Category Archives: Books

I don’t really trust my opinions about books. I get all self-conscious about my responses and begin to question them, and then I don’t really know what I think anymore. Iliana wrote about getting the impulse to start nitpicking at a book when it’s gotten a lot of praise, and I can do that sometimes too. Or sometimes if one person doesn’t like a book, I’ll read that book ready to be critical too. And then I often am. And I can be very influenced by book reviewer’s opinions, at least those of book reviewers I know and like, or those whose reviews are very well written. But why should I trust a book reviewer? Intellectually, I know better than that. But I’m influenced anyway.

I guess part of the problem is that I don’t really know what criteria I’m working with when I judge a novel, at least a contemporary one. You could say I should just go with the criteria of personal pleasure — if I liked the experience of reading a book, it’s good. And I try to trust those feelings; I’ve become more and more convinced that they are important and should be trusted. But I know quite well that a pleasurable response is a complicated thing, not least because I know I can feel pleasure reading a book if I expect to, if I’m set up to, if I decide I’m going to. It’s not, at least for me, like I simply enjoy something or I don’t. Well, sometimes it’s like that, but often it’s more like, hmmm, I’m kind of enjoying this but I have no idea why, and I bet my friend who’s also reading the book isn’t liking it, and how can I be right when she’s generally right? Or, I’m not sure I have an opinion about this at all. Or, I’m not liking this because I’m all distracted and not being a good reader, and if I could simply concentrate I’d love it. Or, I’m liking this, but am I liking it because I read a good review about it? Would I like it if I’d read a bad one? Or, I like this character, but what about the plot? What about the larger ideas of the book? What fantastic things are going on in this book that I have no idea about?

I wrote some negative things about Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black yesterday, but I’ve been feeling all this ambivalence as I’ve been reading. Really, some things are great about it — she catches the depressing sordidness of modern suburbia so well — but I did feel bored in the middle section. But I was also distracted and not reading very well in that section. Now, was I not reading well because I was distracted, or was I distracted because the middle part wasn’t very good?

And who the hell cares about all these complicated judgments anyway?

Do I read novels because I have to write book reviews? Because I am responsible for coming up with an opinion for someone else? Because I have some sort of duty to be smart about it? No, not at all. I read because I love it.

But there’s an ego thing involved. Maybe part of the problem is having studied literature formally. Because of my training I’m supposed to be equipped to give intelligent, logical reasons for why something is good or bad, and to get it “right.” People write reviews and criticism as though they are “right.” But there really isn’t a “right” judgment about these things. One thing I need to do, definitely, is to stop thinking that because someone can say something forcefully and in print, that they are right about it. And I certainly am glad I studied literature, don’t get me wrong, but I’d like to remember better that having some kind of expertise in literature doesn’t mean having all the answers to what’s “good” writing and what’s not.

Inspired by Julie’s post on choosing books (from Bookworm), I’ve been thinking about how I choose my own. It can be an agonizing process sometimes. I usually don’t buy books until right before I’m ready to read them (with a few exceptions), so while I own a lot of books, I don’t own an out-of-control number, and I, or my husband, have read just about everything we own (with a few exceptions). I have a list of 18 books I own that I haven’t read, not including anthologies for school and that sort of thing. I like going to the bookstore and buying something I can begin reading as soon as I get home — that way I can follow the impulse of the moment and find just the right book for my mood. I’m not choosing from a shelf at home I feel I should read, but I’m choosing from a whole bookstore of possibilities.

The problem, though, is that I can’t always identify what “just the right book for my mood” is. I will wander the bookstore looking at possibilities for quite a long time and agonizing over what I want to read, what I feel I should read, trying to find the thing I should read that I also want to read, or the thing I want to read that I also should read, and then feeling like “should” doesn’t matter and I should just read for pleasure, and then thinking that life is short and I don’t want to read something not worth while, and then agonizing over what “worth while” means. Do I want to read an older or newer novel? One by a woman or a man? Something experimental? Something more traditional? Something popular? Something obscure?

I remember one college professor of mine saying that when students have asked him what they should read, he tells them to read what they want to, to follow their curiosity and pleasure. I agree, but it’s not that simple! Because there’s pleasure in reading that’s simple and there’s pleasure that’s complex. There’s pleasure that you have to work for, that might not be pleasure in the beginning, but that after a certain amount of effort becomes pleasure — perhaps a deeper kind than the more easily-attained feeling. Reading poetry is like that for me.

