A tale told by an idiot

I’m reading Conversations with Friends right now, because the whole internet told me that I should be reading Sally Rooney. It’s just as good as everyone says it is, and I keep trying to take it apart to figure out why. The best thing I can say is that it’s alive throughout. That was Flannery O’Connor’s standard for literary merit in fiction, and so it’s mine, too.

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Google, of course, knows exactly what I’m up to, because as soon as I started reading this book, Sally Rooney stories started popping up in my newsfeed. Here’s a headline: “Sally Rooney is capturing what it feels like to be alive now.” Here’s what actually happens: A person reads a book and five seconds later it’s a data point in someone’s AI-generated algorithm. That's what it really feels like to be alive now.

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I’m almost finished Conversations with Friends. I’m rationing the last few pages, because I’m not ready for the story to end; and because I don’t know what to read next.

(A few days ago, I heard a radio commercial for a coming stage production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and I thought about my woefully inadequate Shakespeare knowledge, leading me to the brilliant idea of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. And then I thought about spending the next six months obsessively reading all 37 plays and checking them off a list, possibly annotating as I read, possibly writing about each play. And then I thought better of that and decided that i could live with my continued ignorance. I’ve read “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Henry V,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” and “Othello.” That’s probably enough for now.)

Anyway, I’ve been sick for a few days. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Nothing serious, I’m sure. We had to rearrange some furniture last night; and when I say “we,” I mean “they,” as in my husband and sons. I sat on the couch reading my book as the men worked. There’s something very restful about remaining still amid a flurry of movement and activity. Better them than me, I thought.

The main character in Conversations is sick, too, with a mysterious illness that turns out to be endometriosis. I’m not yet sure how things will turn out for her because I’m still not finished with the book, but I feel better than I have all week. I ignored it, and it went away. I’m telling you, that always works.

It’s Saturday morning now, and I have a plan for the day. I have places to go and things to do and a book to finish reading. And then I have to figure out what to read next. Maybe I WILL read all 37 Shakespeare plays. Or maybe I’ll just think and talk about Shakespeare for the next few days, and then Google will magically tell me all about the 20+ Shakespeare plays that I never got around to; and I’ll tell you all about that, too. “To write and read comes by nature.”