The Blind Assassin (a book report)

I just finished the 521st page of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Perhaps if you stared at my nightstand every night you would realize exactly how big of a feat that is, since that book has been perched bedside for TWO ENTIRE YEARS.

The Blind Assassin, which was identified by Time Magazine as a must-read book in its list of Post-1923 Published Must Reads (yes, that was the very official title of the list), was given to me by Shannon when I was visiting her in 2005. I hauled it from jolly ol' England back to Kentucky and cracked it open with the best intentions. Any book more than 300 pages is usually a slow read for me because, well, they're thick and therefore impossible. Plus, David Sedaris will publish something or someone will lend me a skinnier book and then thick-and-impossible gets pushed to the bottom of the stack.

Even as my attention has wandered from this mass of literature, for some reason I never gave up on it. Maybe because Shannon said it was an excellent book, or maybe because Shannon actually read it so I figured I ought to, or maybe because I didn't want to fuss my way out of something hard, I kept coming back to Iris's story of her strange sister Laura, her criminally greedy husband Richard, her simple yet brilliant help Reenie, and the two unnamed lovers from different walks of life who meet in dingy rooms to have sex and imagine a world where children made blind from rug making turned into superhuman assassins. I really like the idea of blind kids becoming assassins for some reason.

It wasn't until after I turned page 521 that I realized how long I'd been living with The Blind Assassin. In the last two years, that paper brick has been to Iran, to Amsterdam, to California, to Ohio, to Tennessee and to Georgia, and somehow it has always ended up staring me in the face every night before bed. It has been a constant reminder of what I should be doing with my spare time. Of adventures that I've had. Of Shannon. Its impossible thickness has become a steady companion, and while I'm thrilled I've finally made it through the whole book after all this time, I'm a little sad to take it from the nightstand and turn it over to the bookshelf.

Mostly because it means Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has resurfaced.