Anticipation; Pre-reading Aiden Chambers' THIS IS ALL: THE PILLOW BOOK OF CORDELIA KENN

Sunday afternoon--

My wife and daughter are at the library, and my son is refusing to nap. He's in there talking to himself, quietly, happily--but I know it won't last.

I want to be reading, I should be doing the kitchen floor, but I'm taking a break to write about the book I'm going to start reading. (Oh, great, he's crying again! He gives just a couple of wails and then is still. Probably, I think—as I listen to the silence broken only by the dryer in the basement where a pair of overalls or some other loud garment is clacketing around--probably he's only waiting and listening to hear if I am on my way. In a moment, he starts kicking the wall, the little varmint. Oh, well. Let him kick!)

Okay, back to the subject at hand:

I've been reading Crime and Punishment, just finished it last night, and the whole while, This is All, the Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, has been sitting on my bedside table, and every so often, before or after my Dostoyevsky, I'd pick it up, feel its weight, and put it down again.


Sunday Night, 10:22

Still haven't read any of This is All, and as much as I would like to get to the subject at hand, I'll indulge myself by saying that I'm just at this late hour finishing a dinner of salami, cheese (extra-sharp Tillamook and The Dubliner), assorted olives, and wine. The interim has been filled with the usual Sunday chores, and augmented by my daughter showing the chief symptom of "the stomach flu" which necessitated my cleaning vomit off her bedroom floor.


IT'S QUITE A BEAUTIFUL BOOK, THIS IS ALL, the kind that makes you thumb through it and caress the pages, which have a soft quality of fabric, a woven feel. The book is six hundred pages, thick and decidedly narrower than it is tall, and the only complaint I have is that the margins in the middle seem a bit small. I am hoping that the book will loosen up a little as I read. We shall see.


AMAZING that Cordelia's voice is, already, a little bit stuck in my head. All I have done is read the first couple of pages in the bookstore, then hit a few random pages, including one in which she describes several ideal, perfect things: a dream kitchen, complete with favourite ingredients, and a new, well-made book, among others.

I like Cordelia already.


I ALSO LIKE THE BOOK ALREADY, or at least the idea of it. The jacket tells me that it's "for ambitious readers" and "not for younger readers" and is "A huge book in every sense."

I also like little books, shallow little books even, but most of all, I like a big, huge, vast, book. Teen literature is particularly awash in small books. Most titles seem to come in around 200 pages, and though there's nothing wrong with that length, I like to get lost in something that meanders around like Raskolnikov through the streets of Petersburg. Ann Zwinger, whom nobody outside of natural history has heard of but who is an incredible writer and teacher, told me that I am an "encyclopedic" writer. This causes me some heartache in the revision process when I have to cut at least a quarter of what I've written, but maybe that's what makes me love a long book so much. I want it all, and deeply.


That's why I like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky--but more on the Russians later. I still have Raskolnikov on the brain, and I hope I get a chance to make a few notes before I am swept thoroughly away into the world of Cordelia.

And there we have it: to be swept away, transported, lost. That's the thing! With a great, big, book, you're in the fictional world longer, and the fiction is more real--if it's true. A big book can give you more characters and can more closely elucidate the lives of those characters. The places and the movements of people through those places form patterns in the mind that sing and hum like memories of your own life in the "real world." Or maybe they sing more clearly, with more truth, than your own memories.

Now it's after 11:00, and I want to read, and maybe to get to sleep before it's tomorrow. So I'm off to prop myself upon the pillow, and lose myself in Cordelia's pillow book.

Because here's the thing: I like a big, serious book. A big, real book. One that gives me characters that are not merely made-up fictions, but characters that are true, characters that exist so fully in their world that they live inside me, and so--as any beloved person does--they enlarge me. Dig that! To be enlarged. To extend the dimensions of heart and mind. To expand the soul.

Dig that.