In recent correspondence with a couple of college friends about reading lists, I've been a little bit surprised at their admissions that they have been having trouble reading. Both of them PhDs in literature, one of them runs a comparative literature department at a pretty well-known university, the other now a lawyer. I obviously quasi live to read. And play sports, but that's another post.
During the pandemic, admittedly, I have been reading more mysteryish novels, so not the heaviest fare. And yet, there's something to each of them, things to learn, things to absorb. Just the process of reading fiction, giving ones self over to an author/narrator, saying, in effect, you drive, I'll ride shotgun. There is something to it that is so liberating and fruitful. And cheap!
I was looking for an Alan Furst novel to share with Graham (he pushed it aside and said "that's like the sixtieth book you've suggested....") and I came across a volume of Erskine Caldwell stories that I had picked up somewhere. I've only read one book by him, some novel I came across somewhere, but I fondly remember a scene about a son and dad buying a bag of fried chicken and eating it in the car somewhere in the South in the 40s. So I took the Caldwell upstairs and read the intro and a story -- the first story Maxwell Perkins ever bought from him and published in Scribners. It was not a great story, it was frankly pretty wierd, but upon reflection it mapped kind of interestingly onto something I had read from Lorrie Moore's Self-Help in another moment of using short stories to cleanse my palate between larger books. No time to go into it right now. Back to the coal mine.
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