On not getting lost in a good book

Bright and early Thursday morning I was all set to hop in the car and drive north for my fall-break visit with the grandkids, but I couldn't leave the house until I learned whether Salman Rushdie had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. (Spoiler: he didn't.) I was afraid, see, that if Rushdie's win was announced while I was driving, I'd get overcome with emotion and have to pull over.

I don't know anything about Jon Fosse (or I didn't until Thursday) but he seems admirable enough. And I admit that Rushdie has his flaws, but if he had never written anything but Shame, Midnight's Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he would still stand among the literary immortals. I've been trying to think of any other living author who grabs hold of me the way Rushdie does but the list is short. Colson Whitehead. Natasha Trethewey. Ruth Ozeki, sometimes. I'm drawing a blank here.

I had lunch with an old grad-school friend yesterday and had trouble talking about books because nothing I've read recently has been particularly memorable. I read a bunch of Sarah Vowell's books in search of an excerpt to assign to my comedy students in preparation for her campus visit next week (!!!), and while I enjoyed Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates, they didn't sink their claws deeply into my soul the way Rushdie's writing does. And I'm once again teaching Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain in my Honors Lit class and loving every minute of it, but Frazier's other books have been mostly meh. 

My leisure reading lately has consisted of Harrison Kinney's monumental 1995 biography of James Thurber, which I've read and enjoyed before but I can't recommend it casually because it's 1200 pages long and so heavy it hurts my wrists. Only a die-hard Thurber fan would be willing to endure that kind of pain for a deep dive into the humorist's psyche, but how many die-hard Thurber fans do I encounter on a daily basis? When my comedy class reads "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" next week, I'll be the only person in the room familiar with Thurber's name. In Ohio! That's a travesty.

Maybe I'm the problem. I read a lot of contemporary fiction but I find it increasingly difficult to immerse myself in the plots or care about the characters. No novel published in the past five years has moved me as deeply as All That She Carried by Tiya Miles, a deeply researched work of narrative history. I'm still praising Whitehead's The Nickel Boys to anyone who will listen, but he's published two more books since then that haven't touched the same chord. 

These days when I want to lose myself in a good book, it's almost always an old book, well loved and reliable. I've been feeling a hankering lately to revisit Middlemarch, for instance. Why don't more recent novels have the ability to hold my attention the way George Eliot does, or Jane Austen or Zora Neale Hurston or Salman Rushdie?

I used to be happy to read anything, but not so much anymore. What's changed: the books or me?