Living in the Times of Coronavirus (COVID-19): Time At Last to Read....

Cover art by Drew Struzan. © 2015 Del Rey Books & Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

Well, I finally did it. 

After four years, a cross-state move, and a multitude of ups and downs, including adjusting to life in a new hometown, getting used to living with what amounts to a new family, and now a state of COVID-19 quarantine, I finished reading Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I usually don’t consider the act of finishing a book a huge achievement. I usually finish most of the books I start reading, unless I run into one that I really hate and can’t even get to the halfway mark because, ugh, it’s so awful that I’d rather have my eyes plucked out by crows rather than have to read…one…more…page.  I’ve had that unpleasant experience quite a few times in six decades’ worth of reading, and I’m sure I’ll have it a few more times before I die.

The last time I felt that completing a book without skimming through “the slow parts” was worth writing about? That was in the early 2000s after I read the one-volume edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I’ve “read” The Lord of the Rings before, of course. I bought a four-book box set that included The Hobbit and the broken-up-into-three-volumes LOTR “trilogy,” but when I was younger I tended to skip all the scenes with songs and recitations of poems. Technically, I read enough of Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga to get the gist of the story, but I lacked the patience to take a deep dive into that fantastical world, no matter how well Tolkien wrote about it.

I’m not sure now when I finally sat down and read The Lord of the Rings without skimming through it. Certainly, it was before 2009; after that year, my free time was curtailed by Mom’s long illness and my need to become her caregiver. So I’m guessing it was around the time The Two Towers was out in theaters. 

It helped, of course, that I’d bought a large, omnibus edition that was a tie-in to Peter Jackson’s 2001-2003 filmed adaptations. The type was larger than that in the mass-market paperbacks I’d bought in the early 1980s, for one thing, and I was older (in my late 30s) and more patient.

When it comes to books I start reading because I like the author, the topic, and the style, but can’t finish as fast as I usually do, I’d have to say that my experience with Star Wars: The Force Awakens is an anomaly.

I bought the book in January of 2016, which is when Disney and Lucasfilm asked Del Rey Books to release it. I wasn’t even thinking of moving then; I was focusing on renovating my late mother’s house and on the fight in probate court to establish ownership of it. And I did have time to read it when I received it from Amazon.

As it turns out, I read just enough of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to review it for the now-vanished site Examiner. I was the Miami Books Examiner (as well as the Miami Blu-ray & DVD Examiner, and the Miami Star Wars Examiner) at the time, and writing timely reviews of new or noteworthy books was one of my specialties. I remember writing that review on my laptop one day while I sat in my old townhouse, and I dimly remember that it received quite a few page views on Examiner after it went “live” on the site in January of 2016.

After that, though, my life went topsy-turvy. I had to deal with a multitude of issues, including finding a lawyer for my probate case, cutting expenses left and right, including the unpleasant but necessary one of firing the landscapers my mom had hired to clean the back and front yards of the townhouse, and keeping my conniving and narcissistic older half-sister away from my house.  And after April of 2016, there was the additional challenge of starting a new life in a new city even as the probate court case was heating up.

Eventually, things calmed down once my half-sister lost in court, provisionally in July of 2016, and officially in the spring of 2017, when the judge in charge of the case made a final decision in my favor. By then, my move out of Miami had been long finished and my house was sold to a willing buyer.

And yet, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic changed our routines that I was able to finally sit down and read, from cover to cover, the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, four years and three months after I started it.

I hope that the next time I brag about finishing a book that I’ve wanted to read will be when I complete Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series…..