The Thread - Vagabond Reading Habit

Here is how it all unravels together for me.

A few months back I was reading Sam's Book by David Ray.

Bertrand Bonhomme,who's opinion I trust, recommended the book for the poems dealing with the death of the poet's son, Sam. A theme achingly near and dear to my heart.

In many of the poems, there are lines from or allusions to a great many of Robert Frost's poems - the poems not taken you might say; that is, not the first poems that pop into my mind when I think of Frost. The lines and fragments were powerful enough that I went back to my Collected Frost (see post below) and read the poems in their entirety.

This is typical of my reading MO. One poem leads to a name which leads to an essay which leads to a story which leads to a death which leads to a song which leads to a lake which leads to a ... you get the picture. How impossible it is to stay with a book when I come across a reference that grabs me, an epigraph that's so right I must read more of that writer. It is no surprise I feel as though I have never finished any one book of mine.

I follow the threads. I leave one unfinished book for the next and jump off at the first exit. A name, a place, an event. I go where the thread goes. In this sense, all books are one book, eh? one book that each of us cobbles together on the path to knowing.

I wish I had thought to keep track of where different books took me. I mean, know the books at my bedside, Ruefle, Edwin Muir, Frost, Charlotte Mew, but I can no longer remember how they got there. If you get my drift.