Reading...Reading...

Reading is my vice. If I’m not writing or drawing or making smoothies for lunch or walking Bisou, I’m reclining on cushions, reading. I’m not proud of this. Even though I mostly read what the culture considers “good” books, and reading is supposed to engage the mind more actively than watching TV, I know I should read less. 

I read to get away from the vicissitudes of daily life, from worries about the future, and above all I read to get a break from what Jung called the endless “circumambulation of the self.” And I read for company--the company of the author, whose voice reaches me across space and time and opens doors to worlds that I would otherwise never know. Sometimes, when bits of those worlds turn out to be almost exact replicas of bits of my own world, I feel a shock of recognition, and the author and I become fast friends. 

I especially like it if my author friend has published many books, so that I can spend months in her company. I fell in love with Iris Murdoch’s mind, and with the way she invents enormously intelligent characters who are at the same time enormously foolish. Luckily for me, she wrote 26 novels. I felt bereft when I reached the final one (Jackson’s Dilemma, written as she began her decline into dementia), so I read them all again. A year or so later, missing her company, I went back for a third reading. 

Then there is Anthony Trollope, who wrote 47 novels on his daily train commute to his job with the British postal service. I don’t think I’ve read them all yet, but I’m almost there. Trollope’s characters, unlike those of his contemporary, Dickens, are never wholly saints or sinners, but complicated mixtures of both. I don’t know whether Trollope was a good man, but I don’t see how anyone so fully in sympathy with humans in all their imperfections could be anything but kind. 

I am not a fiction writer, yet certain novelists teach me to write. At the moment, I’m reading my way through Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series (25 novels), in the order in which they were written. I care very little about who murdered whom, or how the endearing Wexford solved the crime. But I am agog at Rendell’s rendering of physical detail. She tells us how every character, no matter how minor, looks, speaks, and is dressed; how houses are furnished, from wallpaper to floor coverings; how gardens bloom or wither in various seasons. And she’s wonderful on weather, especially rain, as one would guess, given her nationality. How did she manage, as she built her complicated edifice of scenes and clues, to have the mental space and imagination to write all those descriptions? 

And then there are the writers who make me laugh, to whom I devoutly give thanks every time I open one of their books. I read them mostly for therapy, since I’m not sure that it’s possible to learn to write humor (it’s either in your DNA, or it isn’t). At difficult points in my life you can calculate my distress levels by the number of P.G. Wodehouse novels and short-story collections on my bedside table. 

Aided and abetted in my vice by my Kindle, which can waft almost any book in the world to me in the middle of the night in the middle of a blizzard, I read my life away. My electronic library contains 496 volumes, safely stored where they never need dusting. 

At night, lying in bed Kindle in hand, I tell myself that I should turn off the light and go to sleep. True, reading is good for writers, but it can also replace writing, and that is a danger for me. And I think about Cervantes’ warning, in Don Quixote, against other dangers of excessive reading. Enamored of novels of chivalry, Don Quixote sold his land to buy books, and spent day and night reading volume after volume. Eventually, Cervantes tells us, “as a result of too much reading and not enough sleep, his brain dried up, and he went mad.” 

I’m not there yet, but some days my brain does feel a little “dry,” and I worry that I might end up like my compatriot Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

My Kindle And Other Miracles

Thanks to all of you who sent good wishes both here and by e-mail.  It worked:   my survival now appears inevitable.

Two days ago I left the house on non-medical business (lunch with a friend) for the first time in a month, and was amazed to see that, while I was suffering my attack of shingles, fall had arrived in Vermont--the time of year when the drive to the post office is so beautiful it hurts.

Between the pain and the pain meds, my memories of the last few weeks are hazy, but I do know I could not have survived without my Kindle.  In the days before the diagnosis, when the pain at night would keep me pacing, trying to hold out for another hour before waking up my spouse to take me to the ER, I slogged through a big chunk of the Journals of Thomas Merton.   I was unable to follow a plot or a line of argument, but Merton's oscillations from self-doubt to elation fit the rhythms of my mind as it was brought to focus, over and over, on the physical pain.

