A small coincidence and a big one

I enacted my plan re: Seven Types of Ambiguity. After I got back from my vacation, I went to the library and checked it out again. That was about a week ago. I’ve barely opened the book and certainly haven’t started reading it again. I wonder how long it will take…

I have, though, been reading Ivanhoe. Every night and I’m moving along. Ivanhoe himself still hasn’t shown up again but I’ve just begun a new chapter that promises to reintroduce him or, at least, there’s a preamble about how Rebecca and Isaac have been sheltering him since he was wounded at the tournament. Funny that Cedric hasn’t seemed too concerned about his whereabouts…but he’s been busy.

There are two coincidences though. A small one and a big one. Again, on the bus, I watched people reading. They seem to do it mostly to shut people out. Perhaps it makes the trip faster. It just makes me feel sick when I do it but, as I’ve said before, I fear that I may be faint-hearted. Maybe I need to ‘read past the nausea’. Is that what D&G would suggest? That I’m missing something by refusing to participate in the interiority of reading on the bus? The haecceity of reading on the bus. I’m still surprised by what’s revealed through reading choices. The other day two women sitting side by side opposite me were reading. One was reading Ivanhoe (thus, the coincidence) and it was a jazzy edition and she was a very young woman – perhaps still in high school…what was the appeal of the book for her? Or maybe she had to read it for school or something…but who would teach Ivanhoe ? The other woman beside her, a middle-aged woman was reading a much older book, well-worn, perhaps from a used book store or garage sale. The cover design was distinctly 70s. This woman’s book was called How to be an assertive (not aggressive) woman in life, in love and on the job. The two women sat side by side reading, each unaware (unless they had awesome peripheral vision) of what the other was reading. The Ivanhoe woman could have told the How to be woman about Rebecca’s resistance to the Templar’s attempted rape, how she earned and commanded his respect despite her complete lack of power in a society that labelled her ‘despicable’. What could the How to be...woman tell the Ivanhoe woman? Perhaps that women need to tell their own stories…for themselves…

But to the other coincidence. And that is that I did look inside the Seven Types of Ambiguity when I got it out of the library again, just to find my place and to mark it so that when I was ready to begin again, I could just begin…I remembered that I had read up to about page 200. So I started looking at the book around page 200ish to see if I could pick up the thread. This is actually a really interesting part of reading and one that I engage in often because I read so slowly and so sporadically and read more than one book at a time. I also often lose my bookmark. So I ranged around page 200 and it seemed new to me. I think I’d read to the end of chapter 11 and maybe just started chapter 12. So now I read ahead into chapter 12 to see if I could find the exact spot where I had stopped before and I found on page 203 (far beyond where I had stopped reading before I took the book back to the library) Alex’s description of Simon (reported to the reader by Angela/Angel/Angelique) as “increasingly vehement tilting at windmills” – the premier cliché of DQ (or at least the image most people grasp and repeat when talking about DQ. And I’m back at DQ again. Will I ever stop reading that book?


O
and here are 7 words, the first ones drawn out of the bag after the new office move: egregious, integument, complexity, tuberousness, garment, gymnasium, insulation.