Last night, while my noisy next-door neighbor was out, I enjoyed the rare luxury of a peaceful evening. Instead of insulating myself from his TV (explosions, gunfire, car crashes, fistfights, screaming) with work, music, or my own TV, I lounged on the sofa and read a book.
Emily Dickinson was right: There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. Anjali Mitter Duva’s Faint Promise of Rain carried me around the globe and back 5 centuries with a Rajasthan temple dancer and her family. Once I got used to the desert landscape, the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells of Adhira’s world, I had to struggle to re-emerge into 21st-century San Francisco.
San Francisco’s urban landscape is thick with tech and social-media companies. On a field trip to Goodreads a few years ago, I learned that today’s model reader is a multitasker who’d rather travel through a book (like any other journey) in the company of friends, sharing passages as s/he goes. Presumably that’s why my e-books from the library are dotted with distracting snail-trails. For my age cadre, reading was a solo activity, and marking up someone else’s book was a rude desecration. Was it when publishers began redefining readers as consumers that they encouraged them to add their own input to the author’s, so as to make books more disposable and increase sales? Instead, apparently they’ve made reading more social.
I’m focusing on the social side of reading this month as I launch my new book Zapped: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery. For an author, as for a reader, there is no frigate like a book! Writing it is a harrowing but addictive odyssey through treacherous waters, past seductive islands, slithering between Scylla and
Charybdis. When you finally get home, you may not even recognize the place. And what’s this? Your long, arduous 4-D adventure has compacted into a small rectangular 2-D object. Now you must think up a log line, an elevator pitch, a Tweet-length summary which you’ll toss like a hawser in the hope someone will catch it. What passage can you read aloud to a sea of preoccupied faces that will call up the music (already fading in your own ears) of the mermaids singing?
Yet among those faces are old friends you haven’t seen in years, and recent friends who never knew you wrote but are happy to celebrate with you, and soon-to-be friends who discovered the book first and now are eager to meet its author. This too is an adventure — for me, as for many other writers, a voyage outside my comfort zone, and all the more rewarding for stretching familiar boundaries.
