Sneak preview to the winter issue of Reality Mom

The winter issue will be out soon. Order your subscription today by clicking on the paypal link to the right. Or give a year of laughs and insight to a friend for Christmas. The upcoming issue features poetry by Michelle Cristiani and essays by Nadya Petkova and Kezia Willingham. As well as works by your truly such as the following confession to being a book slut.

What He’s Reading

People usually assume that since I am an author, I am a book snob. They imagine every room in my house being lined with walnut bookshelves holding my leather bound treasures. In reality, my kids’ books occupy our only bookcases. Therefore, many of our treasures are scattered on the floor of every room in the house. They are not expensive leather bound books, but rather free loans from the library.

I could feel guilty about denying those authors their measly 40 cent royalty, but I read anywhere from one to four books a week. Rather than hand over my credit card that many times, I much prefer to leave the library with my armful of books knowing I can read a page or the entire thing without feeling as if I just deprived my kids a pair of shoes.

I am a book slut, not a snob. My interests vary and I can be fickle, but in general my standards are pretty low. As long as a book holds my interest, I’ll sleep with it. My current bedmates are Are you There Vodka? It’s me Chelsea (vacuous, but funny), Salinger’s Nine Stories (one of the only authors I reread and never regret doing so), Last Seen Leaving (fabulous mystery), and Faye Weldon’s Mantrapped (a memoir blended with fiction makes for a nice idea, but at 11 at night, I don’t want to work that hard to understand which is which).

In my current phase of single mom who doesn’t watch television sluthood, women’s contemporary fiction is much more likely to be in bed with me than War and Peace. When I crawl into bed at the end of the day, I want to relax and be entertained. I don’t care how gifted the Russians are, they are not easy nor are they cheerful.

What people are reading says a lot about them. Just because I enjoy some genres more than others, doesn’t mean I don’t sample a wide range of books. As I said, I’ll sleep with almost anyone, but not everyone gets to spend the night a second time.

If I had understood the effectiveness of this possible screening tactic when I was dating actual people rather than books, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. From now on, “What are you reading?” is no longer a mere conversation starter. It’s the fast track to determining if we’re a match or not.

An old fling told me he was reading Moby Dick. If he had said this while we were getting naked, I would have thought him witty. But we weren’t and he wasn’t. Rather than being impressed by his propensity towards such mammoth novels, and perhaps be intrigued that he had something mammoth himself, I realized he had more in common with Melville than the great whale. He was verbose in a droning sort of way and after enduring too many hour-long monologues, I chose to search the sea once again.

Somehow I managed to stay in a relationship with a man who read comic books. They weren’t arty, clever, or political comics, they were blood and gore. Fortunately, he was very intelligent and well informed about many subjects, so our conversations were almost always interesting events in which I learned something. Unfortunately, whenever emotions were revealed (by me), he retreated back to his adolescent comic book escaping self.

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