Category Archives: Reading

I realized that I wrote something not quite true in yesterday’s post: I wrote that losing myself in a plot is what I need in stressful times when I’m not reading well. But the truth is, I don’t do particularly well with plot-driven novels. What I should have said is something more like “I need to lose myself in interesting characters or a well-drawn atmosphere or in careful emotional analysis.” Because those are the things I enjoy most; I tend to get impatient with intricately plotted novels. Most often what draws me to a book are people and relationships. I am stereotypically female in this sense, aren’t I? No fast-paced action — give me a relationship story! I feel the same way about movies; I’ll watch action movies, but I can get bored in the middle of them and sometimes fall asleep. But give me an interesting character, and even if that nothing happens to that character, I’ll be happy. There are exceptions — I loved the Phillip Pullman trilogy, His Dark Materials, which has a lot of plot, but it also has a lot of ideas, which is another thing that draws me to a novel. I liked Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver, which has lots of plot and ideas, but I wasn’t so enchanted that I felt the need to pick up the next book in the trilogy. I got a little frustrated trying to keep the details straight in that book. Perhaps it’s my bad memory; I do better analyzing relationships and character than keeping plot details straight in my head.

I liked your suggestions for comfort reading from yesterday’s post very much; I would have picked up Anne of Green Gables immediately if I’d had a copy at home. I made the silly mistake of leaving them with my parents years ago, thinking they were children’s books that I’d outgrown. Oh, no. And I very nearly picked up a mystery novel. We have a ton of Dorothy Sayers books around. I’ve read a couple and liked them. And Jane Austen is the perfect comfort read for me; familiar but never dull. I was tempted to look around to see if we have any Louisa May Alcott, which would have worked very well. But I was scanning the shelves yesterday and came across an Elizabeth Taylor novel I haven’t read, The Sleeping Beauty, and it struck me as just the thing. I’ve read Taylor recently, In a Summer Season, and so I knew what to expect, and that I’d like it. And it’s perfect — set on the seashore and evoking a mysterious atmosphere, with complex characters whose lives seem quiet and serene but as the novel goes along the deeper levels of unhappiness reveal themselves. I like the slow movement of Taylor’s novels, the careful attention to tone and mood and gesture. This sort of thing is much more absorbing to me than something fast-paced. Looking around online I see that Taylor has at least a dozen novels. I’ll have to collect some more to have on hand for the next time I’ll need something comforting.

Kate S. has written about signpost books, an idea I’m liking very much; the idea is that certain books, not necessarily the best books you have ever encountered, although maybe so, meet you at just the right time and speak to you in such a way that changes your subsequent reading. Here is Kate’s definition, in which she distinguishes between formative books and signpost books:

What’s the difference between a formative book and a signpost book? A single book could certainly be both, but if I’m interpreting the definition properly, an aesthetic focus is central to the latter. Girish writes of films that are breakthroughs in that they help the viewer to better understand film as an art form and that provide lessons to take into future viewing experiences, not lessons to take into life generally. A book may be formative because of its emotional or psychological impact. But it would be a signpost book if it helps the reader to better understand what language can do, how a story or a novel or a poem works, thereby enhancing that reader’s appreciation for literature as an art form, and sending him or her off into the next reading experience equipped with a more discerning eye.

Isn’t that an interesting way of thinking about a particular kind of reading experience? For all my talk about how literature can or can’t change people, it’s nice to get specific about it for a bit.

For me, a recent signpost book has been Virginia Woolf’s diary. It has changed the way I read, and it has done so by aesthetic means. It’s strange, however, to think of a diary as changing how I read because of its aesthetics, since diaries are so to-the-moment and generally aren’t revised or worked over with care. And yet there are passages in the diary that are beautiful, and if they aren’t crafted as a story is, they contain their own structure and attention to detail and innovative use of language. And a diary itself has an important structure to it: the structure of daily or nearly daily writing, with its implication that everyday details matter and deserve to be recorded.

