October 29, 2015 - 08:44
[Over the summer I read Megan Sweeney's book to prepare for our 360. The afternoon I finished the book I wrote the following and sent it to one of my best friends from college who's a voracious bibliophile and librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She and I have been exchanging letters and emails about books for over a decade. I thought y'all might like to read my reflection.]
Reading Megan Sweeney's book prompted reflection on my own reading habits and the judgments I make about the habits of others. Sweeney forgoes most evaluation about what kind of reading we should encourage and what kind discourage; she writes haunted by past practices of “bibliotherapy” that sought to inculcate morality in prisoners by assigning certain books. This still happens in many prison systems, as you may well know, although in less direct ways (i.e. defunding the prison library such that the only books are those donated by Christian groups). But Sweeney did lead me to recognize the emancipatory potential of books, how even urban fiction and Christian self-help can empower readers (not that I’m ready to actually read either genre). Moreover, regardless of the particular books (or almost regardless, I suppose), communities can form around books and the books can serve ends beyond their ostensible content – the physical pleasure of handling books in an environment that severely restricts touch or just creating an excuse for relatively free and equal conversation.
As I said, Sweeney’s book has also led me to reflect on how I’ve become the reader I am. There are so many ways in which I read now that have their origins in my past. I recall the titles my parents read to my brother and me and how seriously they took their undertaking. (My parents read to us nightly until I was 15.) We didn’t read many children’s books (and thank God that “young adult” did not yet exist as a genre) but rather more venerable works: the journals of Lewis and Clark; histories of the Pacific Northwest, the West, China, and Far East; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion; the Narnia books; biographies of political figures. While I don’t recall conversations about these books, the ritual established one pattern in my own reading life: I always read before bed and when doing so I seek to read something not just diverting but worthwhile.
Another habit: bringing a book. How often did my brother and I read while we waited at a restaurant or as my parents did something or while resting between activities? I became early accustomed to reading everywhere, pulling out my book in public and being seen with books regardless of my activity. My aunt’s mother had a newspaper clipping from the Seattle Times pinned to her wall for all of the years I knew her. With caption “Summer Reading,” the photo showed my mother with my brother and me on either side of her, reading beneath a tree outside the Queen Anne Public Library. I would often repeat this habit as I grew up, reading The Once and Future King beside the Queen Anne Playfield or Ravelstein at Bicracke Park overlooking the Seattle skyline or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening on Madison Beach on Lake Washington. I always brought a book and only occasionally forgot it, like when I left a book by the psychologist of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal at the Seattle Center Fountain. (It was a library book and to my good fortune someone returned it.)
Books were also a source of community. My father and his brothers always exchange books, usually brought from one house to another in paper grocery bags, the books in a single somewhat precarious stack. They trade the usual mysteries and thrillers but also literary fiction, history, and sci-fi. Books about east Asia are especially popular. My parents always recall with great fondness their reading of Somerset Maugham while traveling together in Asia before my brother and I were born. They would aloud read to one another as they traveled. I remember reading Maugham while at the Queen Anne Pool with Boys and Girls Club – observing, partly, but not swimming – and being rather unimpressed. My mom was also in at least one book club, which met monthly on Sunday nights. I recall this mostly because it was our prime source of new books for many years (that is, until I became our chief buyer) and also because I would later mock the tendency toward Oprah selections.
School also encouraged independent reading in various ways. I actually rarely remember being “forced” to read a book and feeling it as onerous. There were books like Kaffir Boy and Nectar in a Sieve that I did not especially cherish but I still found worthwhile at moments. Much earlier than that, however, I recall being introduced to the library at Coe Elementary School and being challenged to read every book in it. I don’t know if I accomplished this, but when I graduated from fifth grade six years later I felt as if I had – all of the books had become familiar, and I still remember the specific locations of the biographies, fantasy, Newberry and other award winners, and history. I also ordered less substantive books from the Scholastic Book Club, the catalogs for which would be distributed to us once a month in school. I read biographies of pop stars like Michael Jackson as well as sports books and American history.
If one pattern from these various practices of reading emerged it resembled something like Sweeney’s approach: I had no criteria for distinguishing a worthwhile book from a simply entertaining (or perhaps even degrading) one. I read what presented itself to me, be it in school or from the library. I did not have a sense of self-improvement or education. I never successfully kept a list of summer reading books or had other significant adults give me books to read – at least not until high school. (I also don’t recall my parents giving me books to read. They bought me books like the Scholastic ones I picked out but I don’t recall receiving books I hadn’t selected myself.) From my middle school reading I remember very little: a Mickey Mantle biography I read while at Dabob Bay on the Olympic Peninsula; a biography of George Gershwin; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Thorton Wilder’s Our Town. I had a Dean Koontz phase one summer that later became a Tom Clancy phase the next. With both I reveled in salacious details of sex and violence. There was a vague feeling of accomplishment when you finished one of those thick paperbacks.
