On reading a novel.

At a used book sale last week, I picked up a novel. Over the last year or two, novel-reading has become more of a treat than chocolate. Since I’m studying nonfiction and I feel incredibly behind my classmates in common-creative-nonfiction knowledge, I usually feel compelled to read nonfiction—but it isn’t nearly as satisfying as fiction.

When I read a novel, I’m gone. Absorbed. Transported. Somewhere else. Some people call this escapism, which is said with a sneer. I disagree—it’s more like traveling mentally. There’s something exotic about curling up with a novel about India or Mars or Middle Earth and meeting ents or IT or monsoons. Even something as nonexotic as a baseball game can be enthralling in a book. (And, honestly, via fiction is the only way I’m going to be enthralled at a baseball game anyway—whether I’m reading about the game or reading during the game: same difference.) Friends of mine in college actually remarked that I seemed happier when I had a novel in progress.

I haven’t read a novel since January. (That’s not true—I did finish one about baseball. That’s where I figured out that Pittsburgh’s baseball team is named the Pirates. Now I won’t get them confused with the Steelers. Ha! I’m almost joking.)

So you might be able to imagine my delight when I discovered that my summer teaching gig allows for time with novels—both mentally and physically. I could open one, read it, and not feel guilty for not reading nonfiction. M.M. Kaye’s Shadow of the Moon and I have been fantastic friends for the past week. Kaye and I have had brief, unproductive encounters before—she’s quite dense and history-heavy at times. But this time… I pushed through the first one hundred pages and was as captured in place as the heroine: Winter.

And that’s where this story ends: there is no epiphany about how Winter’s life parallels mine—because it doesn’t. I’m not an Indian heiress, literally or figuratively, so you can now consider this the anti-climax of this post. I enjoyed a novel. I thought the world should know. M.M. Kaye is not on the historical level of James Michener, nor is she of the page-turning equivalent of Mary Higgins Clark, and her characters are not as heart-breakingly complex as Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. But she can weave a good yarn. She must be for eight hundred pages of suspense, complicated with colonial tension. That was a good summer read.

I’m just sorry it’s over. Instead of reading tonight, I find myself blogging—which isn’t all bad.

Any other good novel suggestions?
I think I’m off for an M.M. Kaye adventure in Zanzibar.