True statement (which may sound exaggerated but isn’t):
Sarah has read over 200 books so far this year.
She’s the voracious reader I wish I was and imagined I’d be
when I was younger. Real books, e-books, audiobooks – she eats them all up. The
area beside our bed is a minefield, where she’ll have 30 or so books
within reach. (She only reads two or three at once, but she likes to have
options.) Her interests are broad, and it’s easier to list off what she
doesn’t like: sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also doesn’t love depressing
fiction, but she has read some of the most depressing-sounding non-fiction that
you’ve ever heard of. Falling Home: Creating a Life That Catches You When
You Fall, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging,
Invisible Women: Data Bias In a World Designed by Men; What Happened To You?:
Conversations on Trauma, Resistance, and Healing. True story – one night in
bed, I rolled over around three in the morning and saw her reading a book
called Why We Can’t Sleep.
Over recent years, I’ve watched her do deep dives into
Sexual Harassment, Race and Racism, the Pandemic. When the each, new horrible world
event shows up, many of us are too depressed, afraid, or overwhelmed to learn more, but not
Sarah. She’s always conscious of blind spots she may have and she’ll shrink
them in any way she can. Not to suggest this is the only reason she reads: she
reads to entertain herself, and to relax. Between Ibram X Kendi and Michael
Lewis, she'll chainsmoke seven Meg Cabot books in a row. She also has a special
place in her heart for behind-the-scenes and oral history books about TV shows.
Recently she read one about Friends, one about the Wire, one about Jeopardy and
this one (which really belongs with the list of depressing titles above), I Remember
Everything: Life Lessons from Dawson’s Creek.
What’s crazier to me is how much she retains. She holds
onto what she’s read for decades. I’ve been reading the Anne of Green Gables
series recently (a recommendation from Sarah from about 2001 – so I should catch
up on all recommendation by the time I’m three thousand years old). I came
across a funny line and went to read it to hear – and she completed my sentence
before I was halfway through. It makes her so fantastically well rounded. She’s
a polymath, my girl. This hasn’t happened in a while, but so many times after
she has just crushed some dude at Trivia Pursuit, the guy says something like,
“Well if these were all history questions, I would have beaten you.” And it’s
like, dude, if it was history, or science, or sports, or politics, or
geography, or sociology, or mathematics, or culture, or specifically whatever you
got your degree in, she would have annihilated you all the same.
Happy Birthday, love. You are first in my heart, just as you
are my first pick in any trivia competition from now until the end of time.
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