After Merton, when my brain started to clear a bit, there was a Trollope novel.  I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of Trollope novels--I'm almost through his entire oeuvre.  Perhaps I should start saving them for emergencies.  Finally I read a hugely entertaining biography of the six Mitford sisters (Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford, is one of my favorite novels).  Compared to what their mother had to endure, having shingles seemed a piece of cake.

Thanks to my beloved Kindle I could, in the middle of the night, my breath sour and my hair unwashed, press a few keys and have a book come winging to me out of the ether, as precious and consoling as a percocet.

But the shingles wasn't all bad, and in fact it worked a small miracle:  I lost ten pounds in two weeks, literally without lifting a finger (I didn't have the strength to lift a finger).  As someone who can go whole decades without losing her appetite, when it went away and stayed away I was filled with curiosity.  Why wasn't I hungry?  Why was I, a lifetime member of the clean-plate club, now pushing away most of my dinner untouched?  Why did nothing--not a ripe tomato still warm from the sun, or an apple from my tree, or a slice of home-made bread--hold the slightest appeal?

Then a couple of days ago, as I was sprinkling blueberries on a small dish of yoghurt---drearily thinking protein, antioxidants, acidophilus--I suddenly noticed a wet sensation in my mouth.  I was salivating!

Since that moment I've been thinking about food a lot, and wondering how I might recapture that elegant standoffishness towards meals that I enjoyed so briefly.  How can I hang on to that viral windfall, those vanished pounds?  I have no idea, but I suspect it will require lifting a finger or two every once in a while.

When You've Read All The Books

"The flesh is sad, alas, and I've read all the books," (La chair est triste, helas, et j'ai lu tous les livres) yawned the French poet Stephane Mallarme a hundred years ago.  He was a young man then, and his wife had just had their first child, but he got bored easily.

It's taken me longer to get to that point--to the book part, that is--but lately I've been feeling depressed about reading.  It's not that I've read all the books, of course--neither had Mallarme.  But I've read an awful lot of them, probably too many, and now I'm like a foodie who's tired of fancy food. 

I feel as if I've read all the dead authors, and the living writers I do like don't write fast enough to feed my habit.  Kate Atkinson, A.S. Byatt, Nick Hornby, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Margaret Drabble, get on with it!  You're not getting any younger, and I'm almost to the end of everything that Trollope ever wrote.  Please write faster!

Meanwhile, the great annual book sale for the benefit of the village library is coming up next weekend.  It's held at the local school's gym, which is crammed full of cafeteria tables loaded with thousands of books, from novels to manuals on auto repair. 

The minute you walk in the door, you see everybody you know, carrying cardboard boxes and tote bags and pulling shopping carts.  When the books they've chosen get too heavy to carry, they stack them up along the walls.  Occasionally you stumble on the semi-recumbent body of someone who couldn't wait until he got home to start reading.

People circulate among the tables with their eyes glazed, bumping into each other and muttering excuses.  And from the full cardboard boxes and overflowing carts you can get the feel of a Vermont winter, of long dark evenings by the wood stove with a stack of books at hand.  Gathering reading provisions at the July book sale is one of those preparing-for-winter rituals, akin to chopping and stacking wood, that prudent Vermonters engage in even in the heat of summer, because in these parts winter is always lurking in the back of people's minds.

Every year since I moved to Vermont I have attended the library sale, and staggered home with a New Yorker tote bag full of old books.  But I'm thinking about skipping the sale this year.  I'm afraid of finding that I've read everything out there, and even more afraid of buying books only to discover later that I've already read them.

Still, I'll probably go just for the pleasure of seeing my friends and neighbors preparing for winter, and because there's always the chance that I might find an author I've never heard of before and without whom I cannot live.  Maybe I haven't read all the books.

