Penguin Modern Classics 2009. Cover Photograph: Françoise Lacroix/Panoptika
BOOKS READ 34: WIDE SARGASSO SEA BY JEAN RHYS
I can tell you right now that I won’t remember this book. I’ll forget next week that I’ve even read it. It’s not bad or anything, I just felt no connection to it whatsoever and didn’t feel the need to make a connection to it either. And it’s nothing to feel bad about (as you can tell…I clearly don’t). I would say though that is is kind of rare to find books that you truly connect with and that stay with you. It’s like that with everything. Music, films, food, people, loves.
I kind of knew going into reading this book that I wouldn’t really get much out of it, and the main reason why I started reading it was cause I had recently gotten it and also it was so thin and I knew I would (haha…) feel at least some validation from finishing a book (as you’ve probably noticed, although I have a strictly book blog, I am by no means a prolific reader, and I want to write more on this thing, but it’s all based on how fast I read, which is at times, for me, painfully slow).
I know it’s like…well what was the point then of even reading the book, much less, buying it if you know you weren’t going to really care about it anyways? You know how you go into a bookstore and you let the books carry you, you let them make you think that if you pick them, and if they are read, that you will I dunno, be this certain person that you’d want to be, a more (ahem), well-read version - a better version of yourself.
Regardless, it is also about the pursuit for finding that story that resonates with you and to me, the best way for these stories to be found is through this sort of trial and error, of being guided by these notions, and oh is it ever nice to find that story, but oh is it ever okay if you don’t as well.
