growing in the goo

I've been painfully slogging through Moby Dick for the past month and a half. I treat walking away from classics as a personal failure, so I had been determined to stick with it through the end.

But honestly, I can't do it. The damn book was making me hate life. It was such a disappointment. It started off all excitement, but soon enough dove into a lengthy comparison of right whales and sperm whales. I'm not one to give up, but please. Herman Melville. No wonder you died impoverished.

(okay. that's calling on bad karma, and it pretty much guarantees that I'll never sell a book. but I'll say it anyhow, because it deserves to be said.)

So, last Friday, I was in Border's (no, not the one I had been kicked out of) and eager for something good to read. I was planning on spending tons of time at the pool this weekend, and the thought of cracking open Moby Dick reeked too much of homework, and not enough of fun.

I was in a difficult mood, and was pretty much deeming each back cover I read as trash. Or unoriginal. Or boring. Or painfully, painfully bad. Recognizing my difficult mood, and growing all the more difficult by the second, I decided to pull the ole "shut the eyes and point to a book" trick.

Miraculously, it worked.

My finger settled on The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, by Robert Hough. It's a fictional account of the life of a (real life) female tiger trainer, who had her heyday back in the early 1900s. I was a sucker the second I saw the loud front cover, but the fact that the back cover said she was "brazen, suicidally courageous, sexually adventurous, and survived a dozen severe maulings—and five husbands" cinched the deal.

Sounded like my kind of read. And I love this book. So much so that when I was at the bar last Saturday, and talking to some random guy who was revealing his life story much too soon, my mind kept coming back to the book that was in my pocketbook, that was on the chair. I really, really wanted to crack it open and read. Admittedly, that guy wasn't too far from a dud, but still.

This book makes me happy. It's the way reading should be.

"When he looked at me, unblinking, I could never quite tell whether he was someone who'd do a good job protecting me or whether he was someone I needed protecting from, and it was this mixture that grabbed my attention."