Retreating Into Reverie

When I settled down to read the NYT book review, I had no intention of buying or ordering any new books.  You hear that? No intention!

Already have enough unread books I’m intending to read. They fill the table in my living room, like planes on a runway waiting for the signal to take off. There are…

Three books I’m concurrently reading. Seven others I intend to read. And six on my app queue at the Chicago Public Library, which will be sent to the local branch as soon as their current readers return them–whether or not I’m ready to read them. So hurry up and read those books on your table, Benny boy, so you can read the other books about to come your way! 

That’s why I had no intention of adding more books to the runway. 

In fact, these books are haunting me. I wake in the night and think–stop sleeping! You gottat read those books! 

It’s a panic like the ones I used to get on Sunday nights in high school, when it hit me that the weekend had come and gone and I’d done nothing to prepare for the tests I had to take the very next day. Not that I did anything about it. But in this case…

I creep down the stairs, flop on the couch and start reading. Best reading ever. No phones. No TV. No nothing.

Until the crack of dawn, when I go back to bed. Hoping to sleep just enough so I wake with enough energy to do whatever I have to do. Including…reading those books.

So, yes, I had no intention of adding new books to my must-read list. But…

I read Adam Langer’s review of The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, Peter Orner’s latest novel which is about Kup. And–oh, wait. Gotta explain a few things.

Adam Langer is a super-talented writer who grew up in Chicago and has written several novels.

Peter Orner is another super-talented writer who graduated from Highland Park High School and has written several novels and short story collections.

And Kup is…

Damn, I feel old, having to tell you who Kup is. There's a part of me that finds it inconceivable that everyone doesn’t instantly recognize that name. Kup was Chicago’s most prominent gossip columnist–I read him every day from the moment my family moved to Evanston from Rhode Island in 1966. And I watched his Saturday evening talk show all the freaking time.

C’mon, people–how can you not know Kup?

Apparently, I’m like the main character in Orner’s novel, who “retreats into reverie, reeling off names of Chicago streets, journalists, athletes and politicians as if reciting a Jewish prayer for the dead.” As Langer puts it.

Or as Orner writes: “All the names we lug around. Those names we’ll never shake no matter how long we live.’”

Langer concludes his review with this…

Orner has constructed “a moody and engrossing meditation on the informality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorial novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”

That’s it. My intentions vanished. I put down the book review section and picked up my phone and went to the library’s app, and ordered Orner’s book. 

Guess what? There were 145 people ahead of me. Looks like I’m not the only reader in Chicago lugging around those names.

From past experience, I figure it will take three or so months for Orner’s novel to make its way to me. Just as well–still got that ever-growing stack of books on my table to get through.