And I want it all. I want to read the books that bring fairly simple pleasures, like, maybe, a David Lodge or a Richard Russo novel (not that these authors aren’t complex, but I don’t find reading them difficult), and I want more challenging reads, like, say, Virginia Woolf, and I want to read poetry, both older poetry and contemporary stuff, and I want to read nonfiction — books on literary history and on religious history and theology and on science — and I want to read older novels and newer ones. A while back, I heard an interview with Zadie Smith on the radio, and she said she usually reads older, “classic” books because there’s so little time and they are so great, and I agreed, at the moment. And then I read about all the tempting new novels out there, and I change my mind completely.

And so at the bookstore, I’m often in agony with all these possibilities and feelings. That’s partly why I’m tempted by the kind of reading plan Julie describes — she wrote about reading through the novels in the Penguin Classics list. That sounds great. I am very, very drawn to large, complicated plans, of all types. But I think that actually following through on such a plan would leave me a bit bored after a while. Because as much as I can agonize over my reading choices, I really do like the feeling of entering the bookstore without any idea of what book I’ll leave with.

So with those two feelings — wanting to be spontaneous and feeling deeply anxious about spontaneity — I’m afraid I’m stuck.

But I think I can deal with it.

Here’s more from Alberto Manguel, from a chapter on how we categorize and classify our books:

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon.

Here’s the best part of the passage:

Categories are exclusive; reading is not — or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader — the curious reader, the alert reader — to rescue the book from the category to which it had been condemned.

It’s another way that reading is subversive — whether we like it or not. Any book transcends the category we want to confine it in, and as readers we are able to recognize the ways the categories are misleading and limiting. Of course, we need classification systems for our books, or we’d never find them, but I like Manguel’s reminder that our categories don’t have any existence in and of themselves. They are imaginary and they are arbitrary. And it’s great to think that by reading imaginatively we’re fighting tyranny. Even if we are talking about the tyranny of libraries, generally excellent institutions. Actually, he’s not really talking about the tyranny of libraries, but about the habit of believing that the books really and truly belong to the categories we place them in and nowhere else.

So, please, don’t let your books lead narrow lives, isolated lives. Read them with curiosity and imagination, and rescue them!

I promise I’ll stop posting on Manguel one of these days. You may be getting sick of him by now. But he’s SO GREAT!

Last weekend was terrible for riding. It rained both Saturday and Sunday, pretty much non-stop. Lots of people at work are reporting flooded basements. I’m not even looking at mine.

But reading was good. Here’s what’s going on in my reading world:

• I began Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and have read about 120 pages so far. So far, it’s great. It’s a good story, absorbing, with an engaging main character, and the sentences are beautiful. I’ll write more later, but basically it’s about a 20-year-old man living with a wealthy London family; the father in the family is a recently-successful Tory MP. It takes place in the 80s under Thatcher. The main character, Nick, comes from a much less wealthy background and is gay, and so is an outsider in several senses. He is figuring out his place in the family and in the world at large.
• I’m continuing with Manguel’s History of Reading, which, if you have looked at this blog before you will know, I like quite a lot. More quotations to follow.
• I’m almost finished with Mary Oliver’s book of poems American Primitive, which I highly recommend. Very beautiful, striking poems about nature and people in nature. I’ve posted a few poems here.
• I’m slowly reading The Tale of Genji, a series of loosely-linked stories about court life in 11th century Japan and could be considered the first novel (if you’re into things like naming first novels). This world is very remote from ours, in time and in customs. The stories so far have been about Genji’s pursuit of women and the political consequences of those pursuits. I’ve only read about 1/10 of the book and I’m sensing now that the plot is shifting from Genji’s pursuit of women to his taking on a more powerful political role and having to give up some of his youthful pleasures. We’ll see.
• Finally, I’m slowly reading through Virginia Woolf’s diary, Vol. 1. This is a good book to look into for a bit before falling asleep — not to say that it’s boring, but it’s best read slowly, and I like keeping something on the nightstand to read for 10 minutes or so before bed. It’s largely about her reading and writing, her friends, her entertaining, her work with Leonard on their printing press. It’s a valuable read, I think, for the occasional revealing detail or eloquent description.

In spite of my earlier post about longing to do more rereading, I bought more books over the weekend. I suppose new books will most often win out over the old ones. Pretty, new books are just too hard to resist.

I picked up a copy of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, which I heard about through Jane Smiley’s book about reading novels. Those of you who like book lists might like hers — she has a list of 100 novels she read in the course of three years and this book describes that project. You’ll find the list here.

