38 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
I always have high expectations of a Barbara Kingsolver book, and Animal Dreams did not disappoint.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to this book. It has been on my shelf for years. It’s now part of my “read what you have” initiative meant to slow down my purchases of new books. I love to read, but I also love to acquire new books, and sometimes my acquiring moves faster than my reading. It’s a goal of mine this summer to catch up a little on things I’ve set aside for later. I’ve seen later, and later is now.
This is how I came to pick up Animal Dreams this week. It made the stack of “time to catch up” books. And so I start by saying I don’t know why I put this one off when Barbara Kingsolver is always a favorite, but that’s not entirely true. I do know.
Her books gut me. I have to give so much of myself to them that I’m no good for any other book for days. They require of me that I stop and think about them. I don’t mean they are intellectually difficult. They aren’t. They are easy to follow and enjoyable to read. They just demand the attention. They want to be contemplated and deservedly so.
I finished Animal Dreams a few days ago, but it is lingering with me. I have dreamed about it, which is only fitting as much of the story has to do with what people dream and why. “You dream what you do,” Loyd tells us in the book. “You are what you do,” Hallie tells us. We struggle, along with Codi, to figure out who that means we really are.
Codi returns to the town where she grew up, where she always felt like an outsider. She goes there to teach and to be near her ailing father. She goes there just as her sister is taking off for Nicaragua on a personal mission to help where she can. Codi does not know what her personal mission might be. She is a med-school dropout whose last job was the night shift at a 7-11. She is the sister who cannot even remember most of her childhood and has been told the parts she does remember are not real.
She is a restless soul forced to confront all of the sources of her restlessness. Even the man she meets along the way is not a new man but someone from her past.
This book is deeply contemplative and vastly wise. It is tragic but beautiful.
There are many lessons to be learned. Like many of Kingsolver’s books, this one is filled with environmental messages. Codi ends up battling to save the river that is the life source of her town. As she researches the conditions of the river and passes her lessons on to her high school science students, we learn the many different ways in which corporate greed (and thus consumer greed) has destroyed our rivers and mountains and natural places. It’s a book to make you think again and again about your own wastefulness.
Mainly, though, Codi learns to trust herself, to trust people who care about her, and to take some chances on her own human needs, her own animal dreams.
It’s a beautiful book. It isn’t one to speed through. It needs to be mulled over and savored. It’s worth the extra time that mulling over will take.
Go get a copy of Animal Dreams for yourself, and don’t keep it on your shelf for years on end before picking it up to read. Maybe we can absorb books through osmosis if we surround ourselves with enough, but reading is faster and more effective.
