Does anyone else fall into literary comas?
When I finish a book (or even a short story for that matter) regardless of how the story treated me or my emotions, I have to give it the moment of my life to sink in before I move on. For me, my time to mull over the book after I’ve finished it is almost as important as reading it.
“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” by Gabrielle Zevin has put me in my most recent coma.
Disclaimer: This is not a book review, but only because I do not know how to write a book review and I don’t want to be judged on my lack of proper things that appear in a book review. In all reality, I’ll be talking a lot about this book.
Even though I don’t think I understood a fraction of the literature references in this novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I caught a few nods to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Great Expectations” but I could feel the subtleties and intentionally askew passages going over my head. Zevin also did a wonderful thing where she crafted A.J. as a pretty snobby person from the very beginning (not that he is an unlikable character, surprisingly!) so it lightened the sting of the references that might have normally come off as condescending. Clearly Mr. Fikry is more well-read than I am, but Zevin was not patronizing me for it.
Back to the dilemma of my coma, I have never been so torn between needing to give “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” it’s time and feeling the intense need to dive into another book this very instant. This was a story clearly written by a book-lover, about book-lovers, for book-lovers, and it was the best book I could’ve read at this specific point in my life. If you want to fall back in love with reading, this is a nostalgically, charmingly, motivational book. To be 110% honest, the writing style wasn’t my favorite, it came off slightly dry with a lack of description and emotion in parts, but even that preferential disconnect between Zevin and myself did not overshadow my enjoyment of all the other elements of her story. She truly made me want to reread classics I’ve studied and discover everything on the “new-release” racks of my local bookshop.
And yet, I can’t commit to the investment in another work before my moment on Alice Island feels resolved. I say “moment” with ambiguity because sometimes I need just enough time to get a good cry in, (like finishing Divergent, not that it wasn’t WONDERFUL, but it required less of my brain power to comprehend and move on from than others) and other times I need to stare at a blank wall for a couple hours and be alone with my own mind for a couple days (which was truly how I felt when I finished “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. For literal days. Holy cow.)
That is one of the main points of this sporadic post, I suppose; to contrive resolution without having to wait for it to come naturally. That sounds silly, and this will sound even sillier, but I don’t want to cheat on a book that I have dedicated hours of my life to. But discussing it and writing about it has worked better than I even expected. Now that Mr. Fikry, and Maya, and Amy, and Lambaise, and Ismay have a concrete presence in my life, I think I am ready to let them all rest on the Island and move forward.
I think I will make this a regular occurrence.
Now what to start next?
Dabbling Adult 