What it Means to Have it.... BADD

I'm going to get a bit personal about my BADD constitution. It wouldn't be fair to flippantly and nonchalantly bring up a book each week - without letting one know just how deep the letters cut into my psyche.

It runs deep, and flows from long, long ago. For some reason, the gene of my reading disorder was activated at an early age. I would do anything to get a good fix. I once found a twenty dollar bill in a purse my mother no longer carried around (so it wasn't technically stealing). Instead of being an honest child, I took it to the school book fair and spent every penny.

I would read books that I wasn't quite old enough for... and still today, I have not outgrown this neurosis.

I kept books from the library so long that I couldn't find them anymore, just because I couldn't bear taking them back.

I made fun of my mother reading and crying over a book, but eventually couldn't resist taking it, and found myself doing the same thing.

I have been the object of ridicule, of being relentlessly made fun of, for keeping the company of a book... in a bar.

I've admittedly had late fines from one library totaling something around a seventy dollar range, and whole-heartedly support food drives that erase fines for a worthy (my) cause.

Today...I find myself not quite sated with one book from an author and set out to find more from ones I loved just to take care of an itch that had been created by them.

I choose a variety and cannot pledge loyalty or fealty to any one author. They are juxtaposed as lovers from: C.S. Lewis to Nietzsche, Emily Bronte to Henry Fielding, Stephen King to Henryk Sienkiewicz, Diana Gabaldon to Aphra Behn, Kahlil Gibran to Carl Sandburg, Hafiz to Toni Morrison, Louisa May Alcott to Laura Esquivel to Henry Miller to Wayne Dyer and showcased in bondage covetously on my shelves.

I bawl over a delicious book having uttered the words "the end." I can only rejoice or find any sense of happiness upon the discovery that there is more to the story - a series!

I refuse any treatment or diversion or substitute or alternate lifestyle for my affliction of running my eyes over the inked-on pages that I want more and more of.

Threatened by the reality of out-of-state moving more than once, divorce, possible poverty, and small upper body strength, only a very small percentage of the massive collection of personally owned books is ever passed on to new homes.

I am continuously reluctant to admit the books I've been reading under the sheets. Some mean so much to me, their existence is a covert one and I don't want to share them with anyone else. There are books that are easy to talk about because they don't mean that much.... Then there are those that I only share with a select few.

They say that surviving some afflictions and/or tragedies comes more swiftly by voicing the experience. If I were to become a thriver and overcome my BADD constitution by blogging here... Swift destruction of this blog would occur. All followers would probably be included in that destruction.

I thought it only fair to acquaint you with the BADD malady and any possible threats to the proximity of it.

This one book on the shelves of human evolution...

To open the figurative page of this post I'd like to quote page 307 of Marisa de los Santos' Belong To Me: "When you considered the whole of human history, which Dev knew was a speck, a subatomic particle in an atom of a microbe on a flea clinging to the colossal breathing animal of the cosmos, which was itself a speck floating on the endlessly deep, endlessly long river of spacetime blah blah blah, the event was tiny. The event was quantum." That's what I'd like to say about this book. On the shelves of the world where there's something around eight new books published a day - the data imprint it takes up is an infinitesimal event. Belong To Me, however, reads like a magnanimous one.

Perhaps it's my geeky B.S. English background. She mentions my most favorite poem of all time. And in such a fun, humorous, cute way. Perhaps she mentions old movies I've been watching lately like Streetcar Named Desire and ones that yummy Cary Grant plays in, and that just so easily reels me in. It couldn't be because she laces her quick and witty prose with references to great authors and works of literature in such pretty text to get this bibliophile panting. This author knows what she's doing in getting a booklover's engines running; she's got a Ph.D. in literature and wields her art with such intoxicating flair!

She creates characters who have tensions between each other and they end up loving each other despite themselves. She's got lovable characters in the guise of control freaks and beautiful midget women (really, just a short woman, like so many in my own family). There's a genius fourteen-year-old boy who possesses the art of skillful, intellectual conversation better than a team of engineering cunning linguists (the discussions on Darwin, Robert Frost, and string theory are delicious and precious hearing them from the lens of such a young sprout). Also in the mix is a lying, trickster Coyote-woman you can't help but love in the end... but still so glad you get to see her falling to pieces in tears.

There's a variety of human stages passed through intimately: first love, betrayal, enduring love, untimely death, the beauty of childhood, unconventional trysts, and the surprising unity of relationships despite the foibles that humans all too frequently bring to the table, despite all of our expounded upon evolutionary progress.

She gives her characters all the dimensions to match up to the high literature alluded to in metaphor, and makes this bibliophile delighted to discover upon reading the last page that there's a prequel to this book, even though it stands apart strongly on its own. What a pleasurable delight in reading!

Will NOT Cry...

There's something to be said for curling up with a book with predictable and familiar themes. I try to tell myself that I only read "novel" novels...but the truth is...I find myself sometimes drawn to reading books that are so formulaic I'd do better with the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series that I loved as a child. Sure, the choices would be predictable and also limited to A..B...C...or..D..... Exactly my point! That small amount of choice and the feeling of likely coming to a correct conclusion as to what happens is often times gratifying in a comforting way. I suppose if I'm wrapped up in a blanket on the couch, adding a book I can comfortably wrap my mind around is just adding to the theme. Homey...in my own terrain...intimately acquainted with...and mild curiosity answered teasingly only a few pages away.

That was precisely the case with Kristin Hannah's Firefly Lane, a story of two women sharing a tight friendship despite differences, distances, and decades. It's precisely the kind of book a woman might want to curl up with if she's craving alone time but simultaneously yearning for another woman friend to fill up the empty spaces of her heart. It's predictable to an adult woman. And yet...it was the paper companion I stuffed in a suitcase and took on a road trip with my kids. I looked forward to settling down with it once under my sheets in the foreign hotel room a state away from "home." I got a hearty laugh during an emotional time with the characters when one stated, "Just don't tell my mom!" There was also the moment that I kept telling myself sarcastically, "I'm not going to cry over this dramatic, formulaic piece of chick lit." I'll put my cards on the table though.... There was a moment when I looked across to the other hotel bed at my twelve year old daughter, and wrinkled up my face like a Shar-Pei, and let the tears out. This little gonna-be-a-woman someday daughter of mine said, "aaaawww, mama" sweetly...but it led to a little giggle.

Witnesses. Cards flat on table. Some websites might only give it one star...and I've given my criticism as well.....but it still evoked an emotional response out of me!