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I find recently that I've been reading slower. I don't mean just that I'm reading less, which is true mostly due to an increased work load, but I also find myself slowing down my pace as I read. I find myself lingering over passages. Perhaps it's just the books I've been reading since I've stumbled upon some really great books lately. And The Position by Meg Wolitzer definitely qualifies as a great read. Because I've been reading slower I'm not digesting books in huge gulps but rather I've been reading them in small doses with lots of time to think in between servings.

The Position not a new book, it's been out for a couple of years. It's been sitting on my shelf since last October when I attended a round table discussion at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. When I arrived I really had no intention of buying this book. But after listening to Meg Wolitzer talk about writing in general and about the book in particular I really had to get it. That evening she earned herself a position at my dream dinner party, women authors edition. (The one strike against her was that she didn't seem very enthused about blogging but I figure we could pull her over to the dark side.)

On the surface The Position is about a family. At first glance the Mellows seem like a pretty normal family - mother, father, two daughters, two sons, quiet suburban neighbourhood. But during the 1970s, when the kids were still young, the parents wrote a book called Pleasuring, a Joy of Sex type book. But it wasn't just merely a sex book. Much to the horror of the children there were artists drawings of their parents doing it in every position imaginable throughout the entire book. They even invented a position called "The Electric Forgiveness" (hey, we are talking about the 70s here). Rather than sit their children down and tell them about the book the parents merely put it the rec room with all the other books. Almost immediately their eldest son Michael finds it. Unable to handle the weight of what it represents on his own he shows the rest of the children.

"Once we've seen it," Holly had said a few minutes earlier when Michael announced his intention, "then we can never unsee it. It will stay in our minds."

And it does stay in their minds. The book takes over the lives of everyone in the family. It changes them and there is no going back. This initial view changed them all and the book skips ahead thirty years and you see how it has impacted them over time. All the family members get at least one chapter to tell their story, some get more and some you wish had more.

Wolitzer is a very talented writer. She's one of those authors who makes me feel woefully inadequate in my attempts at putting words to paper (or more appropriately, to screen). My copy of The Position is littered with post-it notes from passages I liked. I didn't flag nearly as many as I could have but there were enough that I got asked a couple of times if I was studying something. (And if you want to get some interesting looks, try reading this one in public...). One of my favourite passages is in one of Dashiell's chapters. He's reflecting on his country and his political party. Like that day when he first saw his parents book, he has lost his innocence.

We have lost our special place, he thought. We've lost the perfection that allowed us to be boyish in one way and manlike in another; we've lost the shining maleness that shimmered everywhere, and was sometimes resented but tolerated, and more often than not was loved. We have lost it, and it can never be returned to us. We no longer have our position, our corner booth, our distinction.

At it's heart The Position is about how our actions impact us and those around us. It's about how the positions we put ourselves in change who we are and change those we love. It made me think about blogging actually, especially those that blog naked. Will I wish that I had blogged nakedly? What will our 10 years older selves think of our blogs? 20 years? 30 years? The Mellow children were constantly being told how their parent's book changed someone's life. I don't expect to change anyone's life through blogging, but I know people who have made imprints on my life through their blogging.

I like books that make me think. I especially like books that make me think about things that I wasn't expecting and in ways that I never considered before. This book did that for me. And I think I need to add the rest of Meg Wolitzer's books to the list of books that I must not only read, but own.

Photo credit: Simon and Schuster's page on The Position
Quotes taken from the 2005 paperback Scribner edition, pages 11 and 235 respectively.

Contributing Editor Sassymonkey also blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.