My Rediscovery of Me

I’ve finished rereading Anne of Green Gables. I cried and cried and smiled so much.

Remind me to write about loneliness, sadness while being happy, happiness while being sad, horses, failure.*

*Not all these things are Anne Shirley-related

I often joke that the purchase of novels should be banned from my credit cards.

I am an impulse book buyer. I read the back cover, flip through a few pages and throw a book next to a cash register.

I have four bookshelves in my one-bedroom apartment. They are full of paperbacks and hard covers — and journals that I’ve filled through the years.

But here’s my problem: I haven’t been reading the many, many books I own.

In the past month, I’ve started way too many books: Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums, Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I haven’t read more than 50 pages in any of those books. So what do I do?

I go out and buy more books! Three, in fact. Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Main Street by Upton Sinclair and a combination Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

And now I’m 30 or so pages into the Idiot. I’m toying with the idea of giving myself a deadline to read it. But I don’t think I’d meet that deadline. Instead, I’ll just commit to reading it. I won’t touch another novel until I finish this one.

And I hope that will get me back into the writing mood.