"My very dirty secret: My brain is broken. I can’t read.

It’s been this way since January. January–probably not coincidentally–is when we got our internet back after a month’s absence. In December I read ten or twelve books, substantial books, but since we got back online, my reading has gone steadily downhill. With fiction, I get a few pages in and quit. With non-fiction, I make it to the 100-page mark before putting it down. Even my online reading has steadily dropped off–I haven’t read the New York Times in weeks. The only thing I’ve read all the way through on salon.com is Cary Tennis. I’ve devoted a lot more of my time to combing youtube for Miley Cyrus videos (don’t judge, okay?) and watching the Where the Wild Things Are trailer.

So I’m about to do something I haven’t done since college.


Have we talked about how much I hated college? Probably not. I try to avoid it because there are no words for how much I hated college.

When I was a senior in high school, my dad told me this: “You know how everyone tells you that college is so different from high school, that you get to study what you want, that you don’t have to go to class, that your professors don’t make you do busywork, that people aren’t as immature and don’t care about cliques, that you’d better learn how to study because an all-nighter the night before the test isn’t going to cut it anymore? Forget it. College is exactly like high school, just bigger.” I didn’t believe him. I should have. Because it turned out that college was all the bad parts of high school mixed with some new, original bad things. I still had to take classes I didn’t want to take, every English class I ever took had a sign-in sheet, I still had to do busywork–only instead of it being a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet, it was a two-page response paper. People were still immature and stupid. I operated entirely on all-nighters my sophomore year. But on top of all of those things that were exactly the same as high school, there were new stressors. I didn’t adapt well to the 800-pages-of-reading-per-class-per-week workload, and my anxiety level went from high-but-still-tolerable to off the charts. I transferred schools once, took two semesters off because I desperately needed a break, failed class after class, and started every new semester by debating whether or not I should drop out entirely. I had panic attacks daily. The fact that I managed to graduate at all still amazes me.

In between Milton and Shakespeare and Yeats and Coetzee, my brain stopped processing the concept of reading for fun. Not only was I reading hundreds of pages a week for class, I was stressed out all the time. My brain wanted a break. Eventually, the only books I could read were romance novels. The kind with Fabio on the inside cover, dressed like a Viking or a cowboy or Mr. Darcy, hair rippling in the wind while he clutches a lady who’s about to fall out of her dress. The books had titles like The Duke’s Wager or Seduce Me at Sunset. Their plots included such unlikely events as secret babies or revenge seductions. And they always, always ended in a wedding, followed by an epilogue that included five children crawling all over the heroine’s lap while she happily ponders how to break the news to her husband that she’s expecting a sixth.

I read chick lit, briefly, before switching to romance. It’s less stigmatized; even the smartest girls I know occasionally pick up something with a Louboutin-clad heroine on the cover. But I never really got into it. The majority of chick lit is vile–its plots are vapid, and its heroines make me want to stab syringes into my eyeballs. Even more complex chick lit, like Marian Keyes, is still beyond bland. There’s no color in the language, no grayscale emotions. Even the inevitable hook-up at the end was rarely romantic, instead merely a relief that I didn’t have to suffer through watching the heroine embarrass herself in front of the hero anymore.

I expected romance novels to be more of the same. But they surprised me. Most of them were still pretty awful. But I was surprised at how many were only a little bit awful, and at how there were even a few romance novels that I liked. A lot. Unlike in chick lit, there was description! (Sometimes too much, too flowery, but still–description!) The characters were more often likable than chick lit heroines, and they were allowed to feel emotions other than lust, rage and embarrassment. I even learned things from romance novels! True, I mostly learned things like how to address the daughter of a duke or what an orangery is, but occasionally I came across more interesting bits–a breakdown of the Napoleonic Wars, or a description of Vauxhall Gardens, which I had read about in several English classes but never been able to picture until then.

And most importantly, after a romance binge, you start to feel a little bit dirty, a little bit ashamed. It’s like eating an entire box of cookies in one sitting. After too many in a row, you feel like you have to redeem yourself by reading something with 800 pages and a five-syllable word in every paragraph.

For the most part, I quit reading romance novels when I graduated from college. After graduation, the stress disappeared, and my ability to read books with ambiguous plots returned. Until now. Which is why I have a god-awful-looking Nora Roberts romantic suspense novel sitting in front of me. I’m hoping it’ll cure me.

And maybe after I finish that, my shame will motivate me to finally finish 2666. And when I say “finish,” I mean “start.”

-"

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms,
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
Thanks to your love a certain fragrance,
risen darkly from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride,
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where “I” does not exist, nor “you,”
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
So close that your eyes close and I fall asleep.
— Pablo Neruda

being reunited with someone who became my first boyfriend has flipped my world over. there's nothing like someone to shake you up, reminding you where you came from and how you once viewed the world. this was my favorite quote when i was twelve, when he and i met in that playground, playing wallball the week before the summer of 1998 went into full throttle. he lost; but he courageously approached me the following autumn, asking what my name was as he nervously glanced back and forth between my interpreter and i. the rest is history.

Duende del sur, originally uploaded by maria.benitezmontero.

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untankelike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? […] The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you."
—Philip Roth, American Pastoral