Category Archives: Reading

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?

Here’s my dilemma: what book do I take on my backpacking trip? Husband, dog, and I are going on a hike on the Appalachian Trail Wednesday through Friday of next week. Of course, I have to take a book with me; the thought of spending three days in the woods without a book is terrifying. Actually, being anywhere without a book is terrifying.

But the problem with backpacking is that I want to carry as little weight as possible, and books can be heavy. Husband and I have worked very hard to get our pack weights down; these days I’m setting out with between 30 and 35 pounds and returning with a pack probably well below 30 (after I’ve eaten all my food). We’ve gotten the light-weight tent and the light-weight packs, we’ve ditched the stove and now we only eat cold food, we’ve gotten light-weight shoes, we’ve done everything but cut off the ends of our toothbrushes (and we’re considering that). So the weight of the book I bring is significant. What’s the point of buying a light sleeping pad if I bring a heavy book? The book can’t be heavy, and it can’t be super short either: what if I finish my book early? Then I’m stuck with nothing to read, or with having to read the book again. You can see, I think, that the decision matters.

Certainly a hardcover or a library book is out of the question, not only because of weight but because the book might get soaked through with rain, eaten by wild animals, dropped in a stream, hurled over a cliff, or otherwise lost and ruined. I’ve thought that the best option is one of those mass market paperbacks because of their high word to weight ratio. Who needs the big margins of a trade paperback? That’s wasted weight! The more words, and the smaller the words, the better. I want to be able to spend a lot of time on each page, to make that book last as long as possible.

But maybe I should look at the weight issue from another perspective entirely: what about the weight of the words themselves? By that I mean, their intellectual “heft.” Maybe I don’t need a larger number of words; maybe what I need is greater complexity and depth in those words. In that case, a slim book of poetry might do the trick. Yes, those books have huge margins, and very few words per page, and not many pages, but, on the other hand, poetry rewards lingering a long time over those words, and I read through a book of poetry slowly. Poetry invites you to read and re-read, so it wouldn’t be as big of a deal if I finished it before the trip ended.

But, to be honest with myself, it’s not just that I can’t venture into the woods for a few days without a book, I can’t do it without a narrative, a narrative preferably in prose. Poetry is great and all for home, but it wouldn’t be satisfying as the only book I have while traveling. I’ll have to opt for the mass market I think.

All this doesn’t even broach the problem, however, of what I want to read about. Do I want something about nature, the outdoors, travel, or walking? An adventure story? Or do I want something completely different, something that takes place in drawing rooms? Usually I opt for something not related at all to hiking, often an 18th or 19th century novel, sometimes something contemporary. I’ve taken this and this before. After spending all day outside, I’m often ready to crawl into the tent and focus on a world very different from the one I’m in.

Although I love backpacking, it is anxiety inducing to think of heading into the woods without access to a bookstore or to my bookshelves. So, thank God I have a week (almost) to decide what to bring.

I had a much calmer day than yesterday, all back to normal, mostly: a little work, a bike ride in the 70 degree weather, and an evening of reading. I’m trying not to obsess about whether I got the job, so it won’t spoil my weekend.

I began reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed today since I’m teaching it in class next week. I’m re-reading the book, actually. I haven’t taught it before, so we’ll see how it goes.

What this means is that I’m in the middle of five books right now: Woolf’s Diary, The Tale of Genji, Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, Mishra’s An End to Suffering, and Ehrenreich’s book. I haven’t been in the middle of five books since I was last taking classes, quite a few years ago, but I decided to try an experiment and read a bunch of things at once, to see how I like it. For most of my life, except for school, I’ve been a one-book-at-a-time person, but I’ve been reading other book bloggers who read a bunch of things at once and like it, and I’m inspired. It’s not that I feel any lack reading only one book at a time: I like being absorbed in one story, like the focus, have a better time remembering the plot and characters, and don’t have any troublesome choices to make about what to read every time I want to.

However, this works best for reading highly absorbing, or even mildly absorbing books. It does keep me, I think, from tackling more difficult things. Would I pick up the Tale of Genji if I expected to read that and only that until finished? I would be less likely to, certainly. With one book at a time, I don’t read much poetry, since I don’t have the discipline to focus on much of it at once. And reading rapidly through a series of poems doesn’t seem like a good idea. I don’t read many collections of short stories. I’ve begun to read through Montaigne essays a couple of times, but I give up because I get tired and want a break. The same goes for Virginia Woolf’s diary.

I can’t see myself reading two novels at once, unless we’re talking about something like Don Quixote, which I might want to vary with something shorter and faster. But I can see myself keeping one novel at a time going, and then a selection of other types of books. The test will be to see if I keep at those other, non-novel books, or whether they suffer from neglect.

We’ll see how it goes — I’ll make sure to report back on this experiment.