I also got a new book of poems, Jane Hirschfield’s book Given Sugar, Given Salt for when I’m finished with Oliver. I read Hirschfield’s book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates, a couple years back and loved it. This book is a great way to learn how to read poems or to enhance your reading of poetry; her insights are exquisite. I don’t mean to imply that her book is about “how to read a poem,” but in the course of discussing particular poems she models careful, sensitive, deep reading.

Finally, I picked up Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black. I’m looking forward to this one.

So, although I have many, many great Manguel quotes to leave you with, I’ll limit myself to one:

However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is complete is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven’t yet grasped. That is why — as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again — no reading can ever be definitive.

I’ve said and I’ve heard other bloggers say that those who claim they don’t have time for reading aren’t making any sense whatsoever. If you want to read, you will find time. Saying you don’t have time is a way of finding an excuse for not doing what you don’t really want to do anyway. I fit reading into every unfilled corner of my life, and I don’t feel like this takes any special effort. It’s just natural. People might be amused to watch my husband and I eat meals – except for lunch at work we eat most meals together and sometimes even at work we do – and it consists mainly of us shoveling food into our mouths while we devour our reading with equal pleasure. We eat fast so that we can get upstairs to a more comfortable place to read. We have “family dinners” all right, but we don’t talk to each other: we read. We have a stack of magazines on our table, so an article is always handy, and I know well the difficulty of holding on to a book while eating something like tacos or a messy sandwich that requires two hands. Magazines are a good solution to that problem.

I do want to recognize, however, that there ARE people who really, truly don’t have time to read. I’m thinking of, say, someone who works two jobs or a single parent trying to hold down a job, or two jobs. Having time for reading is, to a certain extent, a middle-class privilege. I say that reading is natural, as natural as breathing, and it is, but … it’s not. If you know something about 18th-century culture, you know that reading is connected, in however complicated a fashion, with the growth of the middle class and of leisure time. Yes, probably anyone anywhere can fit in a little bit of reading every day, but I can see having to work so hard, and worrying so much about money and food that reading becomes less important and a person loses the energy for it. Ehrenreich’s book on low-wage workers reminds me of this.

But I think when I and other people criticize others for not having time to read, we aren’t talking about the poor, we are talking about middle-class people who choose to keep themselves busy with other things. I just don’t like the idea of not recognizing that some people’s lives are so difficult that it really would be a struggle to find time to read. And that some people have never learned to love to read because they didn’t have parents who read, or because their education sucked. And I don’t like the idea of looking down on people who make different choices than I do, although I know I’m guilty of doing this. Okay, I DO like looking down on people who make different choices than I do, but I realize I shouldn’t.

I added the Alberto Manguel quotation above as my “blog description” because it captures so beautifully how I feel about reading: it’s almost as natural as breathing. It’s something I do without even thinking about it. And, I should probably clarify, Manguel isn’t talking solely about reading books; he’s talking about reading the stars, the landscape, animal tracks, tarot cards, another person’s face. In this broader sense, we all do read, all the time.

It’s a gloomy, rainy Saturday, which makes it a perfect day to stay inside and read, which is exactly what I’m doing. Since I took a long bike ride yesterday, I am content to be sedentary today.

I’ve been thinking about reading and rereading recently, after I discussed an excerpt from Sven Birkerts’s Gutenberg Elegies with my students. This excerpt discussed intensive and extensive reading, or reading the same things over and over (a common practice when books weren’t plentiful) versus reading things only once and moving quickly from one thing to the next. Birkerts makes an argument for the value of intensive reading, for knowing texts deeply and intimately and for devoting time to contemplating their meanings. This is one way to develop wisdom, a quality he thinks we’re in danger of losing.

I’m not impressed by this argument about wisdom, and I don’t generally buy claims that bemoan the ways things are deteriorating in these horrible modern times, but I do like the idea of intensive reading. As someone who’s spent quite a few years studying literature, I like rereading texts, contemplating them, reading other people’s ideas about them, writing about them, maybe even gaining a little wisdom from them. But, of course, there are so many things to read, and I want to read as many of them as I can. I generally read extensively — moving from one new book to the next — but sometimes I get a longing to reread something, anything. I want the feeling of coming back to a familiar story. And I’ve heard multiple people saying something along the lines of “You haven’t really read a book until you read it the second time,” which I believe, in a way. The first time through, you are orienting yourself, learning the basics of the text, and the second time through you can pay attention to the finer points and understand more about what the author is doing. But I can’t read everything multiple times, even things I love.

So I’m torn, wanting both to get to all those books that sound so great, and wanting to linger over the ones I like, reading and rereading them. Usually newness wins out.

How many of you reread things? Do you often reread?