Category Archives: Reading

Boy, sometimes Monday hits you hard! I’m feeling rather shell-shocked right now. This is the busiest part of the semester for me, with tons of paper drafts I need to read and comment on and classes to prepare for and meetings to attend and little annoying tasks that come out of nowhere and take forever to accomplish. Plus I want to ride and blog and read, and do all the usual stuff. And I really hate being busy. I don’t thrive on being busy, as some people (amazingly) do.

Anyway, that explanation accounts for my rambling thoughts this evening. So, I’ve begun listening to P.D. James’s The Murder Room, and, oh, what fun it is! Perhaps I should make a habit of listening to mysteries in the car … for some reason mysteries go well with being all on my own in the small space of a car. So far, and I’m not very far into the book, James’s writing is wonderful — smart, literate, entertaining. And there’s something about hearing an actual voice narrating the story that works so well; the reader’s voice is quiet and intimate and also a bit somber, as befits a murder mystery novel. I understand the main character, Adam Dalgliesh, is also in some other of her works, so perhaps I’ll have to seek those out.

I need more light, fun books to read. I’m feeling rather bogged down with Nightwood and The Recess, although I’m almost through with Nightwood, which will free up some time for other things. But, as often happens, the things on my shelves seem too serious. I’m so ambitious when I buy or mooch books, and I forget to think about the times when I’ll need something lighter. Shall I use this as an excuse to go to the bookstore? Or perhaps I can raid Hobgoblin’s shelves for some more mysteries; he’s got lots of Dorothy Sayers’s books and Ellis Peters and at least one Amanda Cross mystery. Perhaps I should throw aside all other reading plans for a while and reading nothing but mysteries until I feel better?

I wish I had another Georgette Heyer novel on hand; that would do quite well too …

My problem is that in the moment when I pick up some difficult book, I’m feeling optimistic and energetic and ambitious. But that feeling rarely lasts during these busy times of the year, and then I feel stuck in the middle of something I don’t have the energy for. If I do this a couple of times, then I’m stuck in the middle of a bunch of things I don’t have energy for. And as I don’t like to set books aside for too long, I generally keep going with what I’m in the middle of. I should just face up to the fact, perhaps, that the slower times of the year are better for ambitious reading, and the busier parts are not, and that’s okay. I don’t have to be reading difficult things all year round after all.

I came across this passage from Nabokov on reading and re-reading recently:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

I agree with what Nabokov says here, and it bothers me that I do relatively little re-reading. Of course, I feel pulled by the lure of new books too, and that pull is almost irresistible, but reading nothing but new books (new-to-me books) feels a little bit superficial sometimes, as though I’m not really digging into my reading, really thinking about it seriously and experiencing it fully. I know I’ve written about this before, and I don’t mean to rehash old thoughts, but this feeling does stay with me.

So I’m tossing around the idea of focusing on re-reading next year. I’ll certainly read plenty of new books, but I might try to pick out some books I’d like to re-read as well, maybe some books that meant a lot to me in the past, or that I didn’t understand well the first time around, or that have continued to intrigue me. Perhaps I’ll re-read something now and then, say, once a month or so. I’m trying very hard not to commit to any reading challenges, but this wouldn’t be a challenge, exactly, and I wouldn’t set the books I’ll re-read in stone. Maybe I’ll list some possibilities, but make the final choices only at the last minute.

So, what might I re-read? Right now, these are a few books that come to mind:

• Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Of course I’d pick things from the 18C! I would like to know this early novel better; I’ve read Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews quite a few times, as I’ve written about it before, but Tom Jones I don’t know as well.
• William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. This book has defeated me so far. I’ve tried to read it at least twice, succeeded only once, and didn’t really get it where I did succeed in finishing it. But I want to get it! I really do.
• Something by George Eliot. She’s one of my favorite novelists ever, and this re-reading would feel like pure pleasure. I’ve already re-read several of her novels, including Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch. So, perhaps I’d re-read The Mill on the Floss? Or Adam Bede?
• Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I don’t feel like I’ve done justice to this book; perhaps I read it when I was too young or wasn’t able to focus on it fully. I have vague memories of it, but would like to know it better.
• Perhaps Lolita? I really love Nabokov’s writing, and I’m sure I have more to learn from this book. He’s such a wonderful writer, isn’t he?
• Perhaps I should return to some books from my youth? Perhaps the Betsy-Tacy books, or some Anne of Green Gables.

