eleven/fifty-two

Sometimes I worry that I'm reading too much, that there's a set amount of words you can read in your lifetime, and I'm burning too fast, burning through the pages, and I'm almost done, and I need to slow down.

But then I remember that I'm a overanxious freak, and I get on with my life.

Seriously, it's been a few years since I've read this much, and I'm enjoying it enormously. The latest victim of my voracious reading habit was Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty, the story of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a poet (and author of Autobiography of a Face) who survived cancer as a child, which left her with a disfigured jaw. She and Ann sort of became friends in college, and this book covers everything from there until Lucy's death in 2003. It's a sad read for the most part, and there's one paragraph near the end where I sat there, read it again, and said, "Well, that's it then, that's how it's going to end, and there's no way anyone could stop it." and it was crushing but real. Real life is a bitch sometimes.

I say it's a sad read for the most part, but that may be a bit too sweeping. It's also very sweet and touching and all that stuff, it's just that when it's real life, and you know that the ending is sad, everything becomes tinted a little bit gray. But Patchett writes well, and it wasn't a mind-crushingly depressing read, please don't get that idea. A lot of it was funny, and I like that Patchett wasn't afraid to tell the truth of Lucy (or of herself, for that matter), all the bad parts along with the good parts.

p.s. Here's an article that Patchett wrote that's basically a condensed version of Truth & Beauty, if you're interested. I think I'm falling a little bit in love with Patchett's writing, it's so beautiful and perfect and everything's in just the right place.

(link via cheesedip.com)