I seem to go through reading cycles. When I go away on trips, it feels as if I've just discovered this amazing thing to do. Books seem heightened. It was the reason why I originally bought a Kindle, because I was sick of lugging so many books around when I traveled anywhere.
When I'm home again, it seems much more difficult to read. I always read something every day, but, for example, if I'm in the middle of a book on a trip and go back to it once I'm home, it seems as if the flavor has changed. I have a hard time keeping track of the plot. It feels as if I'm lost in a swamp of pages.
So I was in a bookstore the other day. Bookstores have a completely new meaning to me now. They still feel like refuges. When I see one, I want to spend some time there. But now it's about finding inspiration or, in my best moments, it's about buying a book as a gift for someone who isn't Kindleized. Ann Packer's books happened to be on a table. I opened one up, read a few pages, and when I got home, I started to read Swim Back To Me.
With this book, I fell in love with short stories again. Somehow I seem to forget that this form is a reading option, but Swim Back to Me made me appreciate again the craft of writing a great story, of carefully choosing moments, of getting a reader quickly into a world, of knowing how to end it. When I read this book, I often wondered what was going to happen next. I was often surprised. I cared about the characters. I was happy to see them return. (The book begins and ends with the same characters thirty years later.) I would often come to the end of it and read the ending a few times, because I liked it so much. Ann Packer basically gave me a solution to my daily readig blues, and for that, I am grateful.
