by Kelly Pickerill
I’ve found myself unmotivated to read lately, and I think it’s because I haven’t come across a book I wanted to dive into head first. I sped through Etgar Keret’s collection of short stories, The Nimrod Flipout, a few weeks ago, and it was good, but short stories don’t keep my reading fortified like novels do.
The annoying thing about coming up book-dry is that it often happens when my reading’s the most voracious. Before I fully realized there wasn’t a book that was calling my name, I sort of saw it coming. I was reading one book, and before I got through it I had picked up and begun three or four others, searching more and more desperately for the next one that would grab me.
Before I knew it, the only book I wanted to read was the Bible. Not that that’s a bad thing; I made it a goal this year to read it all the way through since I never have before. But when you are a reader, and have the itch to read, and feel the pull by the Good Book only, the itch starts to become an irritation.
So I took home a copy of T. C. Boyle’s new book this week because we have signed firsts, and it sat in my Lemuria bag till last night, when I decided that something had to be done about this — let’s call it what it is — book slump. I felt like I wasn’t a reader anymore, and there’s only so much internet reading I can do before I begin to feel my brain is dangerously close to melting.
When I read a description of When the Killing’s Done (from Boyle’s website), “The novel takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels,” and that the inspiration for the novel was “a rather testy turf war fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals,” I cringed — not another “issues” novel. But y’all, it did what many books before it couldn’t; as I began reading, each word pulled me to the next, and then paragraphs, and pages, and now I’m forty pages in! The story and characters are great, but what I really love is Boyle’s writing style. His sentences approach run-on, but they’re the sort that you lose yourself in, until you realize that you’re not making yourself read this book simply because you have to uphold your “reader image.” You love it! And it loves you back. That’s requited book love.
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