mustardseedtrees:

Weekend Read: Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure there is a book god who sends me the right things to read at the perfect times. Confession: I haven’t finished a novel in over a month. I was beginning to think maybe I wouldn’t be able to join the minority cult of book readers in the readingless future because (like everyone else) I would never be able to focus long enough to finish a book again. (side note about that article: can we all please use the word frippery in every day conversations?)

When I first picked up this book about a year ago, I was in Borders to buy something specific for class. I can’t remember what. If on a winter’s night was sitting on the modern classics table and I picked it up because I liked the cover. After I stood there and read the first chapter, I had to buy it. How could I not? I was standing in a bookstore reading about myself picking up this novel in a bookstore and reading it.

I read a good bit of it then, a year ago, and took it with me to Cleveland when I visited Rachelle one weekend. I was so disappointed when I came home and realized that I had left it sitting on her coffee table. If you have read the book, the irony doesn’t escape me that my reading was interrupted. It is almost perfect, actually. I got it back, but I never picked it up again until I restarted it last week.

Yesterday I sat at the Starbucks in Cleveland for hours reading. Then I took a walk and found myself sitting at the top of a playground slide beneath the most beautiful yellow leaves. Add Andrew Bird singing from my iPod, and it was a practically perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

My verdict: read this book…. pirates, murder, spies, conspiracy, love, secret government agencies, everything anyone could ever want in a book, really.