Red Room Where the Writers Are

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Summer’s are a complex time for a busy father of five beautiful but boisterous children, who is also the only true companion of their mother, and who holds down three or four jobs to pay for the joys of this large family. On the one hand you want to spend as much time with the gang as possible, but still, you know, work calls and the bills mount up and getting paid by the hour is one of the greatest incentives ever created to get you to actually want to stay at work for more time than is necessary and even more than is healthy.

And all that without the existential need to read.

Ah reading, that sacred time when we enter another world where mortgages and diapers only exist between the lines and are not the constant background noise that they are in real life. I will read anything and I really mean anything, from old women’s magazines to the back of the cereal packet, but, like so many things in life, there is an unspoken but clear hierarchy with books being well at the top, yet fiction and non-fiction vie with each other for my attention, like two lovers of the same person, who both try to entice him away from the other.

Novels are a thrill, they transport you to the world that occupies the mind of the author. You and they wander in that imaginary place for a while, for a couple of hundred pages. They are the perfect Summer setting, as Summer is a place for getting away, from the noise, the heat, the endless vacation time when the lack of school turns my house into a zoo and an amusement park at the same time.

But, while fiction elevates the emotions, non-fiction feeds the mind, and the mind deserves to be fed and needs to be nourishes even during the Summer holidays, in fact, particularly during the Summer, when the heat and the boredom stifle the mind and attack the gray cells one by one.

So that particular Summer I was particularly busy, I was teaching philosophy in a Summer school for the love of learning and to make some extra cash on the side, the kids were demanding, not out of spite but out of the realities of growing up and needing both parents, and my wife was looking for some special attention that she both craved and deserved. So I was in no market to lose myself in a book. I had no time and no peace of mind. Maybe a simple 200 page novel but definitely nothing more demanding.

Then she grabbed me, the book, and not just any book but a non-fiction, a heavy mind-expanding book that raised questions about life and identity. The book was called “Turbulent Souls” written by Stephen Dubner, that I bought after someone described as “the best book I have ever read.” I am usually wary of such recommendations, as the best book that I have read is usually the last good book, unless you include classics. My last book is the one that I can recommend as the best until I read another that then receives best book title until the next and so on.

Despite these reservations, I did buy the book and this summer I decided to read it. It is a wonderful tale of how Dubner’s Jewish parents convert to Christianity and how he rediscovers his Jewish roots. The book takes us through an emotional rollercoaster of revelations in more ways than one, and is funny, moving and thought provoking as a great memoir should be.

While I tread cautiously I would not be far wrong if I said that it was indeed one of the best books that I have ever read. And from the first page I was engrossed and could not put her down. For an entire week I did little else with any of my free time but read Dubner.

My family wailed and whined, they wanted ice cream and trips to the pool, they sought out excursions and activities and I wanted just one thing, I wanted to read, to read until I had finished and heard the end of all their stories. The book had me engaged and that is really the essence of good reading, that it grabs us and does not let us go until we have finished, until we have journeyed and traversed the world that the writer gives us.

So that was how I spent that critical month of that memorable Summer. My wife almost left me, “It is me or the book,” and while I was somewhat tempted I promised her that I was sorry and would not do it again and that my ignoring-everyone-and-reading days were over.

Yet as Summer rolls around every year I forget my promise to her and my family. I have been to the forbidden palace, I have taxsted what reading can give us and how it can move us and feed us.

Now what will I read this year, what will entice me and hold me that I cannot let her go until it is over.

Anyone got a good recommendation of the best book they have ever read?