Digging in

I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love tonight, bought some time ago after I read some interesting reviews, and which has, lain, unopened on the kitchen table ever since, buried under the general detritus that gathers with all speed on that table (in fact, on all flat surfaces in close proximity to me), sometimes surfacing briefly of its own accord, occasionally surfacing during a ‘tidy-up’.  Yesterday, it surfaced again, so I grabbed hold of a corner, to stop it diving back into the abyss, hauled it out and tucked it into  my bag.  The bag is only marginally safer than the table, but the book was still visible when I opened the bag this evening, having failed to burrow its way to the bottom during the night, and consequently is now open on my desk.   

I’m slightly irritated by the style – the tendency to implied superlative (I’m frankly exasperated by the Divorce (and as for ‘Divorce Internment Camp’! …  (p. 27))) and the rather chirpy dialogue are a little too Sunday supplement columnist for my palate; and the likening of the Indonesian medicine man to Yoda made me wince; but on the whole I’m surprised as I expected it to significantly less readable than it promises to be. I quite like some of the ideas, such as considering a prayer for God’s help as a petition that others might sign too, and am very taken with improving foreign language skills by reading a newspaper article in the language each day; but I’m annoyed by the misquotation from Louise Gluck’s ‘The Wild Iris’: it isn’t ‘From the center of my life, there came a great fountain …’ , but ‘from the center of my life / came a great fountain …’, and by Gilbert’s tendency to make (one of her superlative) points using overly long lists of names, questions … . But then, Gilbert is still eating, and maybe the style will change when she starts praying. 

Still, Eat, Pray, Love is the right kind of book for this night’s reading. It’s bitterly cold outside, with much snow underfoot and according to the forecast, the temperature will drop significantly and there’ll be much more snow.  I can think of no good reason to leave the hearth, dogwalks aside, and so here (dogwalks aside) is where I’ll stay.