I’m sure I’ll think of more as I go on …

I like challenging myself with difficult books now and then, but there are some books that leave me quaking in my boots. There are challenges, and then there are challenges, right? And then there’s a category of book that is quite possibly beyond me entirely. So, to get specific, a challenge of the first sort, the sort that is difficult but doesn’t leave me quaking, would be something like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a book that is rather difficult to piece together, but still something I can follow, more or less, that makes a kind of sense, and if I read it a time or two more, I’ll feel like I can understand. Proust was like this too.

The sort of book that makes me quake is something like Ulysses, which I had to read in a college course, although I’m not sure how much I really got out of it. I know I can read this book and get it for the most part, especially with some critical help, but it requires an awful lot of work. I’m not opposed to doing this kind of work, I just want to do it in a time I have tons of energy and enthusiasm for it. I’d put the longer novels of Pynchon in this category, and certain kinds of poetry qualifies here too, like if I were to undertake reading the collected poems of John Ashbery, someone known for being a bit obscure.

The books that are perhaps beyond me entirely? What comes to mind immediately is Finnegans Wake. In fact, this may be the only book in this category. I’m okay reading books I can’t fully make sense of, but a book I can’t make sense of at all? That’s different. Not that I’ve tried, I must say — perhaps the book isn’t as difficult as I’m imagining. But I have my doubts.

I’m thinking about this issue because I just read this article in the New York Review of Books on Gertrude Stein. It’s a review of Janet Malcolm’s new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. As I understand it, the book is about their lives, most interestingly about their lives during World War II, and also about Stein’s writing. Stein is a writer who makes me quake a little bit. I’ve read her book of poetry Tender Buttons, and I thought it was quite beautiful, even if it didn’t make any sort of logical sense. But it’s the kind of book you just let wash over you; you savor the language and give up trying to pull together a logical meaning.

But her other work scares me a bit, particularly the longer work, such as The Making of Americans, which the article describes as “gigantic and impenetrable.” Janet Malcolm calls it “a text of magisterial disorder.” And the article also says this:

Again, about The Making of Americans, Malcolm calls the book a laboratory for Stein, ponderous and unforgiving, a morass, a nervous breakdown of a novel, swerving between conventional narrative and gibberish, “a work that Stein evidently had to get out of her system—almost like a person having to vomit—before she could become Gertrude Stein as we know her.” But Malcolm admires its refusal to “impose a false order on disorderly complexity,” which might also be said of Cézanne’s art, in all its ambiguity and mystery.

I like that description, “a nervous breakdown of a novel,” but do I want to read it?

I don’t like the idea that any book is beyond me, though. I feel torn between not wanting to spend my time on impenetrable books that would frustrate me and not wanting to give up on any interesting-sounding book out there. I may never try to read The Making of Americans, but I don’t like the way it’s out there, taunting me with its difficulty.

Thanks to The Literary Saloon, I came across a fabulous article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian called “My Literary Love Affair,” about how he discovered Virago Modern Classics. The article is fabulous for a couple of reasons: because it’s got information on the history of the series and because Coe’s story of encountering these books is a good one. He describes coming across the series in a bookstore in 1982 and being intrigued by the phrase “modern classics” connected with names he hadn’t ever heard of before — May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamond Lehmann. He says that calling these books by largely forgotten women authors “modern classics” was a powerful political statement at a time when the term “classic” meant a little more than it does today.

So, he reads some of these books and finds himself and his writing changed. This is what he says about the experience:

Before long, the Virago novels would unseat some of my deepest assumptions as a reader, and also alter my course as a writer. It was under their influence, in my mid-20s, that I abandoned straightforward autobiographical writing and chose a female protagonist for my first published novel, The Accidental Woman; while my latest, The Rain Before it Falls, is intended (among other things) as an hommage to the whole list and the authors which it reintroduced.

He talks a lot about Dorothy Richardson’s long, Proustian-like novel Pilgrimage (Pointed Roofs is the first part). Pilgrimage was considered hugely important in its day, but around the time of World War II fell out of favor and has never returned. Coe describes how Richardson experiments with style, trying to produce what she termed “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.”

He also describes May Sinclair’s work and says of Rosamond Lehmann that he has had a decades long literary love affair with her writing. Lehmann is an interesting case study in how women writers get marginalized for taking up supposedly “female” subjects; one male reviewer wrote of The Echoing Grove that “so prolonged a voyage in an exclusively emotional and sexual sea afflicts a male reader at least with a sense of surfeit” and another that “entirely, exquisitely feminine readers, trousered or otherwise, will probably receive the book with rapture.” Coe points out that Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, published at the same time and with a similar tone and theme, did not receive the same treatment.

