I’ve been so busy lately that I feel like it’s been months since I’ve really been able to relax. But it’s the good kind of busy: that crazy end-of-term rush to get everything wrapped up, book launches, finally getting the re-design of I Heart in Toronto up and running, a wonderful Scholastic internship, my very first book club meeting, etc.
And very soon it will finally be Monday, the day I’ve been waiting for for what seems like forever. Oh Kenya trip, how I’ve waited for you! I’ve been so excited for it lately (school building! giraffes! new friends!) that I’ve had a hard time concentrating on anything else. But this evening I finally took some time, between loads of laundry, to get organized, and I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about books.
I came across this, which I wrote down a long time ago, and which I still love immensely:
“…I suspect we all have inward links between some books and where we were when we escaped into them. Everyone knows the memory links to scents or the pop songs of teenage summers, but I suspect if we reach back and in, we’ll find many of the books of our lives to be vividly time and place specific too.” –Guy Gavriel Kay (in the July/August 2008 issue of The Walrus)
Oh, yes. The Time Traveller’s Wife is thirty degrees Celsius, the fan-flutter of a loose bedsheet on the sofabed, lamplight, mosquito-buzz, 3am. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the armchair in my parents’ living room, mid-summer Saturday afternoon, cold tea, sunlight slanting across the pages. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a wet highway in Nova Scotia, feet tucked under me in the backseat, a blanket across my lap because it was still winter everywhere else, and my tiny university town somewhere in the rearview mirror.
The Cellist of Sarajevo is our next book club book, and I’m bringing it with me on Monday to read during the ridiculously long flights. I can’t help wondering what reading it in Kenya will be like (Kenya! It really hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m finally, finally going).
What about you? Do you have any time-and-place-specific books?
