The Guilty Pleasure of Summer Reading

I am deliriously exhausted because I stayed up until four o’clock last night to finish a book.

And not a book I’m writing, either, but a book I’m reading.

Not a book I’m preparing to teach, not a book I’m working up to review, not one I’ll need to introduce or preface, not a book recommended by my contemporary-book-reading friends. Nope, I stayed up WAY past my bedtime, wrapped in a comforter with the cats wrapped around me like feather boas, because I could not rest until I found out  what happened in Desperation, a novel by Stephen King.

Desperation, in a big clothbound edition, had been sitting on the bookshelf for a year or so, bought in a feeding frenzy at a store where King (even in hardback) was practically given away as a treat if you purchased other books. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ll give myself a break, sit down with big cup of coffee, and take a look.”

King is not new to me. When I taught a course on “Revenge and Literature” at UConn a few years back, the reading list started with the likes of Medea and ended with the likes of Carrie (We did Hamlet, Othello, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and The Godfather, in addition to some others. Fun.)

Carrie is a terrific book, a juicy one to teach and a brilliantly crafted one to dissect. The film version is an excellent match, too, what with good ol’ Sissy Spacek looking Barbie Goes to Hell and Piper Laurie as a sort of Blanche DeBois on acid.

Pet Sematary scared me so much I had to put the book in another room before I could go to sleep because I was dumb enough to read it in bed. I swore not to make that mistake again.

And I didn’t. I started Desperation very early in the morning because I had just finished a whole run of books by an undeniably accomplished but rather dull writer of the 1920s (in preparation for one of those scholarly pieces) and wanted to clear my palate. I also figured that I deserved a bit of fun before settling down to the work of the semester.

Maybe the book caught my attention immediately and completely because it begins on a stretch of highway out west called “The Loneliest Road in America.” Michael and I spent a good part of the summer driving to and from California (we’ll talk more about this later, trust me) — and a significant part of that journey took place on The Loneliest Road in America, Route 50. Yes, I sent postcards to my friends in Manhattan saying that we had stumbled upon Central Nowhere and gleefully described the cliched nature of towns with no traffic lights, ones with tumbleweeds instead of tourists.

Hahaha, said Stephen King, as he delineated every possible nightmare an erstwhile city girl, a confirmed Easterner, an English teacher no less, could have about Nowhere. There were English professor-types, too, in the book, as well as a pretentious aging writer and a curly-haired girl and a precocious kid. I felt that every single one of the characters carried some shard of me inside of him or her, and I had that feeling of shock you get when you read a good book. Not just fluff, or junk, or pulp, but writing you genuinely hear and touch as it comes off the page.

Drawn into the book and being forced to read until (as happens to certain of King’s characters in a more literal sense) my eyes were falling out of my head was NOT what I expected. I read through the cooking of three meals, I read through the news, I read through a long bath. I read as Michael muttered and then growled about people who acted like they lived in dorms, leaving the lights on while others try to get some honest sleep.

I want to “witness” to the deliciously sweet sensation of staying up all night just to find out what happens in a novel and why it happens, then to shut the book with a satisfied sigh. It is an emotion I rarely associate with academics or scholarship and that grieves me; pleasure should be more of a priority.