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This morning I was working my way through Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires. Working my way through.

It's a dense book, but I've never been opposed to that. It incorporates multiple points of view, multiple storytelling sounds. It centers on one particular year—1951—at Mount St. Gabriel's, an all-girls school, but it weaves across time and through repercussions as that year is recollected in an elderly nun's purposefully dry, "official" memoirs. The cast of characters is rather gigantic, and the tangents are so multitudinous that I found myself setting the book down and wondering how the author (a three-time National Book Award finalist) managed to keep track of them all. Perhaps I also wondered how we readers are expected to, as well, and whether or not there'll be sufficient pay-off in the end.

But what is stopping me more, is the sound, in this novel, of the young teens about whom it is mostly about. "Well, unlike Tildy, I never needed to have just one special 'best friend' I could tell everything to," one 16 year old says. "Probably Mama has filled that role for me. We're still girls together, giggling in the darkroom about how interchangeable most boys are." This 16 year old has a sister who is 14. The sister often sounds like this: "We can entertain ourselves. Chloe is a very interesting person to be with, and she finds me interesting."

A long time ago, when I was a frequent reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, Michael Pakenham, the editor, cautioned me against having an opinion about a book until I had in fact finished reading it. I didn't pronounce mid-course opinions then, and I'm not pronouncing an opinion here, but I am describing one reader's experience. I will continue to work my way through, for many readers have enjoyed this book, and sometimes stories just need time to unfold. I'm 130 pages in, and I've got 263 pages to go.

I've been trawling through a part of my own history this weekend—through file folders stuffed with xeroxed passages, quotes, and lecture notes, with old book reviews and essays, with pitched-forward questions. I wanted to see, as I prepare to teach at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, just what I'd once been thinking. I wanted to measure my progress since then.

The exercise is bittersweet. It involves recalling books that I could not live without—but have, for a decade or more. It evokes wonder at my own wonder. It settles me into a slower unit of time. It reminds me of the power that books still have over me.

I was a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun, years ago, when Michael Pakenham was at the helm. In the big pile of things that I've been sorting through this weekend, I found a Sun piece I'd written on memoir. Tucked within were thoughts on memoirs. I share a few of passages from that essay with you, my book-loving blogger friends. I cherished these books then; I cherish them now:

I might not have learned to love the memoir form—or begin to write it—had I not happened upon Natalie Kusz’s miraculous Road Song in 1990. The story of the author’s long recovery from a ferocious attack of a pack of Alaskan dogs, Road Song was, for me, the revelation of a form. Here was the past delivered with equanimity and respect. Here was a terrible tragedy gentled by words, a book in which the good is everpresent with the bad. Kusz writes to comprehend, and not to condemn. She writes her way back to herself, and as she does, she broadens the reader’s perspective, disassembles bitterness, heals. Road Song begins in the spirit of adventure, not with despair. Road Song begins with an “our” and not an “I” and reverberates out, like a hymn. There is no selling out here. Just a hand reaching out across the page.