Cinnabar and Alabaster

when, finished with it and still delighted, i had a friend on the phone , & was bragging about my defiance and frivolity ("you inspired me," i said, "the other day when we were studying at your house and you were reading comic books!"), my friend asked what the book was, and i found myself embarrassed to explain.

"it's a probably-cheesy love story," i said sheepishly. "it's on the national bestseller list. oprah probably loves it. but it's this really cool story about..."

my friend, who is one of the wonderful kind who never lets you get away with shit like that, called me on it immediately. "why do we do that? why assume that because it's popular it must be crap, that if a lot of people are reading it that it must be somehow less worthy, that it's not refined enough for us to spend our time on if it also pleases-" "-normal people?" "normal people."

we had a good bonding moment over that, side-stepping sheepishness a little once we'd both acknowledged it was there; he admitted getting a rush out of the slash-burn-smash ending of a recently-read wolverine comic, and i confessed to having enjoyed the da vinci code--"it's not stupid," i said; "not to hear them describe it," my friend named a few of the grad students we know--and sometimes love--overheard trashing the book in the basement computer lab. "there are a few things he could have made a little more realistic, like, i don't know, the characters sleeping at least once in their 3 or 4 day wild adventure--they just kept running!--but i liked reading it. i didn't know all the answers to the puzzles, & it was fun to follow along, to try to guess, to figure it out." we also, it turns out, on occasion, both enjoy a little brain-candy detective fiction, so long as the pieces actually lead to some kind of conclusion that we get to cooperate with the protagonists to figure out.

all of that accounted for, however, i'm still a little embarrased at the "national bestseller" banner emblazoned in dark red across the top of this book, the "today show book club selection" banner mirroring it across the back, at the list of approval-granting organizations on the inside cover that includes the "book-of-the-month-club," and most especially--this is the part that has me considering not lending it out, even to people i know would also love it--at the set of book-club discussion-questions on the last few pages. this is the biggest sin of all to me--even worse than its publishers printing brag-lines about its own popularity all over the text is this set of guidelines for how to read it, how to talk about it, like it's an eighth-grade book-report assignment...

i'm more ashamed to be ashamed of these things than i am of the things themselves, but i'm still considering asking the friend who loaned the book to me if he'd mind me tearing out those question-pages before i hand it off to anybody else. that might be a personal pet-peeve; i won't adopt textbooks that have questions after the reading-selections they include either.

the most important point, though?

audrey niffenegger's the time traveler's wife is the best book i've read in years. i love the writing, i love the story, i love the voices for reasons this isn't the place to explain. it was the best way to spend a day i've stumbled across in months. it was one of those books you feel as you go through like you're recognizing your own face, and someone else's, even as you're seeing them for the first time, that you're coming home again to somewhere you've ever been. that might be a cliched appraisal, but cliches become what they are because they're true.