I read this book in small sections, mostly a little bit each night before I went to bed, and I found that this is an excellent way of living with someone’s diary for a while. It’s not reading through their life at the pace they lived it, since I might read several entries each night, but it is reading the life slowly, getting a sense of daily rhythms over time. Some nights what I read wasn’t memorable in the least; other nights I read passages that still stick with me. And this is how life is, with many days that disappear and some that remain in the mind.

I’ve continued reading other diaries, including Frances Burney’s Journals and Letters, and I’m reading it in much the same way as I read Woolf’s: a little at a time before I go to bed. I’m also appreciating the aesthetic value of the book; Burney takes great time and care to reproduce scenes from her life complete with long stretches of dialogue, and I can see how her journals and letters are practice for her novels. So, I think Woolf has taught me the value of reading diaries, a little of what they are capable of doing, and a good way to read them — slowly, to get the feeling I’m living alongside an author for a while.

There have been a number of posts on litblogs lately that are largely about the relationship of literature and life: here’s a post from Dan Green’s The Reading Experience on reading with a kind of aesthetic distance versus reading in order to learn how to live. And here’s a response from Scott Esposito from Conversational Reading. And here’s a post from Stefanie’s So Many Books on the revolutionary potential of literature. The larger question in all these posts seems to be about what a writer can do and what effect a book can have. Do we read for aesthetic pleasure? Do we read to learn something about life? To change our thoughts or actions? Can literature affect anything outside the world of the text?

I don’t know what I think about the revolutionary power of literature, although Stefanie offers a powerful example of revolutionary possibilities in her post. I suspect that the changes that occur from reading and writing are small but powerful, but that figuring out what causes what is too complicated to sort through. It’s not often that a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes along and appears to make a significant change in people’s ways of thinking and in politics. And even the effects of that book are debatable. But who’s to say how the little changes that reading and writing cause work together and what they add up to?

Dan Green argues against the idea that authors can teach anyone how to live or how to act, and says that artists can tell us about art but cannot necessarily impart wisdom more readily than anyone else might: “I’ve never really understood why we would want to turn to poets or novelists for insights on ‘how to live.’ What has given them some special dispensation to pronounce on such a topic?” To a certain extent, I think that’s true: it strikes me as a mistake to see artists as having an advantage in the pursuit of truth and wisdom. This sets us up for perpetual disappointment at an artist’s flaws and weaknesses. But I tend to be someone who hopes for wisdom from artists anyway; I don’t think they have a “special dispensation” to pronounce on how we should live, but they do have something to tell us about life — the question is figuring out what that is.

Dan talks about some things he thinks we can learn from literature: the contingency and mutability of existence, and a manner in which to question the status quo. I think, also, that art can teach us to pay attention to the world. It’s not so much what an author says about life that I find valuable, but rather the awareness an author brings to existence. I might or I might not emulate a moral ideal I find expressed in a book, but I do hope to emerge from a book seeing things that I hadn’t seen before, paying closer attention to an aspect of life I’d overlooked. I think that learning to see is ultimately a moral lesson, since granting someone or something our attention is a step along the way toward acting responsibly toward that person or thing. An author might not be able to teach me how to live, but if she can teach me how to see, I’ve learned something valuable.

I’d question the distinction between aesthetic appreciation and passionate, engaged reading. Why do these two things have to be opposed? Aesthetic appreciation doesn’t have to imply distanced observation and detachment. As I’ve learned from Elaine Scarry, formal beauty can inspire a powerful emotional response that can lead to thoughts about equality and justice. It’s possible that the more I understand an author’s craft, the more capable I am of passionate response to the work and that response can possibly teach me something about life. Those things won’t necessarily take place in the same moment, but I often read a poem and respond viscerally, and then re-read it and begin to understand the crafted nature of the poem, its artistry, but I’m still responding emotionally and my aesthetic insight can add to my emotional response. I don’t see why aesthetic understanding has to imply gaining a critical distance that is never bridged to bring one back to an emotional closeness to the work.

