​​When you read this, I will be in Europe. (You can follow along on my adventures on Instagram; follow me @amylsorensen.)

(My first time in Europe...wandering a street in Florence, my favorite Italian city.)

In January Haley decided to do a semester abroad in Spain this summer, and then in April she had the idea of going a week early, to see some of the sights in Europe. I decided to come with her because I was worried about her traveling around Europe on her own. (And because I wanted to see some of the sights in Europe too!)

I was talking to a neighbor about this trip, and she said "I can't believe you're brave enough to travel to Europe without your husband. Or even at all! I would be so afraid."

"What would you be afraid of?" I asked her, sincerely curious.

"Getting lost. Or mugged. The airplane crashing. All of those terrorist attacks in Europe!" 

I thought about what she was saying. It reminded me of my mornings spent running up Squaw Peak Road, which is a steep, twisting, narrow mountain road near where I live, with narrow shoulders, and how whenever I start to run it, I am overcome with "what ifs." What if I got hit by a car? What if I accidentally fell down the mountain? What if I stumbled on the road and got injured? What if someone from the shooting range shot so wildly that he shot me? What if a mountain lion followed me?

Usually, before I start, I have to take a deep breath. I have to remind myself of my precautions: I only run with one earbud in, and the volume on my music extra low so that I can hear the traffic. I stick to the shoulder. I run with my cell phone so if anything But when I get started running up that road, I leave the "what ifs" behind. What I find instead is a running bliss that is unique to that place, inspired by the steep uphill, by being on a mountain, by the view around me (three different mountains I have hiked, and trees so close i can touch them if I want to, and wildflowers and the blue blue sky). It is a hard run, but it is beautiful, and if I let my "what ifs" stop me, I would never feel that feeling.

I listened to my neighbor and her litany of fears, and why she would never travel without her husband or, likely, with her husband, and I found words tumbling out of me. I hope I was gentle and not judgmental. "I decided a long time ago," I told her, "to not be limited by fear. To not let fear stop me from doing what I want to do. If I let myself be afraid, I would never do anything."

If I'm honest, I can tell you: I am afraid. I'm afraid that we will miss our carefully-scheduled trains. I'm afraid of getting lost and of losing Haley. I'm afraid of not knowing how to navigate the Tube or the Metro and of ending up somewhere dicey. I'm afraid our hotel in Amsterdam—right in the middle of the Red Light district—will be dodgy. I'm afraid of pick pockets. I wasn't afraid of airplane crashes, muggings, or terrorist attacks, but I am, a little bit, now.

But still—when you read this, I will be in Europe. Because you know what else I am afraid of? Never experiencing anything beyond the small confines of my everyday life. Never sitting at a street cafe in Paris while French is spoken around me and I don't understand anything but I am there. Not having any more museum moments, when you go to a specific museum to see a specific piece of art which is, yes, amazing, but you also find your​ piece there, the one that everyone else might overlook but that is a piece that changes something for you. The prospect that I will never see the great architecture of the world, or wander down ancient streets I don't know the name of, or stand on a bridge over the Thames or a canal or the Seine.

I want to be amazed by what is around an unknown corner, humbled by history, astounded by churches. 

I want to run down cobbled streets or on a path through a garden or past storied monuments. (Yes...I am packing my running shoes!)

I want to go, and see, and experience what the world wants to show me. 

I am afraid of the bad things that could happen. But I won't let my fears stop me from experiencing the good things that can be found only by stretching. By going out into the world anyway.

​One of my librarian friends and I were talking a few weeks ago about what we were reading. She said "I've actually just finished binge-watching Veronica Mars, and now that I think about it, I think it's a show you'd really like." She thought for a second, clearly struggling to put a weird thought into words. "Part of it is about how she was date-raped and is trying to figure out who her rapist was...and that seems like, you know. Sort of your thing."

Another awkward pause.

"Not that..." she hesitated.

So I jumped in. It's not that I can say I like reading books about rape. That really would be weird. Instead, it is that I am drawn to books (and yes, TV shows and movies) that deal with women's issues in serious, realistic, and thought-provoking ways.

