Reading is my oxygen

My colleague Dan White's memoir, The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost my Mind--and Almost Found Myself--on the Pacific Crest Trail, was chosen by Salon as a top summer read. Salon talks about Dan's book even before David Sedaris' new one!

I have the book on my bed stand and will begin it soon. I'm looking forward to it because I'm sure it's hilarious and poignant, as the reviews say--and also because I will be teaching the book in one of my classes in the fall, and Dan will be visiting the class.

Also on my bed stand is a novel I'm writing a review on (I have an August 1 deadline) and and a huge stack of books I'm wading through as research for my historical novel.

I love books. I love reading. Life seems off somehow if I'm not in the middle of a meaningful story.

Research crazy

I've been working on a scene for my historical novel that centers on a 14-year-old girl in a Pasadena, California TB sanitorium in 1918. Patients had to eat raw eggs and milk 4-6 times a day. (Think Rocky Balboa: all of this protein was meant to beef up those being consumed by TB, which was also called "consumption" because the body would burn itself out and waste away.)

Thank goodness for all of the databases available at our public/university library. So much information is at my fingertips. Of course there's the ongoing risk that I'll get happily drunk on history and have an oh-I-forgot-to-write hangover.

I just talked over the phone to a very helpful a medical historian at the National Institutes of Health. I had some questions that he was able to answer, such as: Would her family have visited often? Would she have been able to interact much with other patients? WWI was just coming to an end at that time, and I know some TB-infected soldiers were staying at Barlow: would she have been able to talk to them?

I recently learned this amazing fact: In the early 1900s, more than 80% of the U.S. population was infected with TB, and tuberculosis was the single most common cause of death.

Due to antibiotics, TB cases reduced significantly by mid-century. However, some TB hospitals continued in operation. My mom worked as a nurse at this one in the early 1960s.

February House

Did you know that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee all lived together for a few years under the same roof?

Their fixer-up Brooklyn brownstone was "host to an explosion of creativity, an extraordinary experiment in communal living, and a nonstop yearlong party" as the book jacket of Sherill Tippins' February House reads.

Many of these people will make appearances in my new novel. I'm reading Tippins' book as part of my research. This is the best kind of research, where you lose yourself in great reading that evokes the complexities of people and their time.

Carson McCullers and Jane Bowles--both of whom were married to men but had passionate affairs with women--will figure prominently in my as yet unnamed novel. I'm discovering so many interconnections among the (mainly queer) literary figures of the era that I'm gloriously drenched in the chaos of discovery.

The more I read about Auden and his lover Chester Kalman, the more I think that perhaps I have two or three novels coming out of this research.

I wish I could say more, but I've got to run off to the university to take part in a departmental reading of student essays. It's an all-day affair of reading anonymous paper after paper, scoring them based on a 1-6 rubric. A weird tradition, a bit like self-flagellation. It requires a lot of caffeine to stay on task.