I’ve found since I’ve begun blogging that book reviews from traditional media sources matter to me less and less. I’ve kept a list of books I’d like to read for quite a while now, many of the books coming from book reviews and some coming from recommendations from friends or my reading in various non-review places. But the list was never very long, and I wouldn’t add to it frequently. Since I’ve begun blogging, however, the list has grown at a frightening pace. I now have 150 books on my to-be-read list, which I recognize isn’t all that many compared to the lists many of you probably have, but is probably five times as long as my list from my life pre-blog. And it’s continuing to grow at that fast rate, so that by the end of the year, my list might have doubled. Hmmm … should I find a way to get that list under control? Maybe not. Maybe it should just be a list of possibilities, not things I’m absolutely going to read so as not to pressure myself, but things I might read, if the time comes when the books feel right.

I think it’s the different sort of writing I come across on book blogs that inspires me to add books to my TBR list when traditional book reviews don’t as often. I’m very interested in what reading a book feels like. I want to know what the experience of being immersed in a particular book will do to a reader. I’m interested in knowing about the story, the setting, the characters, the ideas, the writing, and all that I can get from traditional book reviews, but I also want to know about the book on a more subjective level. What did it do to you? How did you feel when you read it? And answers to these questions I’m much more likely to find on book blogs, where people don’t have to follow conventions of formality and don’t have the same pressure to keep themselves — their personal experiences and stories — out of the writing. Not all traditional book reviews are that cut and dry, I realize, but I’m much more likely to find personal, impassioned writing elsewhere, and that, I think, is what I really want.

Litlove, in her recent post on the blog genre, gets to the heart of what I want when she says that “blogging always offers a pattern of the mind that thinks, reflects, sifts information, analyses, distinguishes, recommends, enthuses. No matter what format the blogging takes, the blog reader receives a very intimate and immediate contact with a vibrant subjectivity, that is engaging with the world in the way that seems most natural and most enlivening to him or to her.” Reading this sort of writing — about whatever it is a writer finds most enlivening — enlivens a reader too. I read book blogs, and I feel like I’m encountering a mind impassioned by reading and generously sharing that enthusiasm, and I’m inspired to respond, sometimes by writing comments, and sometimes by adding books to my TBR list. I’ve always been excited about reading, but now having been a book blog reader for a while, I find myself even more excited about all the great books out there. I’m having that experience in the bookstore less and less where I’ll wander around and feel like nothing is speaking to me, no book is calling out to me to read it. Now I am much more likely to be overwhelmed with the choices.

This is not to say that I don’t read traditional book reviews anymore, because I do, but I’m much more likely to skim and skip articles, and turn instead to the blog world to see what’s out there.

And I’ve had some trouble concentrating on my reading. So here’s a short post summing things up and wishing you a happy weekend.

• As I wrote about yesterday, I’m working my way through Vincent Carretta’s biography of Olaudah Equiano who wrote a narrative about his life in slavery and after. He’s a very interesting writer, dealing with a lot of important things going on in the mid to late 18C: slavery, of course, and travel, exploration, colonialism, trade, economic theory, political theory, sensibility, autobiography, dissenting Protestantism.
• I’m also in the middle of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, which I’m finding powerful and moving. It’s unlike most novels I’ve read; it’s a fable of some sort, and I’m still figuring out exactly what it all means. None of the characters are named, although they all feel lively and real. The sentences strike me as strange — does anybody know why Saramago uses run-ons as he does?
• I’m about 40 pages into Swann’s Way, working my way slowly towards the goal of reading the entire Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, whichever you prefer. So far, I’m loving it. I like very much Proust’s slow, careful descriptions of detail and nuances and moods, and I like his digressiveness, moving about in time, following one thought to the next, wherever they might go. So, I keep a list of books I’ve read, and I’m unsure how to count Proust. What do you think? Should the entire thing, In Search of Lost Time, count as one book, or can I count each volume separately?
• I have also begun, but barely dented, Frances Burney’s Journals and Letters. The edition I have is only selections from the journal and letters, but it quite lengthy anyway, at something like 500-600 pages. I’m still in what the editor calls her “apprenticeship” years, her late teens, and I’m impressed by the quality of thought and writing. I can see her developing her eye for the details of social life she would satirize so well in her novels.
• Still plugging away at Jane Hirschfield’s poetry, which is as good as ever. I get a good number of hits from people googling Hirschfield; she must be fairly popular.
• Some things coming up: I’ll be buying John Updike’s new novel Terrorist soon for my in-person book group which should be meeting in the next month or so, and I now own a copy of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau for the Slaves of Golconda discussion at the end of August. It sounds like a number of people will read a second Wells novel, but I’m not sure I’ll have time. We’ll see about that one. As for other reads? I’m not entirely sure. I like to save some of my reading choices for a spur of the moment feeling. And I don’t want to give away everything that might appear around here — to give you a reason to come back.

