Finding Ursula

As much as I love reading, I have come to realize that the act of reading requires quite a lot of effort. I mean this particularly for reading for pleasure. Reading for work or research is something I can manage to do quite easily as and when needed. Looking back, I've always had bursts of reading throughout my life, and almost all of them have been spurred by one book that was such a delightful experience to read that it ignites a frenzy of reading, until it eventually fizzles out a few books down and returns to the status quo of me picking up a book now and then.

The situation has been a lot worse since the birth of my daughter. She turns two this August, and I don't think I've read more than 6 books during this time. Plus, I've been bored these past few months - not so much in the sense that I don't have much to do, but quite the opposite. I've got too much on my plate, and while everything that I'm working on is quite exciting individually... put all together, it's all quite overbearing and taking up every ounce of my creativity. I guess I've been craving something that doesn't have an 'output', as in that it's more of an indulgence for its own sake.

Falling in love with the act of reading again, I have convinced myself, is only possible by holding a book in my hand and finding a comfortable spot to sit and read it in. Ebooks won't do. Audiobooks are for falling asleep to anyway. So last Sunday, I headed out to Readings to browse and see if something would catch my attention. Never mind the piles (and I mean piles) of books spread all over the house that still remain unread - I'm sure they will be read at some point in my life, but right now I needed to find a book that would blow me away from the moment I set eyes on it. It was too much to ask of a single book, especially since I was going in blind and without any particular book or even genre in mind.

I recognized this pattern of reading in bursts, and how it was always ignited by one amazing book, a few years ago. I think it was when I had finished reading Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk after which I picked up and burned through at least half a dozen more books in a matter of weeks that made me identify this pattern. It really just does take one good book. Soon after when I was once going through a dry period of reading, I attempted something similar to what I was attempting last Sunday. I had gone out to The Last Word to find a book to fall in love with instantly, and I found it right when I entered the store and scanned through the books laid out in the central island. The book was Flights by Olga Togarczuk. It was the first time I had laid my eyes on a Fitzcarraldo Editions book and was pulled in by its plain International Klein Blue color with the title printed right at the top in white in a beautiful serif typeface. This cover was not quite unique to this book in particular; it's actually the design system for all Fitzcarraldo Editions book. A blue cover with the title printed in white for fiction books, and the opposite for non-fiction books, that is, plain white cover with the title set in blue. I did not know that then, and I literally judged that book by its cover. It was the most beautiful blue I had ever seen. A quick scan of its first pages made me very excited about that book, and it seemed like an easy choice. It however failed at the mammoth task I had assigned to it. It's not so much that the book wasn't good - as a matter of fact, the few chapters that I did manage to read of it (and once again, in the second attempt), I enjoyed it quite a lot, but I just could not commit to finishing it. While writing this, I leafed through the book again, and it seems that I've made quite a few markings in the book almost to the halfway point, and reading through some of those has made me realize that it was a book I was definitely enjoying reading. As good a book as it may be, it sits in my did-not-finish(but-I-haven't-quite-given-up-on-it-yet) pile not because it was bad, but because it was not the one to do the job that it needed to do at that time. I do believe that every book has its time and place for every individual that picks it up - reading the right book at the right time is definitely one of the most exhilarating experiences ever.

So, while I now understood that I needed that one book to put into motion a new burst of reading, I also understood the danger of the burden being placed on one book, which made this attempt last week even more high stakes. I had more than a couple of hours to kill with Hydr and R at home, so I was prepared to take my time. I started off with the non-fiction shelves stocking the newest arrivals right in the front of the bookshop - and picked out a couple of books on AI that I felt would compliment the book I was already reading, Ways of Being by James Bridle, but those were just by-the-way picks (and I eventually did not purchase any of them). I browsed through the design and architecture shelves, but there's rarely many interesting choices that aren't coffee table books or reference books in those sections.

On to memoirs - a genre I mostly enjoy. Nothing really caught my attention there either, and I was mainly reminded of Deborah Levy's living autobiography series, copies of all three of which were laying at home still unread. I scanned for Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work, which I had started reading as an ebook right around the time of my daughters birth, but did not finish as I felt like it was too precious a topic for me to read as an ebook. I had found one copy last year at Readings, and was very excited to have finally gotten my hands on it, but then by the time I got to the checkout counter, I had decided to gift to a friend of mine who I thought would enjoy it too (I really hope I have friends out there who think about me when buying books too). No luck this time finding a copy though. I made a mental note to request it on their website, and moved on.

