I was reminded today how wonderful a good book can be. Reading a good novel is like slipping into your most broken-in, comfortable pair of jeans, or having coffee with an old friend. I picked up Prep (by Curtis Sittenfeld) at O'Hare. I was looking for something light and breezy to read on my 20-hour journey. The title attracted me, obviously - while I dislike chicklit for the most part, I admit to a certain soft spot for reading about east-coast prep school girls with their effortlessly cool uniforms of pleated skirts and knee-high socks. The synopsis proved promising too, and it had been reviewed favorably by the NYT (comparing the writer to Salinger and Plath!), indicating that maybe Sittenfeld's writing was in a different class than the generic Gossip Girl novel (and I have never read those, it's a matter of principle ..). Also, it was about 400 pages long, and I couldn't imagine that any chicklit writer would really have that much to say about shopping and shoes - this had to contain something of more substance.

My mom asked me when she picked me up if I had slept much on the plane. I didn't, and the truth is, I was reading. I had started devouring the novel, and it wasn't the guilty pleasure I expected it to be; it was pure, organic food for thought. Sittenfeld's novel was funny, poignant and extremely real. Her writing is so insightful that it was almost painful to read at times - I saw so much of myself in there, and related a bit too well to the main character. She reminded me of the person I was in college, which was almost incredibly sad. Her heroine was not one of those awesomely WASPy entitled Blair Waldorf types that I was expecting. The book was about a girl from the mid-west, a fish out of water who spent most of her time observing rather than participating. Someone who obsessed about any little event that occurred and wondered much more about her classmates than they did her. I have to hand it to Curtis - it's pretty hard to humanize and make interesting a character people would find invisible in real life. That girl was me, and sometimes I do feel I must be invisible in Chicago. Any pre-conceptions I'd had about the title and the cover had vanished as I now realized this was a carefully crafted piece of writing. I later wiki-ed the writer and found out it took Curtis 3 years to write this book, and a lot of it was based on her own experiences as a girl. As I read, I couldn't help thinking that most of my friends might enjoy this - Carol, I think you might like it, except it might be a bit angsty for your taste. I probably liked it so much because I recognized myself among those pages of words. Something both scary and reassuring.

It was nice to finally have time to read for pleasure and feel the strangely familiar urge to keep turning the page. At the UofC, I have to stay up hours on end reading non-stop, but I only keep reading because I have to, not because I want to.

+ posted by M @ 4:03 AM