Because of the way my weeks work I tend not to read much on Fridays and then rarely ever on Saturdays and then Sunday, it depends. Which is to say that I at least somewhat semi-consciously know whatever I’m reading on Friday over lunch is going to have to tide me over until Sunday night at the earliest, often.
Septology is a hard book to take a break from, as it basically demands you sink into the consciousness of the narrator, which consciousness somewhat regularly becomes untethered; minds, they wander. For that reason, if I can offer you, curious reader, any advice, it’s this: if you know you’ve got a break coming up, don’t leave this book off mid-stream. Find the end of a section and get to it. You’ll have a much more pleasant time dipping back into the stream once you come back to it at the start of a section.
You’ll thank me for this.
But don’t worry about me, though, I’m fine, I found my way back into it on Monday, after ending Friday about 20 pages shy of the end of section three, which was an extended tale from the life of the narrator’s doppelgänger, who may also just be the narrator, on some level. Once I got past section three I slid almost effortlessly through section four, the shortest section of the book. I’m feeling good about finishing the book ahead of the coming weekend. Won’t happen again, in other words.
The book remains not hard to read, considering its length and style, but it does evince a level of subtlety that I'm afraid has crept up on me as I’ve made my way along its winding, dream-like river. The book is nothing but real until you start finding yourself wondering what real actually is, after all. It’s also deeply spiritual, or in tune with spirit, or...this is a wrong way to put it. I’m not a religious man, these days, so I'm not sure the right way to put it, and I feel even kind of icky even using words like “spiritual” and “religious” because that’s not my section at the bookstore and it's also not this book's section of the bookstore, but this book makes me get it, a little bit, how a “good” version of something spiritual could feel. If that makes sense.
Speaking of words I feel weird using: if you took a drink every time someone in the book world used the word “luminous” you'd be dead by dawn. I mean, it's too much, I mean, come on, shut up, find another word. And I mean find another word because sometimes some of us actually need to use it for real because a book like Septology comes along within which light shining in the darkness is actually a very real thing critical to the whole affair and the book itself exudes a truly real kind of luminosity and I can’t even use that word when I actually need to use it because the book world has choked on it to the point where it means nothing. Grr, I’m annoyed.
In other news I remain glad I'm back on the blog rather than the newsletter because this post would be a truly awful newsletter issue. I mean it might also be a bad blog post! But at least it exists.