Abundance of groups, and La sombra del viento/The Shadow of the Wind

As William James' psychology yields AA, so my reading and writing and thinking, such as it is, has been pretty well channeled now into irrigating a plethora of social gatherings, with only the right balance between them left to be figured out. My groups:

We went to Bellwether a few times recently even when it wasn't for MathJam,

then of course there's this summer's course starting shortly at Signum,

and the local Smial of Tolkien Scholars, from whom I asked to borrow some books for it,

and whom I also invited to good old Drop in & Write at Spark,

who had me sit at a table today at Auntie's for awhile, where I found out about a group reading The Shadow of the Wind,

which led to INWG, a writing group that meets at Frankie Doodle's--apparently they have good cinnamon rolls--

but then there's another reading group meeting to read books in Spanish, which I heard about at the Spanish conversation tertulia at Lindaman's which has been going on for some 25 years,

but I only just heard about it at the potluck at church, where I've been participating in a memoir-writing class...

and this discussion group I just started as a sister seminar to the ones in Phoenix.

That's it for now, but there's Hobbit Immersion Camp to think about for summer!

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Now, on reading The Shadow of the Wind. To be more careful--and note that spoilers follow--, this came before, from the event at Auntie's for Get Lit where authors read about a teacher they wanted to thank, and a teacher reminisced generously of his idealism and his students in the public school in the Delta, so that I thought of City Year and Anthony at KIPP. Leaving a flyer at the register about Plato in the spring, I happened to pick up a calendar of other events going on, and saw that there was a group meeting the coming week to discuss The Shadow of the Wind, a novel I happened to have at home, albeit in Spanish.

So I read it as quickly as possible, starting that weekend. I don't know where or when I picked up that copy, but in other ways my chance encounter with the book and the group fit in nicely with the story it told, about a mysterious book and its author and readers. As fast as I skimmed along, not bothering to look up all the words I did not know, I still couldn't quite finish it in time, so that I first made the others tell me what happened, how it ended, which was satisfying, and then agreeable to nitpick together. Other questions we discussed were the setting, the ways characters might represent more than themselves, and the portrayal of evil, but the most interesting thing about the book, when it was asked how each reader's perspective made it a different book for us, was how we characterized it as a historical, literary mystery which is also a love story, and a love letter to a certain kind of reading--that total entregment of oneself, losing oneself in the book, not analyzing or comparing it but being swept along by the story, and how our language about this experience does have so much in common with romantic love: how we feel it first in youth or adolescence, how it becomes more difficult to recapture, becomes more complicated with the years; but also how as a writer, it is a kind of wish-fulfillment, to represent a book, a bookstore, a writer, a reader, so devoted to the work. And for me this is even where the question of good and evil is most interesting: why would one say "there are worse prisons than words," or call a place where books are so beloved, so that visitors are enjoined to remember them, a cemetery of forgotten books, when the words are for freeing people's imaginations and their hearts from inherited violence, the books for reconnecting them to one another and opening as far as possible their secretive memories to the light of day? To me, of all the killers and egoists and beaters, that impossibly romantic writer spurning his readers and burning his books is the most evil, and, again, the most interesting, and perhaps a good deal more so before he is redeemed.