Mystery Bag

Memories of early reading, how my Mom inspired my interest in literature through randomization, and how I'm getting back to old tricks

I learned my love of reading from my mother. Some of my earliest memories are of her reading me to sleep beside my bed with a warm lamp close to her face, reading quietly but with care. Though I had many children’s books of my own, she tended to read to me from classics, making early favorites out of Tom Sawyer, Great Expectations, Don Quixote, and many others I clearly didn’t directly ‘understand,’ but still found thrills in listening and trying to. We recorded tapes of her and I taking turns reading that I would play on nights I was alone, a habit that I continued into adolescence, recording myself and playing it on loop into late hours on repeat.

During my early teens, when I became too cool for such things, her tactic to interest me in reading changed. One day she approached me with a pillowcase, inside of which she’d put a stack of books she picked out that she thought I’d like and said that I could reach in without looking and take one. Once I’d read the book, she said, I could take another, and until then I wouldn’t know what else was in the bag. From that point forward, I could not be stopped. The mystery of what else might be next proved to be the perfect mental bullseye that could attract my attention off swords and spells and RPGs. I started stacking titles by the dozens, doing numbers. Now look at me.

I’ve posted a bit over the past year about recent struggles with finding the desire and attention to keep reading, especially amidst depression and with time feeling more fleeting now than ever. I kept finding that I just didn’t care about finishing anything unless it truly blew me away—a difficult task after 30-something years of books—and so quickly my lack of motivation to persevere turned into increasing piles of unread and half-read titles all around the house; books I found interesting enough to buy but suddenly couldn’t find the will to spend the time with. “I’ve read enough already,” I began trying to convince myself, echoing Gian, despite the fact that there’s a pretty obvious line, I think, between feeling inspired and fed. Often I’ve found my writing suffers when I’m not being as actively engaged with possibility, even if it takes forcing myself forward through the stall-outs. It seems rare that there’s nothing that can be learned from a book even if it sucks—at least you learn more about why what you think suck sucks.

I decided a couple weeks ago to break my cycle by returning to Mom’s prompt. I went to a local store and searched through the aisles, picking up things I’d never heard of, or had heard of and never bothered with, or things I’d always meant to read and never had. I ended up with six books, mostly sticking to shorter titles for fluidity, as the last few times I’d tried to get my reading hours up, I kept choosing doorstops, thinking that the bulk would be motivation for me to keep with it since I always loved the marathon-universe consumption model of big books. Something about doing numbers satisfied the hoarder in me much better, I realized, though I made sure to mix in a couple thicker ones, as I am no Reality Hunger needer of constant brevity. I left the books in the bag for a couple days so I’d forget what I’d put in there, and then began the challenge of reading all six before anything else, plucked blind with the same rules.

I read two books in the first 24 hours, wanting mainly to finish the first so I could see what I would pull.