Category Archives: Reading

A number of people have linked to Scott McLemee’s interesting article on bookshelves and what they say about us. McLemee writes:

For there are, it seems, people who feel stress about owning volumes they haven’t read. Evidently some of them believe a kind of statute of limitations is in effect. If you don’t expect to read something in, say, the next year, then, it is wrong to own it. And in many cases, their superegos have taken on the qualities of a really stern accountant — coming up with estimates of what percentage of the books on their shelves they have, or haven’t, gotten around to reading. Guilt and anxiety reinforce one another.

Ah, if only it were easy to be sensible and avoid this cycle of guilt and anxiety. I’m not proud of it, but I do feel stress about owning volumes I haven’t read. I would prefer not to feel this stress, I think it makes more sense not to feel it, it’s much more sophisticated and intelligent not to feel it. But what can I do? Those books sometimes feel like a burden, and I don’t even own a lot of unread books compared to some other bloggers out there.

But for most of my life I’ve bought books in order to read them right away; I would buy them with the intention of heading home that very evening to read them — or rather, I should say I would buy a book with the intention of heading home that evening to read it, singular. So my newly-developed habit of buying books, sometimes stacks of books, with the intention of reading them at some point in the near but unspecified future doesn’t yet feel right to me.

Of course I could go back to my old habits and slowly work my way through the books I’ve already accumulated until the stack is gone, but then I wouldn’t be able to buy those stacks of books. No more library sales for me, no snatching books from used bookstore shelves whenever they look appealing, no more impulse orders from Amazon, etc.

So, I’ll simply have to find a way to deal with my guilt, or to magically make it go away.  Any advice on how to deal with my stupid “stern accountant” superego that feels owning unread books is wasteful and wrong?

Dan Green has written an interesting response to my post from a couple days ago on the value of using an author’s biography to interpret his or her writing. Dan’s post has made me think a little more about my conclusions and has made me want to defend the use of biography in interpretation more than I originally did.

Perhaps I’ll contradict myself; that would be okay with me, as I felt uncertain about my conclusions in the first place … my first post was exploratory and not meant to be definitive.

So, Dan argues that:

using biographical information, about the author or about others on whom she may have drawn in creating characters, to “interpret” a work of fiction is the opposite of interpretation. Inevitably it reduces the work to “what really happened” or to a disguised form of memoir.

In my view, using biography to interpret fiction can be the opposite of interpretation, but it doesn’t inevitably reduce the work to a “disguised form of memoir.” It depends on how the critic uses the information.

What was irritating me as I read the Woolf biography was the notion that people might use biography in exactly the way Dan describes — as the key to a book, as a source of definitive answers, as a way of dismissing other forms of meaning.

But I also think it’s possible to use biographical information in criticism in ways that aren’t simplistic or reductionist. As I’m reading Frankenstein, for example, I’ve thought about how Victor Frankenstein might be modeled on Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley’s husband. The introductory essay to my edition considers this possibility, pointing out correspondences between the two, for example, the drive both of them share to change the world and the obsession they both have with science. What this identification of Frankenstein with Percy Shelley allows a reader to see is that the novel may be critiquing not only the kind of ambition Frankenstein exhibits, but the version of Romanticism and particularly the adoration of the Romantic hero valorized by Percy Shelley. The novel then becomes, in part, a way of rewriting Romanticism itself.

Can you see the larger point about Romanticism without knowing a thing about Percy Shelley? Probably, although you would need to know something about the literary context within which Mary Shelley was writing. The biographical information, however, adds a sharpness and focus to the argument that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

Ultimately, I think context is useful in interpreting literature — it can help you understand what is happening in the text itself — and biography is one form of that context. Biography shouldn’t be used to close down other possible interpretations, but it doesn’t necessarily do so, any more than other ways of reading do.

I feel completely incapable of making a decision about what novel to read next. I’ve thought about it ever since I finished Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart two days ago, but have come to no conclusions. It’s rare for me not to be in the middle of a novel, and usually I have one lined up to go the minute I finish the previous one. It’s the variety of possibilities that’s paralyzed me. Should I read a classic? If so, from what century? Something obvious like Balzac’s Cousin Bette or a little less so like James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner? Or should I read Virginia Woolf? Or something contemporary? If something contemporary, should it be challenging or comfortingly familiar? By a man or a woman? American or British? Something written in English or translated?

One thing is certain — it’s good that I’ve finished Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage, because as much as I liked the book, his chronic indecision is rubbing off on me, I’m afraid.