Sweeney’s book also helped me to see the crucial turn of my reading habits in a different light. I recall the first book I ever bought with my own money and in a bookshop without my parents present or even near: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I was 15 or 16. The details of this “dystopia” thrilled and frightened me, leading me to read others in the genre: Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and even – although I’m not sure I finished it until graduate school – More’s Utopia. Prisons still ban books and the thought of this helped me to see how these books had a subversive edge, how they envisioned alternative worlds in which people struggled for freedom. They spoke to my adolescent drive to individuate myself. Reading became an art of resistance and not just something assigned or encouraged by my well-meaning adults.
I also had the good fortune of encountering at this moment, when I was 15 or 16, English teachers who affirmed my interests and taught me how books could become equipment for living. We had freewheeling and philosophical discussions about our readings, not just analyzing but opening up the books we read together. Remembering the discussion circles and conversations about Sophocles and Dostoyevsky and Joseph Heller still excites me. One teacher had me read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Another encouraged my attending a writing camp. I won an award for best English student in my high school.
This series of events – Clockwork Orange to Catch-22, solitary reading to dynamic conversation– introduced a new reading practice, one that I sought and later created in college: the community of readers reading for life. I began to read during those years as if my life depended on it, trying to find and finish every important book I could, from the Bible to Tolstoy to Gibbon to Confucius. With a little trial and error I found professors who taught not just material but arts of reading, how to delve into a book and bring up some insights, to surface with pearls worth saving. I found historians too unthoughtful about how their reading might matter for the present and social scientists too devoted to procuring useful insights for the contemporary world. English, philosophy, and political theory, however, gave time and consideration to their reading. So that became my course of study.
In graduate school I developed yet two more practices of reading, both of which I’ve come to consider unhealthy yet necessary: the skim, which I rarely employ but seems self-explanatory; and the intense read for argument, which involves high concentration of exhausting attention (such that I can only do it effectively for about an hour) and active marking with a pen or pencil to highlight the argument for later reconstruction. These practices treat reading like one might treat the liquid meals drunk from a plastic packet in some not-so-distant future: food as fuel; reading as information. There’s no savoring in these scenarios, no pausing for rumination. I’ve noted that such reading practices work well for my twenty to thirty minute train ride. During the commute, anything evocative would just prompt me toward other distractions: my fellow passengers, the passing scenery, the impending appointments. When I read this way, it’s with blinders on. I watch my time and keep my eyes on the finish line.
This latter form of reading has unfortunately begun to inure me to many varieties of bad book. Because I read academic titles in this manner, I look past their tasteless prose, redundancy, bad writing, incremental originality, and insignificance. I power through all this, ignoring that there’s nothing great about these books. But not exercising my own discriminating faculties holds dangerous consequences: sometimes I find these tendencies invading my other reading like kudzu in the flower garden; I have to stop myself from thinking of novels in fifty page increments, of books of poems read as equivalent to monographs in political theory.
One way I’ve lately developed to combat the hypertrophy of my critical academic reading is to read poetry without pen or pencil while listening to jazz and, if I’m feeling especially opulent, sipping scotch. The idea here is of slowness as well as layered sensations that make me pause or reread or breathe the peaty aroma of my drink while I listen to a beloved rift (like Coltrane’s entrance in “On Green Dolphin Street” on 1958 Miles). I began this practice at Deep Springs and recall with special fondness getting drunk with a visiting poet while reading John Ashbery as well as sipping rye with another colleague as we discussed Carl Phillips’ poem “Civilization.” And also with students (although minus the booze): Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris; Robert Duncan; Adrienne Rich again and again. Here the reading in community for life returned – these conversations transformed my reading into something more than self-pleasuring. They made of lonely reading a fruitful solitude. That I’ve not discovered similar communities in Philadelphia endangers the vitality of my reading life once more.
There’s more to add here about graduate school and my reading groups there – drinking and discussing literature, usually – as well as the particular reading pleasures of ancient Greek seminars, reading aloud in the original then translating and discussing. Sipping espresso at Caffe Strada on Bancroft Street in Berkeley while a friend and I took turns reading Ovid’s Amores first in Latin and then translating into English. Or my “wedding reading group” of Richard Sennett’s Together and how that brought together so many of my favorite fellow readers for the first time.
Thank you for indulging my reflections on this theme. Do any of these descriptions sound familiar? Sweeney’s book really provoked me to consider all of these different ways of reading that we develop in our lives – where these come from, how they serve or do not serve us, and so forth. And then thinking about reading reminded me of the innumerable pleasures that have come by reading, be they in solitude (like Conrad’s Victory last month) or in the communities that reading creates and sustains.