I've been thinking a lot about escapism lately. This is, I'm sure, at least partially due to the fact that I'm feeling a bit trapped at the moment in one of those in-between places I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Doubly frustrating is the feeling of being trapped not only situationally (a few obligations to complete before I can move on), but also physically (it being obscenely expensive to get from Seattle to anywhere else, and me being poor). How does one fulfill the need to "escape" without actually being able to escape, particularly when one is so tired of one's surroundings?
Books have always been my way out of "real life," I suppose. My family didn't have any sort of video game console when I was young, even though Nintendo and Sega and Playstation were all released during my early childhood (unless you count Atari, which I don't, really, although my four-year-old self thought Astro Grover was a massively cool game), but we did have a lot of books--most notably the entire collection of Agatha Christie mysteries, for which I was probably too young but which I slogged through anyway because I loved Miss Marple. I was bored a lot in elementary school, and my teachers used to send me on my own to the library when I finished my schoolwork early (which was always) and during that time I read Little Women and all of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books. High school was miserable, and during that time I discovered Vonnegut, Ginsberg, Tolkein, and other authors who wrote about horrible things in beautiful ways.
A lot of people asked me in college when I found time to read "for fun", and my honest answer was always that I made time for it, that I carved it out of the time when I would otherwise eat or sleep, because I needed to force my brain out of the place where it was constantly analyzing all the things it took in. It was in college where I re-learned how to read for fun, and during this time I re-read Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables (and its sequels), The Chronicles of Narnia, and His Dark Materials, among about a thousand other things. In grad school this need for an intellectual escape became so intense that, when under extreme stress, I often found myself in one of the used book stores near campus, looking for anything "classic" I hadn't read yet (I still hate Wuthering Heights, by the way).
Before I realized the time commitment required by the activities I had said yes to this summer (Dido and Aeneas, I'm looking at you), I identified several "projects" to complete over the holiday, which, of course, means I came up with a reading list: George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series--all of it--and all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I'm making a fair amount of progress on the former, although the late addition of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has relegated the Doyle to the status of bedtime reading.
It has occurred to me that my summer reading choices are relatively unromantic, something which was unintentional but which makes sense, given my current frame of mind regarding relationships. This probably has something to do with the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 2 and the absurd quantities of Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny showing up on my Tumblr dashboard over the past few weeks. And it is at this point that I have to make a shocking (and probably unpopular) confession:
I didn't really like the seventh Harry Potter book.
I bought it the day it was first released and read the entire thing during my shift (I was, at the time, working slow weekends at a museum), and when I finished the last page, I thought, "Hm." This reaction couldn't just have been due to the fact that I had outgrown the books, as I still, three years later, go back and re-read the first four books in the series when I'm in need of an intellectual cool-down or some easy bedtime reading. In retrospect, I can only conclude that I couldn't ever really lose myself in the story because throughout the book I felt that I was being emotionally manipulated. Each of the characters who died was, in my opinion, killed in order for the plot to have the greatest possible emotional impact on the reader--furthermore, Rowling killed off too many named characters, which began, after a few hundred pages, to desensitize me to the deaths which occurred later in the book. And the romances. Oh, god, the romances. The One Big Happy Weasley Family ending drove me mad, mostly because it happened so abruptly, and for no good reason. The plot would have functioned just as well--or probably better--without the romantic subplots.
(I did go back and read the book later, of course, after reading that affront to the entire history of literature, Twilight. After that, interestingly enough, Deathly Hallows felt like Tolkein or Pullman, so maybe the key to enjoying the later Harry Potter books is contrast.)
My book of the moment, by the way, is George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I'm enthralled. I bought Game of Thrones just before school ended in June, and am tearing through the series at breakneck speed, at least given my work and rehearsal schedules. There are so many characters to love in this series--Arya! Tyrion! Daenarys! And, recently and unexpectedly, Jaime? I appreciate that, although romantic subplots happen, they are not the main focus of the story, and therefore are rightfully strapped tightly into the backseat. This is something I have always loved about Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, and also something I appreciate in formulaic TV crime shows (Criminal Minds is the best example of not allowing its characters' relationships to overtake the plot).
I'm open to book recommendations, by the way, if anyone has them--it's unlikely I'll get to any new books before the fall, but ideas will certainly be considered and added to The List.
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