Coe argues that the Virago series was and still is important in countering critical bias against women writers, but that work still needs to be done, and he points to the relatively few women who make the Booker prize shortlists as evidence. But he does recognize that attitudes are changing, and he makes his point with this intriguing argument:

But there is a sense that the crude gender bias in British literary culture which Virago challenged so effectively in the 1970s and 80s no longer exists. Most of the new writers who have broken through to critical acclaim and big readerships in recent years have been women: Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, Lionel Shriver, Marina Lewycka, Sarah Waters and Susanna Clarke, among others. And these writers are, for the most part, writing big, historically and politically engaged novels, not voyaging in “an exclusively emotional and sexual sea” – a phrase that might rather be applied (accurately, but non-pejoratively) to a novel like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. In 2007, it’s Graham Swift who writes a novel focused entirely on the domestic and familial (Tomorrow), while writers such as Rose Tremain and Marina Lewycka examine the plight of low-paid migrant workers in the modern British economy. The old clichés about what distinguishes male writing from female writing no longer stand up to scrutiny.

Interesting, isn’t it? Reading about how important these women writers were for Coe made me quite happy, and I realized that I responded so positively because I don’t often hear male writers saying such things. Correct me if you think I’m wrong, but doesn’t it seem to be the case that it’s rare for male writers to acknowledge the importance of a specifically female tradition of writing for their own work? Coe isn’t merely pointing out one or two important female influences; he’s pointing to a tradition, and it’s one that taught him to write in ways the male writers he was already familiar with hadn’t.

Has anyone read Coe? I liked this article enough I’m curious about his own fiction.

There were lots of interesting comments on my post from yesterday about Seneca’s advice for reading — thank you readers! I wanted to pick up on a few ideas here, one of which Jenclair pointed out, which is that the publishing environment we have here today is surely very, very far from what Seneca experienced. But I couldn’t really tell you what type and amount of reading material was available in his day, and I wish I could. What in the world would he (and others from ancient times) make of the abundance of books we enjoy today? When he says “a multitude of books only gets in one’s way,” what does he mean by a “multitude”? That he feels anxious about the effects of having a multitude of books available shows that the similar worries we have today are nothing new at all.

The other thing I wanted to consider was the issue of the canon; some people felt we should read largely from the canon and others that more variety was better. I liked Hepzibah’s questions on the subject: “who does get to decide what is canonized and what is not? What makes one author more worthy than another?” Very good questions indeed. It’s because of questions like these that I am suspicious of the whole idea of the canon. Danielle’s question is relevant too: “If Seneca were here today do you think many women authors would make his cut?” I’m guessing they wouldn’t.

I don’t think that canons get created solely on the basis of literary merit, although it would be nice if they were — but even here we’re on shaky ground because I think definitions of literary merit shift over time. What people valued in the 18C, for example, isn’t what we value today. I think what ends up in the canon gets there partly because of aesthetic merit, however it gets defined at any particular time, and partly because of publishing trends; political and social forces (racism and sexism, for example); literary scholarship, created by people with biases and blind spots; the literary context, i.e. what other people were doing at the time that readers can later identify as a trend that then becomes a movement and is taught as such; educational trends, meaning what sorts of texts educators want to teach at a particular time; and surely a host of other factors unrelated to merit.

Canons also have a self-perpetuating factor to them, meaning that works that are perceived as important get passed on and on, not necessarily because they are “great” works of literature, but because they are what’s taught and what the people coming before us knew. I realize this is beginning to sound circular, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between the canon defined as a collection of the best literature that’s out there and the canon defined as “the things people have paid most attention to in the past.” I think this second definition is a more accurate description of what we are referring to when we mention the canon; I don’t think the canon defined in the first way really exists.

The marginal figures are the interesting ones to think about — why is Walter Scott in and out of the canon? Or James Fenimore Cooper? Or Aphra Behn? Or Mary Shelley? Writers like these make it clear, I think, that the canon is a shifty, uncertain thing, always subject to debate and controversy.

In spite of the fact (or because of the fact?) that the semester has begun and I have less time for reading, and am therefore trying to keep the number of books I’m currently reading down to a minimum, I have felt a longing lately to start ridiculously long reading projects. For example, I’ve got The Oxford Book of Essays (edited by John Gross) that I’m tempted to begin reading in, and it’s a long book in itself, but I’d also like to read not just individual essays in the collection, but books by the authors I like along the way. I’d make it a big, long study in the essay. Doesn’t that sound like fun? And something that would take forever?

