Just Jennifer

Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live by Peter Orner

Novelist and short story author Peter Orner turns his attention to his own reading habits and preferences in this collection of essays that revisits some of his favorite books, classic (mostly modern) authors such as Virginia Woolf, Isaac Babel and John Cheever, as well as some more unknowns, Elias Canetti, Juan Rulfo and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.  These essays are not just reflections on the work but include personal recollections about where Orner read the work, what was going on in his life and why the book is so important to him.  In many of the essays Orner muses on fathers and sons as he mourns the loss of his own father and reflects in their time together and their relationship.  Orner is a watcher, an observer; some of his favorite places to read and write include the San Francisco hospital’s cafeteria, reading John Cheever in Albania or The Matisse Stories of A.S. Byatt in a run-down Victorian in Cincinnati.  Orner reveres the books as almost sacred objects, both physically and for the wisdom and solace contained within.  Of the Byatt he says it has a “beautiful light blue cover. On it two people are reading. There’s a window and tree in the background.”  Each essay is intimate and personal and reminds us that while reading and writing may be solitary endeavors books bind us not only to the characters within, their creators, but also to each other as they tether us to the world at large while allowing us to float freely wherever we may choose.  Sources and Notes at the end offer further insights to the works mentioned throughout the text.