And one of those issues is rape.

"Interestingly enough," I told my librarian friend, "I just finished a YA novel about something similar, Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston."

She and I had talked late in December about how, while everyone else thought the YA novel All the Rage (also a novel about rape) was this generation's Speak (ditto on subject), we both thought it was confusing. I read the last part three times but I still didn't have a clear vision of what actually happened. All the Rage takes a character who is already on the fringe—Romy Grey is from the poor side of her small midwestern town—and then pushes her out even further into isolation and doubt when she is raped by (and then reports) the sheriff's son. The book is about how people can turn victims into scapegoats and how girls need to take care of each other (but usually don't) and how the flaws in the system give rapists freedom to repeat their crimes. It's a harrowing, gritty book, but still: I can't quite exactly explain what happened to Romy. Maybe that's the point—and it is a well-established fact that I don't need clean, tidy endings—but I wanted to leave the book understanding what she experienced, and I didn't, so I felt a little...at odds.

But I'm glad such novels exist. Ones that are willing to look at what happens to a girl's psyche when she becomes a victim. Ones that examine how society itself enables such horrible things to happen. By writing fiction about rape, we take away some of its power, because it can become a thing to write about just like any other topic. It's not exempt and it shouldn't be hidden away without conversation, and novels can bring it into the light.

So while, no, I would never say that novels about rape are a genre I am specifically drawn to, they are novels I will usually read, because sometimes reading—even fiction—can be a form of witnessing.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear, takes a totally different approach than All the Rage. The main character, Hermione Winters, is the only daughter of wealthy parents. She's spending the last week of summer before her senior year at the cheer camp she's gone to since she was 14, but this time she is the captain of her squad. At the party at the end of camp, she is drugged and raped, and the rest of the novel is about her process of dealing with this violent experience that she has very little memory of. 

I liked many things about this book. I liked that it challenged my I-don't-like-cheerleaders perspective. I liked that Hermione, even as a popular girl, had to grapple with people's stares, whispers, and assumptions. I liked the friendships and the relationships in the story. 

I liked mostly that the author took this approach, started with a girl who wasn't a victim of anything, whose life was really damn fine, and  then made her a victim. It changes the dynamic of the usual story somehow. Hermione has a strong support system: involved parents, strong friends, access to mental healthcare. It felt like a story that started with a "what if" question: What if a wealthy, successful teenage girl is raped? What does it do to her life? Does it cause her to lose any of the markers of her success?

What I didn't like is that the answer to the question felt like "no." Hermione changes, of course, as the result of the rape. But she never breaks. She is sad, she is nauseous, she is traumatized; she has a freak-out moment later on in the book, but she never crumbles. It doesn't feel like she ever truly reacts to the rape in a visceral, raw way.

And maybe the point of her non-reaction is that, with the right resources, a rape doesn't have to break you. Or that she was a strong character who refused to be broken. Who took control of her experience and acted the least like a victim that she could.

That is positive, of course.

But for me, it doesn't feel believable. It feels almost...glossy. Yes: many, many people are strong enough to survive a rape and not have it ruin their entire life.  No victim needs to be defined as a victim for the rest of her life. But I don't believe there wouldn't be any dramatic choices, or any backlash, or any destruction. Dealing with the outcome, suffering through the backlash and surviving it—what a victim must plunge through during her recuperation—and coming out on the other side as a changed person is where the power of a rape narrative lies. 

And it felt to me like Hermione never plunged anywhere. Like she never went through but went around instead. 

I read novels about rape not as a voyeur but as a witness. As an act of solidarity and a refusal to let it be a hidden topic. Exit, Pursued by a Bear​ was an interesting story. A good exploration of "what if." But by making Hermione so strong, the writer made the process invisible. There was almost nothing to witness. 

Checking out a library book is an optimistic action. It suggests hope in the idea that time will be found to simply sit somewhere comfortable and be immersed in a story. You check out a book because you love the idea of it, or the cover is appealing, or it’s written by an author you’ve enjoyed before. “Read this,” suggests someone whose taste you admire, so you hunt the book down at the library and bring it home. A NYT review, a spot on NPR, a review on your favorite book blog: It’s so easy to find books to read and then to fill yourself with anticipation, both for the reading itself and for the solitude, the quiet, the comfort.

