TeeVee

My daughter is watching Gossip Girls in the den. The Gossip Girl books marked a key point in our family saga because they were the first books that we wouldn't buy for our kids. They're really pretty disgusting, as is the TV show, but keep in mind that we did not forbid her to read them. We just wouldn't buy them for her, as we had bought every book she'd wanted since "Pat The Bunny." (Was that book about a bunny called Pat or about patting something in the book? My mind is going). So she bought them herself or went to the library or borrowed from friends. She soon went through The A list and TTYL and all that stuff, and we never have to buy books for her anymore, because she only willing reads trash. I used to think about how much she's missing out on, but then I remember that I never read anything I didn't have to from ages 15-21, and somehow my brain didn't turn to mush, just like I never put my eye out or plunged to my death because all my friends were jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.

I don't read as much as I'd like to. I read a lot of political commentary on various blogs, and I read the newspapers, but I didn't finish the last book I started, called London Fields by Martin Amis, even though it's good and I've read two of his books before and really liked them. Aside from stuff about China, I haven't read a book since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That's a shame, I think. Reading can transport you in a way nothing else can, and you can look at a funny line and laugh over it over and over again, or savor the construction of a sentence or paragraph at your own pace, rather than the paced forced on you by a movie or a even a song. And I think that makes it more memorable and close to my heart.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about, here's the first two sentences of a short story by T.C. Boyle, author of the marvelous "The Road to Wellville," about a man whose wife is so intent on buying stuff of all sorts that it overwhelms their life. It's called "Filthy With Things."

He dreams, amidst the clutter, of sparseness, purity, the wheeling dark star-haunted reaches where distances are measured in light years and even the galaxies fall away to nothing. But dreams get you nowhere, and Marsha's latest purchase, the figured mahogany highboy with carved likenesses of Jefferson, Washington and Adams in place of pulls, will not fit in the garage.

It's not really apropos of anything, beyond the usual stuff about Americans having too much stuff, but there's no other storytelling medium that can give you such richness in so little space and time.