This weekend's weather, sticky humidity, with bouts of rain storms, and the exhaustion of this week's physical turmoil has left me feeling rather listless. Which is a funny word. If you look at the base parts -list, n, A series of names, words or other items written, printed or imagined on after the other and -less an adjective-forming suffix meaning "without", "not having" that specified by the noun base, you would think a have a lack of lists. The exact opposite is true.
My inherit list making compulsion comes from my mother, of whom we joke "Oh, more than two things, better make a list." And because of whom, my dad clipped the following:
I have a compulsive need to write down everything, lending perhaps to my forgetful flightiness exacerbated by steroid intake or perhaps my OCD. Whatever the reason I keep incessant lists: to-do lists, lists of words I look up, words I need to look up, books to read, books I've read, quotes from those books, movies to watch, things to research, homework to do, food I've eaten for the day (this is a crohn's / IBS thing), lists about ideas for lists.
The craziness knows no bounds. So despite my (real definition) physical listlessness, I am not (family definition) listless. And in honor of this I give you my top 5 list of books I think you (everyone) should read (that I currently own and constantly re-read, and in no particular order, other than this is how they are found on my shelves and my kindle):
Committed Elizabeth Gilbert
- Yeah, so, ignore that it is written by that chick they made the Julia Roberts movie about. She was (and is) an excellent research journalist. In this evoking search on the personal and sociological meanings of marriage and other formalized unions, I learned quite a bit about my own spiritual needs, and realizations of marriage.
Good Poems For Hard Times Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- Even if you don't like poetry. Especially if you don't like poetry. This has a poem for all times, not just hard. Read one a day, read it cover to cover, forget about it, pick it up and leaf through it, and you will find at least half a dozen poems that will move you. I have about 15 marked for compulsive re-reading.
Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil John Berendt
- Who doesn't love a good non-fiction murder mystery, steeped in the mythos of the deep south? Berendt brings the crazy array of characters to life, and threads the history of Savannah, his personal fish out of water story and a murder trial to life. So much so, you may want to call in the help and pour a pitcher of martinis, for the company comin' 'ya heah'?
Rules of Civility Amor Towles
- A grown up, higher socio-economic version of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. It has the same keen sense of detail and personal emotion, the same social structure politics awareness, and a similar hopeful outcome.
The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood
- A novel within a novel. The life of a heiress to a Canadian button-fortune (fortune in name only, as the Great War and subsequent economic downturn, as well as Daddy's do good-ing has ruined the money) as she grows up mother-less with her weirdo-sister in a derelict mansion, and she is then sold to the highest bidder, once of age. The interior novel is a series of sci-fi stories of the dime pulp milieu, as told between illicit lovers. Very cool. Very dark. As all Atwood novels are.
Happy reading, and may you never be listless.
- Em
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