Arriving at April

Now that I've caught up to April 1975, I reached a place where I didn't read quite so much (I shudder to think what I was doing back then that got in the way of my reading. Most likely it involved alcohol.)

Around April 1-4, 1975, I read:

Flying Saucers, C. G. Jung

This book had a profound impact on me. I've been a fan of Jung ever since 1968, when one of the very few things I read in that year crammed with incident was Jung's Foreword to The I Ching, or Book of Changes. I read it several times and it was well worth it. Flying Saucers shows Jung again, as the objective student of human behavior studying a phenomenon without judging it.

I may end up reading more this year than 30 years ago. April 1-4, 2005, I read

Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

I had heard this book was brilliant, and I'm reading it later than everyone in the world (it seems) because the subject matter was so dark--beginning with a child abduction. Usually I wouldn't touch that theme at all, period. Life is too short for me to depress myself that way. But Dennis Lehane is a spellbinding storyteller, his narrative moves on such an almost lyrical undercurrent. He weaves narrative hooks into his characters' voices together so masterfully, that it was a wonderful experience in the same sense that a beautiful song can turn tragedy into pleasure. Unlike other beautifully written, depressing books where innocents get trashed (The White Hotel and Ironweed come to mind--you couldn't pay me enough to read those books again) the characters in Mystic River were all so screwed up from the get-go that there was a kind of distancing from them. This made it possible, for me at least, to keep turning pages and not to get too upset when fate caught up with them.