And then life gets in the way.

I think my ratio of books checked out to books I actually manage to finish is about 12:3. I want to read them, every single one, but I also have to live. I fit in as many books as I can, but there is so much to be done with every minute of time. In any given hour, I could do 18 different things, each of them important, and quite often the thing I pick isn’t reading. I remember once, when I was about 15 or 16, sitting on the floor in a hall of my high school, a teacher stopped next to me and said, “You know, when you grow up, you’ll have to stop reading all the time.”

(Obviously not an English teacher.)

He made being a grown up sound like a desolate wasteland. A book drought. A literature void.

I’m reminded the most in the summer that maybe growing up wasn’t the best thing I could’ve done. Remember how, in the summers of your childhood, you had all that free time? I think most kids probably filled it with running around with other kids, or baseball, or tennis. I did some of that, too, but mostly what I did was recline in a lawn chair in the shade by the peach tree and read. Book after book after book.

Every summer I long to go back to those days. I illustrate this desire by checking out books, and there’s always a pile by my nightstand and a pile in the front room and a couple stacked on the kitchen table. I want to read all of them, I try to finish more, but eventually they are overdue, and then they can’t be renewed another time, and then I have to return them.

But I don’t want to forget them.

Here’s a list of the 14 books I’m returning, unread, so that maybe I will remember, in the face of all the other books that will grab my attention, to check them out again:

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphie. An exploration of the dying days of writers and artists. I am a little obsessed with death lately.

Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal. I discovered this short story collection while looking for books to add to the library’s book group sets. I don’t think it would be a good choice for my library:  short stories with a decidedly un-Mormon twist. (That’s Joseph Smith on the cover.) I did read the first story, about an imagined afterlife, and found it dry and witty and delicious.

Weathering by Lucy Wood. A multigenerational novel about a grandmother, her daughter, and her daughter. One of them is a ghost whose remains are swirling in the river near her home.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente. A reimagining of the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless.

We are Water by Wally Lamb. The story of a woman who, after decades of marriage and family life, falls in love with another woman.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. I confess: this is now the third time I’ve checked out and returned this book, which is an exploration of contemporary marriage. Perhaps it is just not the right time and I should give it up for good? Until it comes into my life again?

The Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan. A teen novel about a boy named Amadou, who is working on a cocoa planation in the Ivory Coast to pay off his inexplicable debt. Did I not read it because I was afraid it would make me give up chocolate?

The Radleys by Matt Haig. A vampire novel. No one sparkles. This is more about family dynamics than blood drinking, but the bloody parts might be an interesting twist.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Some of the women in these stories are almost famous because of their proximity to famous people. Others because they almost make it. I’m kind of in love with short stories lately.

Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach. I loved his We All Looked Up, so I took this one home when I found it on the new YA books display. The description is sort of vague, a boy who doesn’t speak much and always avoids going to school meets an enigmatic girl.

Jimmy Bluefeather by Kim Heacox. The story of a Tlingit native, Keb Wisting, and the adventure he has with his grandson, whose injury at a logging mill ends his basketball aspirations. I got about twenty five pages into this but then got distracted, but the story is still tugging at me.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill. I like what Maureen Corrigan said about it: “a raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together.” What more could one want from a novel?

The Golem and the Jinni by Helen Wecker. I read the first chapter of this as an e-book and I liked it too much to not read the book-book. But then I decided to just order my own copy to take on my trip next week. Why haven’t I returned it yet?

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: The 32^nd Annual Collection. I have no idea why I requested this. For three or four years in the early 90s, I bought this every year. Then I realized I would never get through them all and I stopped. I think there is a story in there I wanted to read. Hopefully I will figure out which one.

All of these, along with five books about traveling in Europe, two books about lupus, and one cookbook, are all finally being returned to the library today. Hopefully someone else will be compelled to take one (or five) of them home. And actually read them.