Every Step Counts

The pared-down new look of My Green Vermont comes from artist/graphic designer/herbalist/gardener/wise woman and friend, Dona Mara.  Check out her website:  http://www.artistseyestudio.com/donapage.html  When the makeover is complete and I have figured out the logistics, I will celebrate by giving away an original drawing for one of  the blog illustrations.  Stay tuned.

Now, for today's post:

I believe in the power of walking.  All I have to do is look at the women in my family, starting with my father's tiny mother who, dressed in black and in high heels, toddled all over the streets of Barcelona until she died in her nineties. Today my four aunts, now into their late 80s and 90s, are still striding down those same streets, on their daily rounds to the baker, the supermarket, and the concert hall.  My disabled 95-year-old mother, who nevertheless endures with perfect vitals, in her  mobile years clocked hundreds of miles inside her air-conditioned house in the sweltering American South.

Alas, where I live, the nearest market, cafe, bookstore and movie theater are all miles away.  It is theoretically possible for me to get along with no walking at all, so I have to make a point of integrating this most basic of human activities into my day.  

Ever since the Japanese propounded "ten thousand steps a day" as the key to immortality, I have loved pedometers.  Unfortunately, pedometers are designed to clip onto a belt, and right away if you are a woman there is a problem, because you don't always wear a belt. You can clip the pedometer to the waistband of your pants but, depending on the fit, it will count either too many or, more often, way too few steps.

When you wear a dress, you can clip the pedometer to a regular leather belt, worn under the dress and next to the skin, and grit your teeth at the discomfort.  Even worse, if you bend in certain ways the pedometer can slip off and fall to the floor, and never live to count another step.

Last week I decided to give my pedometer another chance.  But first I went online and bought a pedometer belt.  It is an elastic, adjustable belt with a flat snap buckle, and much more comfortable than the leather version.

Nevertheless, it is still accident-prone.  As I was sitting down to dinner at someone's house the other night the pedometer popped off the belt and landed on my lap.  There was nowhere to hide it, so I spread the napkin over my thighs, discreetly hiked up my tunic, and clipped it back on. I have since invented a simple thread loop which keeps the pedometer attached to the belt.

Now, I count every step.  I racked up 2,000 during a single phone conversation.  My yoga class, disappointingly, yielded only 100 steps--the pedometer was not impressed by all those down dogs and sleeping pigeons. I wear my pedometer every minute of the day, walking up and down as I brush my teeth before going to bed, when I check the count one last time.  In the morning, I snap the belt around my waist before even putting my feet on the floor.

It's been raining all day, and so far I'm just over 2,000 steps.  A picture flashes in my mind of monks reading their breviary while walking around the cloister.  I have a Trollope novel on my Kindle.  Maybe I can get used to reading it while walking around the house.

Reading, Writing

My mother's sister says that she taught me to read when I was three years old.   "That can't be right!" I interrupt--she is, after all, 92--but she persists, "Don't you remember reading La Vanguardia with me?"  And the memory comes back of sitting on the terrace of my grandparents' farmhouse.  It is summer, and a storm is coming in.  You can smell the rain on the dusty road to the next village long before you can see it.  There is a clap of thunder and my aunt looks up at the black sky, "The angels are banging their furniture around," she says.  Then her finger lands on the next line of newsprint, "Tell me what this says."

Lest I appear precocious, I should mention that Spanish spelling is highly phonetic, so a three-year-old reading the newspaper is not as extraordinary as it might seem.  But it wasn't exactly ordinary, either.  My early reading was the combined result of my aunt's eagerness to show me off to her rival, my mother--"See what I can do with your child!"--and my urge to comply and be praised.

My aunt's enthusiasm earned me years of boredom in school.  On the first day of class, when we were handed our new textbooks, I would go home and rush right through the readings book, followed by the history and then the religion books.  After this the remainder of the school year was a trek in a desert of tedium, relieved only by bursts of terror in math class.