As several of you know, because I’ve left comments on your blogs saying as much, I’m feeling anti-planning and anti-resolutions right now. Which does not mean I’ll be making no plans — at the same time as I’m feeling anti-planning, I’m also rather envious of everyone else’s plans — rather, it means I’m going to try to make them as vague as possible and as realistic as possible. I just looked back at my New Year’s resolutions post from last year, and it began with a similar hesitancy about planning, but I went on to list all kinds of specific goals, most of which I did not meet. I’ll try another method this time around.

So how badly did I do meeting last year’s resolutions? I planned to read 13 classics and got to only 7 of the ones I’d listed, although I did read a number of classics not on the list. But now that I’m looking at it more closely, I see that the rest of my record isn’t so bad. I wanted to read more books of poetry than the previous year, which I did (4); to read more plays than the previous year, which I did (1); to read more short stories, which I did (3 collections); to read more books in translation, which I did (15); and to read one science book, which I did not.

I also did not complete Kate’s Reading Across Borders challenge, although I came close. I committed to reading 5 books in translation from outside Europe, and I read 4 (Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter). I did read 11 books in translation from Europe, so I think I did fairly well in the translation category, even if I didn’t meant my particular challenge.

I’m doing okay with the Outmoded Authors challenge and this one goes on until the end of February, which gives me plenty of time.  I committed to reading Walter Scott and a few other authors from the list, and so far I’ve read Scott, plus Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and now I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen, which means I need only one other author after Bowen, assuming “a few” means three or more.

So — what’s for next year? First of all, I would like to change some attitudes of mine. I don’t like the way I get down on myself if I don’t read what I set out to read. So any resolutions I make and challenges I sign up for are only suggestions to myself, not requirements. If I don’t meet them, it’s not a big deal. I would like to emulate Kate’s attitude about challenges:

I’ve never regretted signing up for one even when I didn’t finish it, so great is the pleasure of embarking on a reading journey in the company of congenial fellows, and so great the rewards of the encounters with new authors and books thereby provoked.

Next, I’m going to do my best not to worry about the total number of books I read. I do like keeping track of the number, but I don’t like how I notice the number of books I read each month and wonder what the yearly total will be based on the monthly number, and wonder whether this year’s number will be higher or lower than last year’s. I would like to follow Stefanie’s resolution to value quality over quantity.

I’d like to keep reading lots of books from earlier centuries. I won’t name a specific number, but I will try to read regularly from pre-20thC times throughout the year. Last year I read 12 books from earlier centuries, which wasn’t so bad.

I’d also like to join Kate’s Short Story Challenge — keeping in mind my new attitude toward challenges, of course. I do want to keep reading in the genre, so joining the challenge only makes sense. As I prefer to read collections rather than single stories, I’m going to choose Option #3, which entails reading 5 to 10 collections from any author. I’m drawn to Option #4, which involves the same number of books but by authors I haven’t encountered before, but I can think of a few authors such as Raymond Carver whose work I’ve read but would like to read more of, or Flannery O’Connor whom I might want to re-read, so it makes more sense to stick with Option #3.

Finally, I’d like to keep going with my essay project, which involves using a couple essay anthologies I’ve got as guides to a broader survey of the genre. I made some progress on this project today by reading Plutarch’s “Consolation to his Wife” and liking it enough to order a collection of his essays.

And that’s it. I’m hoping to make this coming year a calmer, less goal-oriented reading year.

Booking through Thursday (A Thursday meme I’m actually doing on Thursday!):

Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on?
I don’t so much mean something like reading a series from beginning to end, but, say, a string of books that all take place in Paris. Or that have anthropologists as the main character. Or were written in the same year. Something like that… Something that strings them together in your head, and yet, otherwise could be different genres, different authors…

I don’t read this way at all, but perhaps I should give it a try. Instead of looking for books that are similar, I purposely go for ones that are different. My goal is to get variety, not similarity. So if I finish an 18C novel, for example, I might pick up something contemporary next, or if I finish a book of literary criticism, I might turn to science or history. I worry about getting bored or bogged down, I suppose, particularly since it takes me a while to finish a book. And there are so many different things I want to read, that I’m reluctant to read two books from the same general category in a row.

But I do like the idea of letting one book lead to another. It would be fun to see how long a chain of connections I could create. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if I could maintain it for a number of months or even a year? The only way to do it would be to try to make creative connections and bring as much variety into it as possible, to include fiction and nonfiction and books from all time periods. Otherwise, I’d get bored. But if I had a long chain of connections, then I’d have a kind of reading narrative, a story of how all my books fit together. That would be kind of fun, wouldn’t it?