Kia ora koutou,
This last weekend of heavy rain, wind, power outages, flooding, made me remember all over again what a great pleasurable yummy thing reading is.
Outside was vile, I didn’t know if the power would go out or not. The first month I lived here there was a similar storm and the power was off for two and a half days. This time I didn’t have to wrap myself up in rugs, light the candles, but I turned to the same source of comfort.
Immediately the darkness, the cold, the howl of the wind, gave way to some very old friends which I have on my iPad library. Me and AS Byatt (see her eulogy for Georgette Heyer) and thousands and thousands of others have read away their daily problems, their heartaches and sorrows, their pains and tribulations, by losing themselves between once the covers of one of her Regency novels. One suspends disbelief and simply sinks into the story and admires the humour in the writing. When the gale is singing opera, when thunder and lightning are rock and rolling, I don’t want to read about the problems of the world. I know about the problems of the world. When I’m worried that the lights and power are going to go out I want to go into a world that is definitely not founded in reality, a world which makes me laugh, makes me read on, and where I know, unlike real life, is sure to give me a happy ending where the lights, albeit lamps and lanterns, go on when they’re lit.
I dipped into Harvey McQueen’s This Piece of Earth for the 50th time. I read parts of Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, for the 1000th time, I read some poems in Janis Freegard’s Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus that I particularly like, I read Antigone and Macbeth (the weather was a perfect backdrop), and on and on I went, dipping and reading, reading and dipping, that old magic cast its spell.
The power didn’t go off at my place this time but what the storm did was remind me yet again of the rush of pleasure, the awe, the happiness that was like nothing else I knew when I realised for the first time ever that stories could go on for the whole length of a book. I was eight or nine. Up till then I’d only read short stories. Yes, I dipped into Emily of New Moon this weekend too.
Renée
