For Pleasure: A Letter

Dear David, As you know, I begin most of my emails with apologies. So first of all, I am so sorry for being late getting back to your email, and for being appallingly late with the review of M.’s latest novel. And I apologize most of all for this: I just cannot do it. This book has been an anchor around my neck ever since you sent me a galley back in the winter. I have finally clawed my way out to page 700-something and still the remaining 300-some pages loom ahead, foreboding and without promise. At some point in the more than six months it’s taken me to get this far into the book, I started forcing myself to read it by taking it to the gym with me. It made sense for the task of reading this book to accompany my trying to lose weight on the stationary cycle: both are joyless, laborious, repetitive chores done in a state of squinty-eyed perspiration and only in the distant hope that, eventually, I will finally get rid of something heavy.