Started rereading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues today and I immediately fell back under its spell, savoring the words and the story and remembering past readings. It had been some time. The book was stored in a stack, not immediately visible as I am working on increasing and rearranging book storage facilities in the house. A chance remark brought it back to memory. For that I am thankful.
I first read this book in 1977 in a college course on 20th century fiction. The reading list was diverse and difficult, much of it like nothing I had read before, completely foreign to me, and I struggled at first but came to love everything we covered. That course changed much of the way I looked at reading, although it never stole from the secret thrill of escaping into an imaginary world with an occasional bit of trash fiction. We read Beckett, Brecht, Jean Genet, John Barth, Tom Robbins, early Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and, oh dear, I forget what else. Many of the books became permanent fixtures in my library and I read other works by the same authors. They are all old friends now. Ahh the path of memory is long and winding.
I read Cowgirls that year, and then I read it again shortly after I graduated from college, probably in 1981 or 82. Somewhere in the late 80’s I lent it to someone, big mistake, I was still young and naïve then and would lend out books, most of which have never come back to me. I had to replace it so my current copy is newer. I read it at that time but probably not since. At that time I was trying to reduce the inventory of paperbacks in the house, a mission undertaken every few years as I have a tendency to hold on to all books. They aren’t all friends though. There are those books with which one never connects even if the tale is well told and the writing beautiful. There are the many books that are good for a one-time escape and then are forgotten, never bearing up to a second reading, and there are the books that are not so great in terms of literature or writing but hit a chord, bring up some forgotten memory or remind of us a particular time or place. The merit of these books is more than the book itself – it is the relationship, almost like a friendship, that has been formed. And of course there the books that can bear reading over and over, sharing something new with each rereading.
You know, I rarely lend out books anymore, unless I know the person feels as I do about books, treats them as treasured friends and would never dream of not returning one. I don’t know many people like that. Occasionally I will lend something to the kids, but never anything that cannot be easily replaced. It seems the only books that come back are the ones that I wish would stay away, the mistakes or misbegotten gifts from others, books like WICKED which everyone I knew loved, and which kept coming back to me despite my deep disappointment in it.