assignment #2 - lily gardner: charles manson meets mormonism

I suppose my inability to remember many of the books I’ve read in the past year is indicative of its lack of impact upon me, or perhaps simply my roving attention. The list includes everything from The Girls, a decision spurred by the newest Tarantino film, to The End of the Affair, which I admittedly listened to primarily because Colin Firth was the one reading it. It includes Goodbye Columbus and 1Q84, Educated and The Goldfinch, and a number of supplemental AP study guides. None of those are particularly indicative of my personality, but none of them are particularly antithetical towards it, either. I would argue that perhaps an individual’s aspirational reading list represents much more about them, a manifestation of the person they’d like the become. Mine includes everything from The New Jim Crow and finishing Between the World and Me, to the one about the Crawdads that everyone and their mother seemed to read in book clubs. 

For me, reading is a constant aspiration, only strengthened when I actively recall what I’ve garnered from it in the past. A new insight into the world from Graham Greene and an appreciation for that of others from Tara Westover. Haruki Murakami provided a relief from the feelings incited by Roth. Tart, an artful reprieve from the Spanish pounding in my head over the summer. Because, as someone with a memory requiring copious documentation, it is the feelings I get from a work, everything from a Grace Palay short to a haiku, not the work itself, that truly make the difference.