What does it mean to enjoy reading a book? For me, this is not such a simple matter. I’d been thinking about this question a bit when I came across these posts from This Space and Book World, both about the various kinds of enjoyment people find in their reading. Steve from This Space writes: “I read what I need to read; that is, what gives me pleasure (but what is pleasure? Maybe that’s the key question here).” I like this question; it makes sense to me, a person who can spend a lot of time analyzing emotion, to ask what pleasure is. And Sandra from Book World wonders how to direct, and whether to direct, her daughter toward more challenging books — the question here is whether she should let her find more challenging books on her own or guide her a bit.

There are so many ways to enjoy a book, so many kinds of pleasure to be had out of books, that to say I enjoyed a book or liked it becomes kind of meaningless. If someone were to say to me, just read what you like, I’m not sure what I’d do. I like … almost everything, or if I didn’t like it, I might very well have enjoyed not liking it. There’s pleasure to be had from dissecting exactly why I didn’t like something. I can enjoy a book because I got absorbed in it and had trouble putting it down — as happened when I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy earlier this year — and I can enjoy a book that isn’t absorbing exactly but is super smart and complex and beautifully written — as happened with Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. And I can enjoy a book that’s downright boring in parts, like The Tale of Genji, but which has a compelling atmosphere, a dream-like, quiet quality to it that stayed with me through the weeks I was reading it. I like books with a strong emotional pull; reading Prep was that kind of experience, where I felt something for the main character. But I also sometimes like books with another kind of emotional pull — not the kind where I feel something for the characters or story, but the kind where I’m loving what the author does with language. Pale Fire is one example of this. It’s not a book where I came to care about the characters or story; rather, I loved the word play, the exuberant voice; I responded emotionally to Nabokov’s love of language.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had out of reading books that are difficult, the intellectual pleasure of struggling with a text. I have no idea how to teach this to other people, though, or if it’s teachable at all. I grew up reading and re-reading things that were fun and easy and felt like pure pleasure (Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder), and also picking up difficult things now and then, things that were a bit beyond me at that point, and I was the type of child who would stick with the book and struggle with it pretty much no matter what. I think I did this for a number of reasons, some admirable, some not: it’s good to want to challenge myself, good to try new things, probably not so good to stick with a book just to be able to say I’d finished it — for bragging rights — or to prove that I’m a certain kind of person, a certain kind of reader.

I’m interested when people say they had another kind of experience, one that involved finding more difficult or challenging books on their own, at their own pace, and that this didn’t involve the kind of struggle I described above. I’ve heard people say they wished they’d been introduced to “better” books earlier on rather than spending so long reading whatever they came across, mainly not-so-good books and coming across more “serious” books at a time that felt late to them. In a way, finding the “good” books, the canonical books, later like this sounds to me like a positive thing — it could, perhaps, lead to a simpler pleasure in reading them, to a more direct relationship to them, so that they don’t feel like a duty or like a training course in reading. But I’ve also heard people with this kind experience lament their years spent reading “trashy” books and express insecurity about not having a long history of reading the books people consider worthy.

I’m not sure what my point is here, except that, for me at least, reading pleasure is a complicated thing. In a way it would be nice if my experience of reading were simpler and more direct — if I didn’t have a rather complicated relationship to books. But that’s just not my personality.

