N is for Not Forgotten Niffenegger

What I Read: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

This is actually one of the few books I've read in my life that I couldn't read out of order.

I read the ends and middles of books all the time. It doesn't hurt my reading experience. A good ending will only convince me to read the rest of the book. A bad ending tells me I'm wasting my time, time I could use rereading Agatha Christie, thank you very much. 

With The Time Traveler's Wife, out of order reading doesn't work. This is not because the chapters are chronologically out of order. A few are, but the book more or less follows a chronology. The reason is that the main character, Henry, is not terribly appealing in the early chapters, but you are supposed to believe that he is. You don't know why if you read the book out of order.

Basically, The Time Traveler's Wife does something fairly remarkable: gives you a fated, true-love relationship that doesn't bypass the difficulty of the actual relationship.

One of the problems with many TRUE LOVE stories is that TRUE LOVE is equated with EASY. That is, TRUE LOVE is taken to mean "My mind is instantly read and my needs are always met and everything goes right except for that one obligatory break-up--but then everything goes right." The seduction of books like Twilight is the idea that once all the horrible external bad people/events go away, the relationship itself will be a no-brainer.

This is not true. I've never believed it, not even with Romeo & Juliet. (My rose-colored glasses phase of teenhood had a relatively short life.)

One of my favorite parts of The Time Traveler's Wife is when Clare finally meets up with her "future" husband when he isn't traveling, so at their actual ages on that date. This is a man she has known since she was six, and she has always known him as mature and stable and, if occasionally depressed, comfortable with the complexity of the world. When she meets his 27-year-old self, she's thrilled, but somewhat taken aback by how...how, well, young he is.

In other words, sure, she's getting the man she'd been in love with all her life and sure, she knows that he will be head-over-heels in love with her, but they still have to do that whole getting-to-know-you-and-live-with-you-and-adjust-to-your-presence thing. And they have to keep doing it. Even after he becomes the man she first fell in love with, she still has to live with him and vice versa.

Having said all this, I would not have read this book if I wasn't doing this A-Z List, yet I'm glad I did. The actual reading isn't difficult. I read the book in less than a week, but I nearly put it down at the 1/3rd mark with a note to self: That's enough for a review.

However, by then, I was caught up in the relationship, so I stuck it out, and it was worth it. But if you are like me, and you dislike "saga" tales, be warned; you may feel that you are being inundated with saga at one point. That's because, unlike real life, many things are being learned and thrown at you at once. Take a breather and keep going. Remember: time eases pain, explains paradoxes, and puts context to past behavior.

Review of the HBO series to follow. 

2023: I read the graphic novel The Night Bookmobile. I found it fascinating. 

However, I'm not sure it does what Niffenegger thinks it does or maybe it does and I don't entirely agree. 

I can relate to the fascination with books--with reading as more than something to (only) stave off boredom or to prove one's intelligence or allow one to meet a goal. It's a love affair that others may see as "geeky" (nothing wrong with that!) but is no different from a passion for God or a passion for a person or a passion for a vocation. 

And yet it isn't those things either since it is communication and commonsense and everyday life. 

Other than C.S. Lewis, I've never encountered anyone who could quite put into words or pictures what I sense about reading. I think Niffenegger is trying. But it seems that she is (still) (like everyone else) determining that reading belongs in a special category, a category that indicates wishful thinking or (to use her own word) "imbalance," a state of mind that requires fulfillment (again, Niffenegger is close but not quite). 

For me, one analogy is food. Reading is more like food to me than like a hobby or work or laundry or my cats or even television (though I watch lots of television). It's closer to writing, in many ways. That is, it is about something being embraced or made but not in a heavy meaningful way. And I read while I do everything else since it isn't precisely a distraction. Yet the whole-heartedness of it, yes, could be closer to something like an immersive video game. But it doesn't require special treatment. I also breath, which is important, and I don't treat breathing as special. 

Of course, not all reading is the same--so I indulge in sweets and roasts and junk food and comfort food and gourmet food and everything else, because that's what I feel like that day or because that's what's available or because someone else got it for me or because I wanted to splurge. I don't really think about it that hard. It's always there. I always do it. So...? 

My mother was a great gardener. Almost every morning in the spring and summer when I was growing up, she would go out into the garden and pick weeds, move plants, add new plants, envision new beds. She carefully scrutinized seed catalogs, made plans in the fall, and grew plants in the basement over the winter. 

As she began to lose her memory, I could take her to the local gardening center and she would have definite ideas about what she wanted--though by then, I was doing most of the planting. 

Yet she balked at conversations with passersby since they always wanted to "fix" her garden or compare what she was doing to something else. She wasn't doing what she did for praise or blame or lectures or for meaning. She was simply doing it. It wasn't a "diary"-type of thing (she wasn't doing it in private). It was out there, presented to the world. And Waldorf & Statler could comment. Yet ultimately, it was, in fact, done for the sake of the thing itself. 

No apologies. And I'm not sure she ever entirely understood (or cared to analyze) why her gardens mattered so much. 

Reading is more like my mother's gardening than anything else.