What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”
While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.
I am not sure where to begin. Pitch Dark opens as the narrator, Kate Ennis, is on Orcas Island trying to get over the breakup of a major relationship. The Orcas Island setting, being beyond a place I know and love, is perfect for a moody contemplation of choices and needing to get away from the world to think for a while. Needless to say, I was hooked from the first page. The almost stream of consciousness style that continues the novel has been compared by others to finding someone else's diary: it makes sense to the narrator but is not so accessible to everyone else. Piecing together the events of Ennis' past relationships, the bizarre and confused trip to Ireland, and her memories of past events was some of the major appeal of the novel, like catching up with a friend who is not great about relating things in chronological order. The style of prose itself was in short bursts surrounding a certain idea at times, unrelated to the next paragraph, and interspersed with long pages reflecting the plot itself, like the long drive at night on a dark Irish road. Overall I'm amazed that Renata Adler's work has been out of print for as long as it has, and I'm glad that reissuing some of her novels means I can discover her work for the first time.