This gorging on school books came to a halt when I landed in an American high school with only the sketchiest knowledge of English.  But I compensated by whizzing through the French texts--so much easier than the ones in my other classes--and as a result I was bored to tears all the way through my college French major.  It wasn't until grad school prelims, when there wasn't even a reading list because we were supposed to have read every "serious" book ever written in the French language, that I felt I had more reading than I could handle.

But how did I celebrate my dissertation defense?  I went to the library and checked out all the authors who hadn't been deemed worthwhile by my professors--Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras...(Yes, all of them women.) 

And what am I doing today, a couple of centuries later, when I'm not dealing with the dogs or the garden or the hens?  I'm reading.  A lot of women writers, and a lot of British writers whom I didn't get to read while I was teaching Romance Languages:  Anthony Trollope, P.G. Wodehouse, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Kate Atkinson.

I read too much.  I read instead of writing.  "Read everything you can get your hands on," writers are told, but that is dangerous advice, for who wouldn't rather read than write?  Who wouldn't rather eat than cook?  True, you do learn from reading (some) writers.  But really, you learn to write by doing it day after day, sentence by sentence, world without end, amen.  And by deleting, deleting, deleting.  "Renunciation is the writer's honor," Colette writes.  See?  I did learn something from reading.

But mostly I read because, other than eating, it's the earliest thing I can remember doing.  A friend used to say of a man we both knew that he was such an obsessive reader that while you were talking with him he would try to read the brand on the sole of your shoe.  I am probably afflicted to a lesser degree, but, like an alcoholic, I never rest easy unless I have a  stash of books safe in my cellar.  God forbid I should set out from home without something to read in my bag--who knows where I might get stuck?  And especially when a storm threatens, and we're expecting one tonight, I like a thick book by my side.

Trollope And Snow

When I find a writer I like I always hope it's somebody with a large opus, so I can dive in and swim around in the stuff and not come up for air for a long, long time. With Trollope, I've hit the jackpot.

I first read his Palliser novels ten years ago, followed by the Barsetshire series. Then at the book sale at our local library last month I found Phineas Finn (one of the Palliser series) in paperback for a dollar. I stuck it in a pile of books during Christmas, and pulled it out after our guests were gone, just as it began to snow. I found that I loved that novel even better than the first time I read it. It was a brick-sized tome, but the snow lasted three days, and Trollope saw me through it.

Then we had a clear day or two, and another snow was forecast. I had a bunch of books to read, but no more Trollope. I rushed to the local bookstore, and they had a single book by Trollope on their shelves. (What are people reading these days, anyway?)

Luckily, it was one I hadn't read, The Way We Live Now, and even thicker than Phineas Finn. I clasped it to my breast and rushed home as the first flakes began to fall. The storm went on for days, but the book outlasted it. I'm only half way through it.

There is no end to the man's inventiveness. There are love intrigues, money intrigues, political intrigues. The last two are not my favorite reading topics, but I'll take anything from Trollope, who makes me empathize with his financiers and understand his politicians by shining the clear light of his intelligence over each one. His women are nuanced--unlike Dickens's icons--fully formed and human. There are salt-of-the-earth heroes whom I find irresistible.

But my favorites are his dithering young lords, forever in need of money, forever in search of an heiress--any heiress-- who will provide it. They have the oddest notions of honor--it's o.k. to owe money to tradesmen, but disgraceful to expect a fellow club member to pay a gambling debt. They are so clueless and so bumbling, that I'm sure that P.G. Wodehouse was thinking of them when he created Bertie Wooster and his cohorts at the Drones Club.

Trollope is smart and he is kind, and that's about the best thing I can say about anybody.


If there is a heaven, do writers go there? And in that heaven, are there peepholes through which they can watch us reading their books? I hope so. And I hope that Trollope knows how glad I am that he wrote every day of his life (nulla dies sine linea was his advice to writers) and how grateful I am for his company this winter.