Punctured hearts and beaten lungs
from THE BOOK THIEF / also probably my former AIM screen name
The aggressively emo words PUNCTURED HEARTS AND BEATEN LUNGS have been thrashing (crashing? clashing?) around in my head ever since I started Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF on Audible. I am not typically an audiobook fan, at least not when I’m reading a book for the words, which I tend to do (or feel the need to do) to move my writing forward. Audiobooks are reserved for the bedtime thrillers and the dramas and the inconceivable plots, though such plots, one might argue, carry a uniquely violent, intangible electricity with the turn of a papered page.
There are a few reasons I’m returning to this childhood favorite. For one, I had one free Audible pick this month and nostalgia can be a powerful thing. But more importantly, it frustrates me that I remember adoring the book, but could not and would not pass a basic pop quiz on its literary themes or characters. It’s almost as if I’d never read it at all.
This is quite natural for me—for fragments of my memory to feel displaced somewhere I can’t seem to unshackle. My friends often joke about my shoddy recollection, but it’s something I’m quite self-conscious of as a storyteller; my unreliable memory often leaves me feeling like an unreliable narrator.
I struggle to remember moments and often words and even people who move and shake me, and it’s a major reason why I’ve always felt this need to document it all, to showcase my love in writing lest I forget what someone or something meant to me or worse, lest I forget to let ‘em know in breaths.
It’s why I recently reread my favorite book, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel García Márquez, which I knew was something special after the first inhalation early on in high school. I’ve read the book at least five times since, not just to remind myself of its magic, but to forgive myself for ever forgetting.
—fiza
As someone who is also self-conscious about her shoddy memory for the same reasons, this speaks to me. It's also an endorsement for me to reread books that I mainly love based on my memory of loving them, as opposed to the storyline.