Litlove and the Hobgoblin have written recently on their childhood books and reading habits; I won’t be giving you my childhood reading list, but I have thought a bit lately about how I learned to love to read. Both my parents are readers, but my reading habits today are a bit more like my dad’s than my mom’s — although I’m quite a bit different from him too. My dad has two types of books he likes to read: science fiction/fantasy and 19C novels. Occasionally he’ll venture into something 18C or 20C, the latter usually something like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle — historical fiction, in other words. He’s read more Walter Scott than anyone I know, and is always on the lookout for ones he hasn’t gotten to yet (and there are tons of them). He’s a big fan of Tolstoy and Dickens and Eliot. I’m guessing he’s read Henry James, but James is a little too late-19C/early 20C for him, a little too pre-modernist. I try sometimes to get him to pick up a 20C novel, particularly one in a realist mode, but I don’t try that hard because I know he’s not really interested. He also owns a number of philosophy and theology books, which I don’t remember him actually reading, but I knew he had at one point, and I knew I would be interested in those too, at some point in the future, when I’d become a better reader.

I haven’t inherited the SF/F reading habit, but I did become a lover of the 19C novel. Occasionally as a kid I’d pick one up and begin reading and realize that I was in a bit over my head. This happened with War and Peace, I remember, although I did keep with it and finish it. I’m certain I didn’t do it justice. But these books became over time the kind of thing I consider a comfort read; sometimes I get in the mood for a long involving novel, one that moves slowly and has multitudes of characters, one that will stay with me for days and days, maybe weeks, and it’s the 19C novel, say Eliot or Dickens or the Brontes, I’ll turn to.

I’m not sure how to characterize the books my mom reads, although I remember her reading all the time. I know she likes historical fiction and history books, particularly ones about American history. She likes frontier stories and pioneer stories. Occasionally, I think, she reads religious books, and Christian fiction. She might pick up one of my dad’s “classics” now and then. She reads young adult novels sometimes.

When I think about who influenced me most directly, at first I think it’s my dad. He and I continue to have conversations about books, and although I now read a lot of books he would never pick up, deep down I continue to love his 19c novels the best. But my mom’s reading legacy may be even more important. Even though I don’t have clear memories of what she read, I do remember her reading all the time. And she is the mother of seven children; I am the oldest. I remember Mom reading when the rest of us were playing and making noise, and continuing to read while we were bugging her for help with this or that. She insisted, in a quiet way, on carving out time for herself, when she let us fend for ourselves and continued to concentrate on a book.

I learned from her not so much a particular kind of book to read, but a way of reading. In the midst of a busy, chaotic life with lots of people surrounding her and making demands on her, she still found time to read. Reading was a way of creating some space for herself to breathe in, I think. I think it’s from her that I learned that reading is a way of being — it’s a quiet, thoughtful, meditative approach to life.

Litlove has a recent post on “ethical criticism,” a term taken from Wayne Booth, which refers to reading and judging books based on their ethical stances. Litlove writes about the difficulty of figuring out what to do with books that express something ethically troubling — for example Huck Finn, and the way one can label it racist — or not — and Camus’s The Outsider and its story of the casual killing of an Arab man. So, the question becomes, how do we read these books? DO we read them? How should we write about them? How do we handle them when we can’t come to a consensus about them?

I don’t have any great answers to these questions, other than to say that I don’t think anyone should discourage anybody from reading anything because of ethically dubious content. But that doesn’t mean those ethical problems aren’t up for discussion and critique. When it comes to course syllabi, it’s a bit more complicated because a syllabus by its nature excludes, and so it becomes easier to keep replace something troublesome with a text more pleasing to contemporary readers. But I think the classroom is a great place to read books that challenge our sense of ethics — to consider the ways Huck Finn might or might not be racist. These books should be part of a debate, not excluded from it.

This discussion reminds me of a conversation I had with a graduate school professor with whom I took a couple classes in contemporary American poetry. I had a talk with her in her office one time about poetry, and I don’t remember the full context, but I mentioned liking Robert Lowell, and I remember that she gave me a funny look. The look was unintentional, I’m sure, and probably she wasn’t even aware of it, but it seemed to me to express disapproval of my poetic tastes. It said something like, “oh, you poor thing, why do you like that poet? He treated women so badly! He owes a huge debt to Anne Sexton he never acknowledged, and he stole material from his wife to use in his own poems. If you thought about it more, you’d decide you don’t like Lowell after all.” She didn’t say anything, but the look was enough to make me realize she was judging me — probably thinking I was a naive reader, a victim of the patriarchy that made me read texts and authors that belittle women all my life.

