Nebraska and Wyoming
Suggested by: Brooklyn Magazine
Traveled: November 2-8

This is different than the posts I usually write, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that they are both love stories, and the surprising parallels and juxtapositions between the two give me a fun game to play. The second reason, the real one, for which the first is a hasty justification, is that I put off writing about Eleanor & Park after the last page, and against my better judgement forged ahead. Now, I’m two posts behind and haven’t picked up Montana for over a week for fear of never returning, so there you go. These books get to be buddies.

In the nature of hand holding and neighboring states, let’s talk about what these two books share:

– These are stories of misfits, protagonists struggling with living on the fringe
– We are witnessing first loves
– Both take us through a sexual awakening
– The protagonists seem to tumble into one another, unexpectedly and equally passionate
– Both feature society and normalcy as the antagonists
– Urgency pervades both
– Smells are potent and evocative
– Neither love is allowed to last
– Both stories seem doomed to end from the beginning

The thematic similarities surprised me, as the styles were so different. Eleanor & Park is a spunky, contemporary young adult novel, while Brokeback Mountain is an artful, all-grown-up short story.

Brokeback gives us sentences like, “The tea-colored river ran fast with snowmelt, a scarf of bubbles at every high rock, pools and setbacks streaming.”

E&P counters with, “Eleanor hadn’t known there were houses like that in this crappy neighborhood — houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and little baskets of potpourri everywhere. She didn’t know there were families like that.”

But when the authors start sharing the excitement of stolen, overpowering encounters, their commonalities appear. “… and as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack’s big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor…” and “They weren’t moving in orderly steps like Mother May I. They weren’t even kissing each other square on the mouth. (Lining things up neatly would take too long.)”

And finally, when the currents of fate and the broken world threaten to be too much, they converge. “I don’t know how to say goodbye to you,” she said. “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

Love is love is love. And it’s awkward and too often impossible. But it makes the lights shine a little brighter, and has filled our libraries with shelves and shelves of beautiful stories.

Colorado
Suggested by: Jacob
Traveled: October 21-27

I have an old, claw-foot bathtub in my house, with a white curtain that pulls all the way around. The edges get tipped with mildew every three months or so. It’s my job to scrub it clean, and I enjoy the cocoon it creates when I am ensconced for my daily showers or rare, luxurious baths. There is a massive shower upstairs, renovated by the previous owner with two waterfall heads and a solid wall of frosted glass, letting the morning sunlight pour onto the dazzling, naked form inside. But I prefer my claw-foot tub and its high, porcelain edges.

That is, until Mr. King finally walked into my life. Now, I approach the tub with a tiny knot at the base of my neck, throwing back the curtains with one eye closed.

This is, I have decided, a fair price to pay for the thrilling story he has given me, providentially during the week where ghosts and ghouls roam the streets. I saw Kubrick’s The Shining two years ago, and while I remember liking it, had very little stick with me. Fortunately so, as it left me as a relatively blank slate to experience King’s writing for the first time. I couldn’t put The Shining down, and pushed my lunch “hours” five-ten-fifteen minutes longer to creep ahead through the satisfying mix of supernatural and human depravity that King has put down. Not sure what to expect from a household-name author with over fifty books in a genre I rarely touch, I started The Shining skeptically. But I quickly warmed as the Colorado winter grew colder, and hardly noticed my pages-to-go dwindling to the thin back cover.

The setting in the Colorado mountains, with the elements blocking any passage of escape, was a haunting mirror of the will of the supernatural forces of the hotel. The snow and wind were just as impassable as the ghostly spirits and evil wills, becoming the source of much of the steady panic that built through the book. To be reminded that human beings are just an illusion away from control is scary. A snowstorm, a hurricane, a tiny solar flare away from disaster. And then King took it one step further, weaving a history for his antagonist Jack that suggests he may have, in fact, had some choice in the matter. And he chose evil. And that is even scarier.