pomegranate

Insomnia

Some books you have to think about when and where to read them.  I took Stephen King's Insomnia with me on vacation and learned after one night of sleeplessness that I couldn't read this right before I planned to slumber.

It's a huge book of big ideas that begins with sleep. On the back side, there's a photo of King wearing a T shirt that says "We Never Sleep."   He looks bemused and very tired.  In the book, he writes about different sleep disorders and many different ideas for cures ranging from acupunture and hypnosis to eating honeycomb right before bed.  I imagine he has tried them all.

After that, I read the the book in the daylight, often with the TV on -- all those football bowl games and no Tivo in the hotel provided an invitation to read during all the commercials. The insomnia turned out to be a springboard to the big issues.  The book is really about the natural cycles of life and death, and what happens if those are tampered with, and the energy that we all have and how it's expressed and used.  I hadn't read Stephen King for a long time, just as I haven't seen a scary movie in forever, because, as I discovered again with reading this book, scary movies and books keep me up at night.  But I really wanted to read Insomnia, because it was such an ambitious book that made you think and wonder, not the things you would expect from a popular author such as King, but there it was, and I was glad to have found it.

The New Library

For a long time, I wouldn't go to the library.  Not the books I want, I complained.  It was too expensive.  I couldn't seem to keep track of when things were due.  I had little sense of how much I actually read.  As a child, I read continuously.  As an adult, I only have that luxury during vacations.  In real time, I only read at night before going to sleep or in those early hours when sleep seems an impossibility, and I seek comfort in a book.  So, for a long time, I didn't go to the library.

Then I started going again for DVDs.  I understood DVDs.  I had a grasp of when and if I would watch them, and I knew all about returning them, which was good, because the library had a stricter policy regarding DVDs.  Only two at a time, one week, nonrenewable.  DVDs, it seems to me, are the new books.  They're the hot ticket in the library, the place to go if you want to get up close and personal with humanity.  You may not find a soul in the stacks.  It's a rare day when you can peruse the DVDs alone.

The selection isn't great, which inspires me to try things I ordinarily wouldn't.  For example, yesterday I went to the library and ended up selecting "Final Analysis" with Richard Gere and Kim Basinger.  I decided it would be either really terrible or strangely fascinating, and so far it is the latter.  Now, the Keanu Reeves/Gretchen Moll movie that I also rented could very easily end up being cold turkey, but that's the way it goes with library DVDs.  You just roll the dice.

Eventually I also started renting books again.  My library doesn't get everything, and I'm picky.  I like things to be well written.  I like the words to have a certain rhythm and cadence. I lke the characters to make sense even if that sense is that they're insane.  I'm not interested in Bridget Jones wanna bes and thinly veiled memoiristic forays in the past, which in my opinion, should have been left in the therapist's office.  And I'm out of the book loop, so I don't know often who to pick.  So, it's generally the open book test.  I turn to a random page and read a few lines and see if I like it.  It's not infallible.  In fact, I'm often disappointed.  But you can now renew books online.  And I'm gonig to the library anyway to drop off the DVDs.  So, it kind of works.