I normally have several books on the go at once. One for bed-time reading, one for the Tube, one that’s to be discussed at the next book club meeting, and probably one that made up the 3-4-2 but turned out to be more gripping than those I went out to buy.
The wedding has put paid to that. Losing myself in a book is usually the best way for me to escape from anything I’m finding tricky or emotional. But at the moment I just find myself reading the same pages several times over because I can’t remember where I’d got to.
Perhaps I should have bought some wedding-related books to dip into. Amazon has hundreds. Most are How To books – how to make the perfect speech, how to plan a perfect wedding, how to choose a perfect bouquet. Some titles made me smile.
I liked The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Weddings (what to do if things turn out to be perfectly awful, I assume) and Buff Brides (how to be the perfect shape for your perfect day – definitely not in the same category as Bad Girl Bridesmaids: three all-new erotic tales).
There are a handful of serious books by American authors with titles such as Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Another is White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, in which the author Chrys Ingraham argues that over-the-top weddings marry two of the most sacred tenets of American culture – romantic love and excessive consumerism.
Romantic love – now we’re talking. Jane and Rochester, Anne and Gilbert, any of the Regency romps by Georgette Heyer. And somewhere in the house I have a box of books my daughter loved when she was little. I’m sure there was a wedding in Brambly Hedge.
1 comment:
Hi MotB: when reading your post I was reminded of an old friend of my daughter's, who stunned her mother by saying she wanted a "Sylvanian Families" wedding, outdoors in a meadow full of wild flowers with hens and ducks wandering picturesquely around. In fact it probably stunned the groom-to-be, as the whole relationship foundered at about that time! The novelist Adele Geras has just written a novel where a wedding is the lynchpin of the story, it is called "Made In Heaven". Not that you've got time to read ;-)
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