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.

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.

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.

B Is For Book

...preferably a long one.

Dona posted a Facebook link to an article by Alan Jacobs in The Chronicle of Higher Education (see below) about "long form" reading and the quality of deep attention that fewer and fewer people are able to bring to a text:

Some people—many people—most people—will not experience that internal necessity of being in books, in texts. But for [some]people...books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

If there is anything--legal, cheap, not harmful, and for which you don't need another person--better than being in a book, I'd like to hear about it.  I learned to read before first grade, but my earliest memory of being in a book, of being carried off by the current of another mind, dates from the summer when I was eight and reading Kipling's Jungle Book.  I sat enraptured in my grandparents' solarium, with the shades closed against the blazing midday sun, hoping that my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and the maids would sit down to eat lunch and not notice that I wasn't there. 

My childhood was a long series of interruptions from Heidi, Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin (all in Spanish translation, since I read them long before I learned English).  "Put down your book and take a walk/take a nap/write a letter/practice the violin/go to school..."  I would surface like a diver, blinking at the light.  After a minute or two getting oriented to the world of tables and chairs and well-intentioned adults, I would put down the book and do whatever was required, inwardly counting the minutes until I could take the next dive.

Things haven't changed much since then.  Falling into a book in the evening is still my preferred reward for a day well lived or simply endured.  And I like my books to be long ones, so that I can swim at leisure among the reefs and trenches of another mind.  The brief dips offered by magazines (including the updated New Yorker), not to mention the medium I'm using right now,  just aren't as satisfying.

Sometimes I wonder if my addiction to reading isn't equivalent to a TV addiction.  After all, not every book I read is a masterpiece,  and there are sometimes masterpieces on television.  Still, given the choice between a book and a TV program, I'll pick the book.  I suspect that a major reason may be that when I read I'm in control.  I decide when to speed up and when to slow down, when to stop and take a second look.  With a book, I'm the driver;  when I watch TV, I'm on a tour bus, and tours have never been my thing. 

Do you like your books short or long?  How do reading and watching TV compare for you?

Long Books

There is nothing I like better than a long book these days.  Don't you?  I am currently immersed in Robertson Davies's The Deptford Trilogy.  Davies is (was--alas, he died in 1995) witty, cultured, ironic, tender and smart, and, bless him, he wrote in trilogies (Salterton, Deptford ,Cornish, and Toronto), which ensures for me many hours in his company.  Elizabeth's loan of the Salterton got me through the third-snowiest-recorded winter in these parts.  Now Deptford  is getting me through those hours when I am too weary to pull another weed, but it's still light outside and I cannot go to bed.

When I find a book I like, I immediately look for more from that author.  Often, as I wander in a daze through the stacks of a local library (nothing puts me in a daze like wandering through library stacks--I can never think of a writer or a title to look for) I use as a criterion, in addition to New Yorker reviews, whether there is more than one book by that author on the shelf. My hermit-like existence prompts me to look for sustained company wherever I find it.

In my long-ago grad studies in French Lit, there were only a couple of women on the reading lists.  Since then, I have read lots and lots of women writers.  Unfortunately, in sheer output they do not compare to the men.  Why didn't Jane Austen write sixty novels, instead of six?  Because she was  busy making blancmange puddings for her father, which I hope he enjoyed.

As I await for the female equivalent of Dickens (whom I can't stand--such namby-pamby women characters), I revel in the likes of Trollope, Proust, P.G. Wodehouse, Robertson Davies.  And now that I'm grown up, I intend to give Balzac another try.

This need for a long-term immersion in another mind means that, try as I might, I cannot really get into contemporary media.  I hate magazines that make you hunt pages ahead for the ending to the (inevitably short) article you're reading.  I miss the almost-book-length essays in the old black-and-white New Yorker.  I detest "side bars," and advertisements that take up text space.  I'll leave you to imagine how I feel about web pages with pop-up adds, not to mention Facebook, even-less-to-mention Twitter (though I have accounts in both).

Fortunately, books--big, fat, full-of-print ones with no advertisements--remain.  I'm due for another trip to the library soon.  What do you recommend?

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.

Lending Books

Some people love to cook for their friends. I like to cook for my friends too, and did so just this morning, in fact. But what I really like to do, is to lend my friends books.

A friend is going to the seashore for two weeks, and asked for a couple of reading suggestions. Not fiction, she specified, and not animal-related. She's a serious animal lover/breeder/husbandrywoman (?) and wants a vacation from all things furry, woolly or cuddly.

Well, I thought, that doesn't leave me with much to work with. Ninety-five percent of what's on my shelves is either fiction, or animal-related. But I looked anyway, and came up with a stack for her to choose from.

There's Scott Elledge's biography of E.B. White (my friend likes E.B. White), and David Lodge's biography of Henry James. (James, to whom nothing much ever happened, must have been a challenging subject.) There's Updike's painfully honest memoir, “Self-Consciousness.” And a couple of How I Survived My Mother autobiographies by women: Jill Ker Conway's “The Road from Coorain,” recounting the path from the Australian outback to the presidency of Smith; and Ruth Reichl's “Not Becoming My Mother”--her mother served moldy food to guests; Ruth grew up to become the editor of Gourmet Magazine.

I pulled out Kathleen Norris's “The Cloister Walk,” about a Protestant woman's discovery of monastic life and spirituality somewhere in the Dakotas, and added it to the pile. And because my friend is a sailor, I picked Steve Callahan's “Adrift,” about being lost at sea (I hope it will make her want to be prudent). I suspect she already knows Anne Morrow Lindbergh's “Gift from the Sea,” but I put that in just in case.

I found crazy, fabulous Anne Lamott's “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith,” another of her accounts of her lurchings through life, writing, and spirituality. What I really wanted for my friend was Lamott's “Traveling Mercies,” the first and best of her spiritual odyssey memoirs. But I couldn't find it anywhere. It was gone.

This is the dark side of my passion for lending out books. Some of them—usually the best ones—don't come back. (Please note that the friend for whom I'm compiling the present stack has promptly returned everything I've ever lent her.) People forget that they borrowed books. I forget I lent them out. This is what happened to my favorite David Lodge book, “Therapy,” and to many others.

But what can I do? The pleasure of lending out books far outweighs the regret of not getting them back—if I'm ever aware of not getting them back. I love pushing books on people as they're walking out my door: “Here's Konrad Lorenz on dogs. And he actually has little drawings on the margins! Here's A.S. Byatt”s “Possession.” Can you believe she's Margaret Drabble's sister? And Barbara Pym? She was popular for a while, then nobody would read her. Then she was rediscovered and was a wild success, and died soon after. Her novels have the smell of damp English wool in them...”

My friend will have to do with Anne Lamott's “Plan B.” But if she comes back from her vacation saying she loves Lamott, or Reichl, or any of the others, I will feel just as good, just as pleased and satisfied as if she'd smacked her lips after a serving of my chocolate mousse.