I had already passed by the science fiction section, very briefly glancing at it and finding the usual suspects. Large books, mostly hardcover, mostly familiar not so much in the sense that I had read them, but that I recognized them. I noticed a paperback version of Contact by Carl Sagan and reminded myself I should perhaps read the copy that was sitting in my shelf that I bought almost 20 years ago. This was when I purchased pretty much every book of Sagan's that I could get my hands on. The book that had triggered this spree was 'The Varieties of Scientific Experience', which I read from cover to cover and all over again all in a matter of a few days. It was a life-changing read -- I was obsessed with it, and it set me off another reading frenzy. Unfortunately, I don't think I finished many of Sagan's other books, but Varieties triggered a period of reading some very exciting books. Maybe going back to Sagan would do the trick?

I kept looking however - in my mind, the newness of a book was major catalyst. Going through the literary fiction section which is the last section in the bookstore, I was now desperate to find something. I starting googling some names that I remembered coming across on different social media platforms, to see what was available. I was getting tired from carrying the books I had picked out, and googling with one hand wasn't making it any easier. I kneeled down to put the books down on one of the floor cushions that are spread all across the aisles of Readings, a name on a book on the bottom shelf caught my attention. Ursula K. Le Guin. Why did that name sound familiar?

Whenever I'm reading, fiction or nonfiction, I try to note down names, quotes or terms into my vault in Obsidian particularly ones that I feel like I would to look up or or read more about. I love how links form that take you from one book/idea/author to another and then to another. I am currently halfway through reading 'Mating in Captivity', which I downloaded after someone mentioned it on twitter, and the title was interesting enough to make me look it up. It's an interesting book in itself, even though it's started to feel like a book-that-could-have-been-a-blogpost. While talking about how surrender can be a liberating experience, the author quotes Octavio Paz: "The moment of merging is a crack in time, a balm against the wounds inflicted by the minutes and hours of time. A moment totally eternal as it is ephemeral.” Oof, that's a beautiful sentence, and I ended up spending the next hour looking up Octavio Paz's works. I was particularly interested in the context in which this quote appeared. Once I had downloaded his book, "The Double Flame", I started by searching for the quote. I couldn't find it. Esther Perel probably translated that quote on her own and did not quote from Helen Lane's translation of The Double Flame, so I decided to start reading the book to just stumble upon it eventually. I'm a few essays in and it's been a delightful read so far - and I'm very pleased at having discovered this book of essays in the manner that I did. It's a whole new topic that I'm exploring here - love, eroticism, sex and eros - I'd been thinking about these topics already and so these two authors and their works come to me at the right time.

Anyway: So, when I saw that author's name on the spine of the book on the lowest shelf of the rack, I quickly remembered that James Bridle has quoted her in one of the earlier chapters in Ways of Being and I had noted down her name just a couple of nights ago. I grabbed the book from the shelf, pushed the ones I had just put down off the cushion, sat down on it and started googling her. Very quickly, I realized it was a shame I had to google her name (I even considered not admitting this publicly in this blog), as she is considered a giant in the genre of science fiction, and this book that I was holding was one of her finest works: The Left Hand of Darkness.

All of this was a very long winded way of getting to the point: I have just been introduced to Ursula K. Le Guinn and my world is changed forever (yes, quite dramatic - but it was the case when I discovered Sagan, Calvino, Kafka, Orwell too -- just to name a few). I will probably write a separate post on the book itself; this post is about how I got to her, and what she has been able to do for me:

I finished The Left Hand of Darkness in three days, and it did exactly what I needed it to do. I have since finished Deborah Levy's Things I Dont't Want To Know, and I will probably finish The Cost of Living tonight. Real Estate is sitting next to my bedside ready to be picked up next. I've made progress on James Bridle's book too. And then I'll move on to two other books I picked up last Sunday, both by authors I really admire: Hisham Matar's My Friends and Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. Flights is back on my desk. It may be time. Even Sagan has begun to call to me again. And of course, there is more of Ursula. The frenzy has begun!