Depression mode activated

This is not a sad post, I promise

I’ve been listening to the book A Little Life for the last month and a half. I realize that’s a ridiculous amount of time to consume an audiobook (well, half an audiobook because I’m only 54% of the way through it) but I listen to it in 20 minute increments on my walk to and from work each day. At 28 hours, it’s gonna take a minute for me to finish it. I tried reading it on my Kindle years ago, but couldn’t get into it. However, I’m finding that consuming this novel as an audiobook is the perfect way to do it.

A lot of people warned me off this book, telling me that it is the saddest book they have ever read and unrelentingly depressing. I was undeterred, as I really wanted to hear this story and get this book out of my to-be-read pile. The thing is, those people are not wrong, not even a little bit. It is so incredibly sad and not just every now and then, but it seems like it is always sad, no matter what is happening. There’s a thread of anguish that permeates the book.

This does not always make for the best way to start my day off, so a lot of days I' find myself having to talk myself into listening to it. Once I’m listening to it, I’m fine, but there are definitely mornings that I’d rather be listening to cheesy pop music instead of the trials and tribulations of Jude St. Francis. But then I always follow that up with “well, if you don’t listen to it while you’re walking to work, you’ll never finish." And that is true. I’m woefully behind on reading this year, having finished only two books so far. Part of the problem is I keep insisting on reading ridiculously long audiobooks. Combine that with the temptation to just dink around on my phone at night instead of reading a book on my Kindle, I seem permanently stuck. It’s not that I don’t want to read, it’s just that there’s so many distractions.

But back to A Little Life. Like I said, I’m 54% of the way through the book and at this point, I have to see it through. I have to know how this book resolves. What I really need is a long road trip somewhere so that I can knock out 4-5 hours of it at a time. But I don’t think that will happen. The other thing I will say about A Little Life is that, despite its intense sadness, it really is beautifully written. It has drawn me in so much more than I thought possible, especially after reading the first 100 pages or so several years back and abandoning it, thinking there’s no way I can read 700 pages of that kind of prose. As it turns out, I didn’t give it enough of a chance.

Now that it’s time to get ready for work, I’m ever closer to the daily decision as to whether or not to listen to it as I walk the just under a mile to work. But we all know the answer to that - we know I’ll listen.