Reading Addiction

Can't Stop. Won't Stop.

I am a third of the way through The Second Ending by Michelle Hoffman and I’m addicted. Incapable of stopping myself from listening to this audiobook. It is full of sadness, long stretches of exposition about the backstory…but I gotta know what happens to these characters.

I’ve told myself I can keep listening…but only if I keep moving. Only if I tidy my office, banishing the broken white plastic clothes basket to the recycling bin. Only if I re-label and hang the gowns, overdresses, and underpinnings I loaned out to San Marcos High School for their production of Pride and Prejudice. Only if the lids get snapped onto bins of elastic and interfacing and sewing rulers are returned to their nails on the walls. Tidying up. Clearing the decks. For what?

In the book, a cast of middle-aged people (like me) struggle. They struggle with unfulfilled dreams and the guilt of comfortable lives. Lives that have grown out of work. Work that makes money but not art. Work like rich manure and fertile worm castings. Work that grows comfortable homes, secure retirements, and (in my case) an obese body that aches all the time.

This book makes me feel. And I love to feel. That is why I love reading. And it makes me think. And, it is getting my office and my sewing studio clean-er. Giving me time to do the chores I hate. Possibly even some cardio later.

The author is a genius at “lampshading,” a fantastic writing technique that I am loving in this book. Hoffman zig-zags my reader skepticism by giving my reaction to characters in the book. For example, when the main character does something stupid and unrealistic, even while I’m sputtering, “No way, that’s a terrible idea and it could never happen like that,” another character goes ahead and just says that right in the text.

But Hoffman’s talent is in twisting the reaction again. Coming up with another variety of surprising character reaction I would never have had, because I am not that character. It’s fun to have my reader objections acknowledged and then subverted. It feels realistic, somehow. Like that is what happens in life all the time. It makes the fiction believable and the characters loveable for their contextual idiocy.

I don’t know how the book will end, but I am already imploring the muse Kalliope, in charge of epic poetry and eloquence that Hoffman can stick the landing. I want an ending deserving of the life moment her book conveys so vividly. But not for a few hours yet. Not until my space is a bit cleaner.

And, my “write something every day” goal is now complete.

Reading addiction for the win?