Now that might actually be true — I might have been a naive reader, and I certainly had had to read texts that portray women badly all my life — but why should anyone judge me for getting something valuable out of those texts anyway? Why can’t I like Lowell? I think it is important to consider the ways Lowell might have written about women badly — I don’t want to be a naive reader after all, if I can help it — but that, in my opinion, doesn’t mean I can’t read him or appreciate what he does in his poems.

I’ll bet this professor wasn’t really aware of what she was communicating to me, and on some level I was highly sensitive about the issue, or I wouldn’t have read so much into such a short exchange. But I wish she hadn’t been so quick to judge me. There are all kinds of reasons to read people with whom we might disagree, or who might offend us in some way. I might decide that the bad outweighs the good in a particular author and conclude that I don’t want to read that person anymore, but I wouldn’t want to impose that personal decision on anybody else. Wayne Booth’s ethical criticism sounds valuable; I think it’s important to consider the moral world created by a work of art, but I think an ethical criticism that sets out to keep people from reading something or that makes judgments about people’s pleasure in reading something just isn’t worth it.

So the Hobgoblin wrote yesterday about a talk we had on gender and reading, a topic I think is very interesting but complicated enough to drive you crazy if you spend a lot of time thinking about it. There are two problems with the topic – one is that it’s really, really hard if not impossible to say meaningful things about gender differences in reading since men and women are so complex and causality is hard to figure out. If there are differences, where do they come from? The other problem is that it’s hard to talk about gender differences without seeming to reinforce them. To talk about “women’s” ways of reading and “men’s” ways of reading is perhaps to make it sound like all women read one way and all men another. And the same is true when you talk about men’s and women’s writing.

I’d prefer not to believe in any differences at all, but if one’s social training and status in society affect one’s reading, which it seems like they must, then one’s gender does affect one’s reading somehow.

But the Hobgoblin was talking about something a little bit different – not how men and women might actually differ in their reading, but about how we might think they differ in their reading: the types of reading that might get labeled “feminine” and “masculine” based on our stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. Here’s where it gets fun, because the Hobgoblin and I tend to disagree on our reading, and it often seems like our differences come from our different takes on emotion – emotion in the book itself and in our response as readers. And he tends to talk in emotional terms and respond to emotion in books in ways that I don’t, and in ways that seem stereotypically “feminine.” I, on the other hand, tend to be a bit more analytical, which seems stereotypically “masculine.” So I guess we’re undermining the stereotypes just by existing, which I think is pretty cool. I hate discussing these stereotypes, even when my point is to undermine them, but it’s true that traditionally women have been associated with the heart and men with the brain, and I don’t think such associations disappear from our thinking all that quickly.

But to call me analytical and him emotional doesn’t capture the true picture at all. Because I’m not heartless and he’s not without analytical power. For him, I think his analysis of books begins with an emotion. And a feeling about a book is a great place to start – it can lead to insights that are deep and rich. Here, Mary Wollstonecraft helps me out: she says “we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.” For me, emotion is a complicated thing that I tend to be analytical about. I have immediate gut reactions to things, but somehow I need to process those reactions and so I end up thinking about and talking about – getting analytical about – feeling.

We disagree a bit on Nabokov. The Hobgoblin says that “Lolita is quite an impassioned narrative, but there still seems to be some sort of distance that the author places between himself (since all of our examples at this point are men) and the story.” Yes, but … there’s distance between the narrator and the story, but that doesn’t exclude emotion. I find Nabokov’s passion about language exhilarating, and I respond to that with feeling. Actually, this has changed a bit over time – when I first read Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, I found him cold too. I read it again, however, and had a completely different response. This time I got caught up in the word play and the intelligence and exuberance of it, and loved it.

When the Hobgoblin and I discuss our differences in reading, I find myself in a funny position because, as the supposedly more analytical one, the stereotypically “male” one, I have this fear I might sound like I’m dismissive of his “female” emotionalism. I argue for my own interpretation of Nabokov and in doing so might imply that his is too simple or not thoughtful enough, not analytical enough. I think this fear stems from my awareness that people in our culture tend to privilege the intellectual response over the emotional one – and, to the extent we think they are associated, the “male” response over the “female” one. So I’m in the position of being a woman reading in a way our culture tends to value, one that is associated with masculinity, critiquing a man reading as a “woman,” in an emotional way our culture tends to belittle.

