A Strange Addiction
If there’s one thing I like about life after college (and there is only one thing—the rest is terrible—I want college back—please!), it’s the time I have to read. Working at a bookstore has caused me to reach a state bordering on gluttony with books. All day I sit in nooks, devouring first pages, first chapters, author bios, and reviews of books that pique my interest. While at the register, I read magazine after magazine, from Us Weekly (if you can call that reading) to The Economist. Through these practices, I have discovered an entirely new world of media that I never partook in before, and I come home with random facts about everything from Scrabble to Guitar Hero (as well as current affairs updates which are necessary in my Life Without Internet).
While feeding my book lust is fun, it has caused me to develop an overwhelming sense of deficiency. The list of books I MUST read grows larger every day, and sometimes I have to sit down and mourn for my lack of experience with major authors such as George Eliot, James Joyce, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, John Updike (RIP), Julio Cortazar, Willa Cather…the list goes on. And on. And on!
Luckily, I have developed a sort of remedy for this “crisis,” and have enrolled myself in a course of my own design, along with a growing book list. An accurate name for this course would be “Every Single Book That Takes Place in Paris,” or maybe “The Bohemian Lives of Parisian Café Dwellers ” or “Books That Make Me Wish I Were an Expat During the Middle of The 20th Century So Desperately that I Bought Cognac and Have Begun To Learn French From CDS In My Car.” The last one, although certainly too long for a course catalog, is probably the most accurate. I have involved myself in a time warp of literary and cultural immersion. The extent of my English major dorkiness has grown exponentially since college; my name is Taylor Katz, and I’m addicted to Paris literature.
There could be worse dependencies, surely. But the fact that my very small amount of money goes toward Paul Celan and Simone DeBeavoir is not acceptable. I must stop the madness! And yet, as I recite “Est-ce que vous voudriez boire du vin?” to myself in the car, and read Hemingway’s descriptions of Gertruide Stein, I can’t deny how much this minor project sustains me, and gets me increasingly excited for the European excursion I will be embarking on come April first. If by some miracle I get accepted to an MFA program, then I will be back in real academia by September, surrounded by others who commit themselves to words. If not, then I’ll be on my own again, succumbing to the whims of my own whirlwind book obsessions. For the sake of my own sanity, I sincerely hope for the former situation—I’d like a syllabus of someone else’s making, thank you very much.