I don’t read a lot. I know, I know. It’s terrible. Illiterate parents raise illiterate children. Fortunately, Ava will probably grow up to be semi-literate, at least, thanks to Leah (who, in addition to being a semi-voracious reader, is beautiful, sharp as a tack, funny, and the love of my life — happy now? ;)). Now that she’s deep in the throes of motherhood, Leah doesn’t have time for much more than a little New Yorker before bed and maybe some US Weekly over lunch, but she’s reading as often as she can.
I, on the other hand, tend to use books as sleep aids. I rarely get more than two pages into a book before I have to back up off of it and sit the thing down. I’m presently inching my way through a copy of Susan Sontag’s On Photography that Leah must’ve picked up for a college class years ago. Sontag has some pithy insights into the place photography holds in our lives, but the real fun is reading the comments Leah made in the margins and puzzling out what mental process she went through when she underlined various sentences. Sometimes it’s obvious (“Yes!” “I agree!”), but other times there’s nothing but a thin, wavy blue line under an otherwise undistinguished sentence.
The last fiction I read was most of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, which won the Hugo Award. It was real exercise, but fascinating. Vinge has a new book out now that sounds every bit as brilliantly twisted as Fire…; I can’t wait to check it out.
The Klevars always bring along loads of books on their annual summer vacation. I don’t know if having Ava along and walking this year will allow for much reading time, but I may try to pick up a copy of Rainbows End before we leave, just in case.