Or I could brush up on the history of philosophy as I’ve been thinking about for a while, except this time, study the authors in more depth rather than rushing through them as one must in a year-long course. Or could start reading novels in German again, because surely after a while I’d remember the vocabulary I once knew and reading them would get faster and be lots of fun? Or I could take this big fat anthology of 18C literature I’ve got and, maybe not read through it exactly, but do a study of the authors I don’t know very well?

I’m often torn between wanting to read systematically, and wanting to read at whim. Or I can put it this way — I’m torn between wanting to be an expert in one or two (or three or four) areas, and wanting to read a little bit of everything.

And the thing is, I’m not so terribly good at taking on long reading projects (Proust excepted, I suppose, but there I have the satisfaction of finishing a volume now and then). I get frustrated when I don’t finish books in a month or two, at the longest. Perhaps I need a “long-term reads” or “ongoing projects” category such as Danielle has; perhaps then I’d give myself permission to take my time. This is just one of the ways I’m sometimes at war with myself …

I’ve never answered one of the Booking Through Thursday questions, but today the question caught my eye, so maybe today is a good day to start. Here’s the question:

Okay, so the other day, a friend was commenting on my monthly reading list and asked when I found the time to read. In the ensuing discussion, she described herself as a “goldilocks” when it comes to reading–she needs to have everything juuuuuust right to be able to focus. This caught my attention because, first, I thought that was a charming way of describing the condition, but, two, while we’ve talked about our reading habits, this is an interesting wrinkle. I’d never really thought about it that way.

So, this is my question to you–are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?

Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?

Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

I’m too much like a “goldilocks” reader for my own comfort. I don’t require perfect conditions, but I require very good ones. I can read when there are distractions around, but I read very slowly when there are — even more slowly than usual. I wish I were the kind of person who could focus well, but I’m not.

It’s rare, actually, that I’m completely absorbed in what I’m reading. I often look up from my book, sometimes to think about a passage, sometimes to notice something about my surroundings, and then my thoughts will wander and I’ll have to drag myself back to the book once again. I’m particularly bad about this when there are people around. I love to watch people, and I can’t help but notice social dynamics, so reading in airports or doctor’s offices is hard (although I do it). I’ll notice if someone starts a conversation, and once that happens, I can’t help but listen in. If people are having an argument, my book becomes useful only as something to hide the fact that I’m eavesdropping.

And I find it hard to quiet my mind to settle into reading. I suspect I’d benefit greatly from meditating regularly — I need to teach myself not to let my thoughts distract me from my book or whatever else. This is particularly hard when the semester is underway and I’ve got lots to think about. I’ll read for a few minutes and then notice that I’m not reading anymore and am thinking instead about how class went that day. Over the course of an evening’s reading, this gets better; by the evening’s end, I’m able to pay closer attention.

I’ve been enjoying starting new books — what greater pleasure is there than diving in to a new book? One of them is Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness; I’m about 40 pages into it and think I’ve figured out what’s going on — it takes a while to get all the new names and new vocabulary and the rules of a new world when reading science fiction — or when reading any book, really, but science fiction especially. It promises to be fun. It’s the first science fiction I’ve read in, oh, probably a couple decades. Perhaps when I’m finished with this I’ll ask for more recommendations.

I also began Bruce Chatwin’s travel book In Patagonia. I’m still figuring out how this book works, too, although once I figure it out I think I’ll end up liking it. Actually, it’s not so different from beginning Left Hand of Darkness because I also have to figure out the “world” of the book — before I began it, I barely knew where Patagonia was. And I have to figure out exactly how Chatwin goes about writing a travel tale. It’s not exactly a straightforward narrative, but is made up of very short chapters, 1-2 pages long, each with their own vignette. So far there’s not much discussion of why he traveled and how he went about all the little steps of the trip — all the connective tissue of the journey; instead, he focuses on interesting people he meets and on the landscape, and he moves really quickly from one incident to the next. It’s amusing — he’ll mention walking down a road, running into a man walking the other direction, and next thing I know, Chatwin is visiting the man’s house, getting introduced to his family, and spending the night there. I’m not exactly sure how they got from passing each other to becoming friends. As far as I can tell, he’s a drifter who sleeps in a bed when he can get one, and behind a bush when he can’t.

I also began listening to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and oh, what a fun book! I love the reader’s voice and accent, and I find the main character so very appealing. Listening to it makes me want to meet him and show him that I get it — that I’m not one of those annoying people who uses sloppy language and tells lies. This book is so charming.