But I don’t think one approach is right and the other wrong, and I don’t think the Hobgoblin’s way of reading is simple and mine is complex. They are just different ways of connecting thought and feeling, mind and heart. I think it’s unfortunate that academics and intellectuals tend to mistrust emotion, and I also think there are many ways of being an emotional person – some of which involve a heavy use of the brain.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my post about novels and literary periods; you all wrote great stuff, and I’d like to quote you liberally.

One of the things that amuses me about eighteenth-century studies is that academics like to call the period the “long eighteenth century,” which usually means something like 1660-1830, although people will quibble about the dates. So the eighteenth “century” becomes 170 years long. 1660 makes a lot of sense to me as a beginning date, since that year saw the restoration of the monarchy after Cromwell and the Civil War in Britain, and that year the theaters opened again. You can pinpoint some significant changes in literature and culture that happened rapidly, which makes literary categorization easier. But, of course, seventeenth-century scholars will work in the years after 1660, and I’m sure some people don’t like eighteenth-century scholars’ way of taking over those decades before the actual eighteenth century starts.

And the problem with ending the “long eighteenth century” at 1830 or thereabouts is the whole Romantic period – where does that go? I’ve heard the Romantic period defined as beginning in either 1789 (French Revolution) or 1798 (publication of Lyrical Ballads) and ending somewhere in the 1830s. I think what happens is that more traditionally-minded scholars work on writers we think of as Romantic – Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. – and eighteenth-century scholars work on those who don’t seem to fit the Romantic paradigm – Austen, Burney, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, although these people have characteristics that might mark them as “Romantic” as well. And then there are a lot of scholars who label themselves as Romanticists or eighteenth-century scholars but end up writing on a lot of the same people. In terms of what specialization they affiliate themselves with, it could have gone either way. So people sort it out and make do with a little bit of confusion.

Here’s what litlove has to say about her experience with literary categories:

… at my university (which is considered very old fashioned) we teach literature in centuries. It’s always a messy distinction because inevitably they blur together at the edges, and when we decided to split the C20th into two halves it took us a series of five meetings to agree where the borderline should fall!

To which I say, five meetings? Were there any fistfights?

But that’s all stuff that concerns academics. How scholars think about literary periods makes some interesting stories (i.e. the confusion over the Romantic period has a lot to do with opening up the canon so that scholars write on novelists and playwrights from the period in addition to the poets, who fit the definition of Romantic [if there is such a thing as an agreed-upon definition of “Romantic”] better [because, after all, the definition was made for them]), but I’m also interested in how these categories can help (or not) the general reader who doesn’t need to stake any claim on a time period or take on a label of specialist in such-and-such, and who doesn’t need to divide up the curriculum in centuries or some other time marker.

You all had some great stuff to say about this:

As far as designating literary periods goes, I personally find them useful to a degree. As long as they are used to describe the predominating mode of writing at the time it is beneficial, but as soon as they are turned into something less permeable or used to purposely exclude, then I think it does a disservice to authors and readers. [Stefanie]

I know things are not always easily and neatly categorized, but I sort of like to do so–it is interesting for someone like me not familiar with these periods to see how the novel evolved. [Danielle]

I find the idea of quantifiable differences between 18th and 19th century novels an interesting one. But, thinking about it further, I don’t think distinctions can be made easily. Literary tropes are so amorphous, and literary influence so widespread that I can only begin to speak about it in terms of changed and changing social environments and mores. [Victoria]

But each and every book exists as the still centre of a small tornado of influences and intentions, and I guess it’s good practice to remain to true to those rather than the overarching themes of the century. [litlove]

