speak, memory

Evan Maloney writes thoughtfully about how inconsistent our memories of books can be. "Are our memories of books determined by how much we enjoy them? Not for me. I read Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late in the mid-90s. I thought it was fantastic, and I never thought of it again until someone mentioned it last year. Conversely, in 2002 I read John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I thought very little of it, and yet I often remember the little I thought." This is true for me as well: I can't discover any pattern that would account for what I remember and what I forget.

Maloney concludes by saying "Nobody can fully understand or explain the relationship between reading and memory. And that's a wonderful thing, because the mystery of how we remember a book is something that leads us deep inside the magic of storytelling." Well, if you say so. For me it's more a testimony to the frustrating unreliability and irregularity of memory.