December 12, Friday afternoon -- Reading David Mitchell

Sunday, February 8, 2009

December 12, Friday afternoon -- Reading David Mitchell

Reading Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. It was on a reading list a friend gave him to occupy his free time while recovering from shoulder surgery. With a shoulder injury you can't work construction, but you can, happily, read.

His favorite book -- Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins. Recently he read Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, which he's read several times.

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To the left are forty-six readers, in shopping malls, on the bus, at a University, beside roadside stands, at a laundromat, and of course, stretched out on the beach. I made a conscious effort to find locals in addition to tourists and photographed, with five exceptions, everyone I saw reading who gave me permission. In the first of these exceptions I was anxious to leave the airport and walked right past two readers at the gate when I arrived; in the second two cases I was on a crowded bus with no way to respectfully and safely take a photo; and in the fifth, I was running to catch my flight home.

At the risk of sounding schizophrenic, this blog is a sister blog to my mother blog, www.peoplereading.blogspot.com. More information is on the mother blog site, but briefly: my PeopleReading blogs are an effort to record the beauty of a book being read at a given time and place, as well as the beauty of an individual's diversity uncovered by outer appearances.

My brief hiatus in O'ahu, as well as my marathon bus trip around the Lower-48 states (see DogearedUSA.blogspot.com) are part of my campaign to inspire PeopleReading blogs everywhere.

I invite you start your own sister (or brother) blog in O'ahu or wherever you may be.

The headline says, Residents dry off, but more rain falls. I was actually kind of happy the weather was so bad. I hadn't told my family, in Montana, who were suffering subzero temperatures, that I had gone to Hawai'i for the weekend. I didn't think that would have gone over so well. But, in another two weeks I would be going home for Christmas and, surely, if it wasn't me, someone was going to let it slip what I'd been up to. It would be better if I had stories of storms of grand porportions, flooding to rival arctic winds. I waited until the rain was thick and I was sitting on the bus in bumper-to-bumper traffic and I thought, this is the perfect time to call. So, I called my brother, and asked, "guess where I am?" and he said, joking of course, "I don't know. Hawai'i?"

Eddie Wen' Go: The Story of the Upside-Down Canoe, by Marion Lyman-Mersereau, illustrated by Melissa DeSica. The author is a teacher at Punahou school and a paddling coach. She helped build a great voyaging canoe that capsized. A surfer paddled out to try to save them but, twenty-two hours later, the people on the canoe were rescued, but the surfer, Eddie Wen' Go, was not. The story is told through the eyes of ocean creatures about what happened to Eddie. He became part of the spirit of the ocean. The pictures are beautiful.

Rightside-up canoes. Easier to read on a rightside-up canoe, though didn't spy anything but oars in hand. No books.

This is Hale'iwa, where I jumped off The Bus (it's a proper noun - that's its name) because I saw someone reading at this cafe on the left. It was a difficult decision to make. The surfer sitting next to me had invited me home with him and said he'd get his sister to read her Harry Potter book for me. It was a real aloha gesture. But, when I photograph readers I want to make sure that it's authentic. Still, I had reservations. It's really great to meet the locals anywhere you go and here I was, with my tunnel-visioned vision of how my project was supposed to go and all I could justify my tunnel-vision with was that I'd just have to go back another time.

Oahu Reading - 48 Hours on the Island

Sunday, February 8, 2009