The Golden Notebook in Our Shared Shelf

Sep 28, 2016 Janani rated it really liked it

It took me three years to finish this book, and that's literally three years. This highly in unusual for me because I either finish books in a giddy rush or just lose interest and shelve then for years. So having a book active for three years is in itself a strange new experience. But this doesn't mean I hated the book. I... Well, I actually loved it but in such a strange, intense way that didn't feel like love. Lessing's writing, which I experienced for the first time, was so compelling, and th It took me three years to finish this book, and that's literally three years. This highly in unusual for me because I either finish books in a giddy rush or just lose interest and shelve then for years. So having a book active for three years is in itself a strange new experience. But this doesn't mean I hated the book. I... Well, I actually loved it but in such a strange, intense way that didn't feel like love. Lessing's writing, which I experienced for the first time, was so compelling, and the thoughts and conversations of Anna felt so familiar to me, like transcripts of my own conversations with a friend (who incidentally began the book with me and finished it in a week like a normal person) that I just couldn't stop reading. And then abruptly, I couldn't take any more because it was just TOO real, and I just had to stop. I'm not one of those people who can stop reading a book for a long time and just pick up where I left off after ages. But with this book, I had no trouble with doing that and in fact felt the need every few months at various points to revisit. But it's just one of those books that you, or at least I, could never finish, and it would stare accusingly at me from my now reading list every time I logged into Goodreads. And then out of the blue, I opened it today and just finished the last hundred pages that have been waiting for a few months now.

I feel like I've emotionally grown up with this book. The three years between 26ish to 29 have been so crucial in my life (and often are in most women's lives I belief) that it feels almost like this book has been a witness and an understanding feminist friend who was ready to be puzzled, angry, depressed, exhilarated, excited and disillusioned right along with me. Lessing-Anna would be ready to bitch about the double standards of men one moment and then doubt her own sanity the next, and then fall in love the very next and then be conflicted by politics and art the next, and I could just get what she was going through.

And the problem when you get too invested in and involved with a book, ironically enough, proved to be the same problem that the book talks about in part. (view spoiler)

I don't know what it says about me that I still loved this book and wanted to reread it almost as soon as I finished it. Whether I will is an entirely different matter. ...more

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