Playworld

by Adam Ross

Roy also had an impressive bookshelf; however, his was tall and narrow and organized, so far as I could tell, by genre, blocks of science fiction and fantasy, none of which I had read (The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a ton of Carlos Castaneda). Included among these was a cluster of Stephen King, Tolkien, the Dune trilogy, these giving on to Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, plus Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, and The Catcher in the Rye. Such a library shamed me. These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal. My mother looked up at me from such books and then back to the page. I felt this lack. This failure.