Why You Can't Go Home Again

My brother’s girlfriend is sweet enough to pass on her New York Times Book Review section to us when she’s read it. But lately it’s been leading me into purchasing way too many books. Well, I don’t think you can have too many books (talk to me again when our living room collapses into our basement), but I’ve sure been buying a bunch.

And the book I’m reading now is one of them. It’s by Geoffrey Becker and called Hot Springs. It’s about Bernice, a somewhat unstable young woman, Landis, her male friend, and Emily (or Pearl), Bernice’s five-year old daughter who she had previously given up for adoption and has, at the beginning of the book stolen back from the adoptive parents. I’m only on page 82, but I am liking this book a lot. And just now I read this:

“Anyway,” said Gillian, “you can’t ever go home. Home isn’t a real place. I mean, it is, but only partly. It’s also connected to time and people and just the way the world was back when you were younger, and who you are inside, or who you were. There’s nothing sadder than walking along a street that used to mean something to you and finding out that it doesn’t at all any more, that you’ve moved on and it’s just a street.”

I like that.

A few of the other books I've picked up and am looking forward to:

Going Bovine by Libby Bray
Sleepless by Charlie Huston
Impact by Douglas Preston
Alice Have I Been by Melissa Benjamin

This last one - a fictional biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, for whom the Alice in Wonderland books were written - is especially intriguing. In college, I roomed with one of her descendants. Wonder if she's read this book?