And I agree with it all. Litlove’s metaphor of the tornado is particularly pleasing and apt, and Victoria’s word “quantifiable,” used to think about differences in time periods, raises interesting questions about the type and degree of difference. I’d love to know about quantifiable differences. Danielle points out the usefulness of categories, while Stefanie rightly argues that categories should be permeable. The categories are useful, and they are deceptive. Establishing categories and understanding the ones that scholars and readers have worked with in the past seems most useful for someone just starting to study literature as a student or someone who is a general reader (not aiming to make a living out of it in some way) and who wants to understand what he or she is reading a bit better. Understanding the eighteenth-century helps tremendously when trying to understand Jane Austen, for example. And I think knowing something about modernism can help a reader understand Virginia Woolf. I take great pleasure in this kind of thing because I like order, and I like lists (for example, when the teacher says, “these are the main characteristics of Romanticism. First …”), and I like being able to explain things to people and categories help with this tremendously.

But I also get a kick out of breaking down the traditional categories. They are arbitrary. Why end a literary period just because a century ends? In this respect, having a “long eighteenth century” that overlaps with and completely subsumes Romanticism, although Romanticism continues to exist alongside it, makes a lot of sense. If the literature isn’t neatly divided itself, then why should the categories be? Why can’t we have eighteenth-century scholars who specialize in Jane Austen and Romanticists who specialize in Jane Austen? (Well, okay, the problem is they go to different academic conferences.) And I’m only talking about dates here. There’s also the question of nations. I’ve been writing about the eighteenth century, specifically the eighteenth century in Britain. But what about the period in America? In France? Studying literature from only one country can lead to a pretty narrow and inaccurate view. To understand the Enlightenment period in Britain, it helps a lot to know what is happening in France. To get early American literature, you have to know something about writing in England.

For the general reader, while the categories are useful, I think it’s best to learn about categories while keeping in mind that they are flawed – to learn about them but not to believe in them fully or trust them. So if you want to study postmodernism, please do, and have fun, but remember that Tristram Shandy is one of the best examples of postmodernism there is.

And I haven’t even gotten to the question of the differences between 18C and 19C novels. That’ll be for another day.

I am about half way through Colette’s book My Mother’s House and Sido and am enjoying it very much. It’s made up of short vignettes, usually about 4 or 5 pages long, each telling a story or developing a theme about Colette’s childhood, her house, her mother or siblings, her friends. They are beautifully written, at least they are in my translation, meditative and thoughtful and atmospheric.

One of the most interesting chapters so far is the one where she describes her childhood reading. Colette captures the magic that books can acquire when one is young and the way one remembers this magic:

After all these years, I have only to shut my eyes to see once more those walls faced with books. In those days I could find them in the dark. I never took a lamp when I went at night to choose one, it was enough to feel my way, as though on the keyboard of a piano, along the shelves. Lost, stolen or strayed, I could catalogue them today. Almost everyone of them had been there before my birth.

This reminds me of the shelf of “classics” my father had, on a wall of bookshelves in my parents’ bedroom. Here is where I found the great Victorian novelists and the great 19th-century Russian novelists, where I picked up books such as War and Peace that were beyond my reach at the time but struggled through them anyway, and surely learned a lot about reading in the process. I think my first experiences of reading things beyond “children’s” or “young adult” books came from what I found on this shelf.

And it was, appropriately enough, high up on the shelves, above the stacks of science fiction and fantasy my father reads, as though my father were making a statement about their relative worth by placing them there, even though he found, and finds, great enjoyment in reading the fantasy books. He remains devoted to his 19th-century novels as his “serious” reading. There is something almost archetypal about raiding our parents’ bedrooms or private libraries for reading – about venturing into an adult world where we don’t truly belong but are preparing to enter. I know there are a lot of novels that describe how the young characters learn things – both useful and frightening – about the adult world in this way. I’m reminded of Charlotte Lennox’s book The Female Quixote where the main character Arabella reads romances from her dead mother’s library and discovers a very complicated legacy. We need our parents to help us make sense of our reading, and yet, when they don’t, interesting things happen.

Colette writes about this kind of reading too. Her father did not want her to read Zola and locked his books away, and Colette rebels. She asks her mother to give her the “safe” Zola novels but even this isn’t satisfactory:

She gave me La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret, Le Docteur Pascal, and Germinal, but I, wounded at the mistrust that locked away from me a corner of that house where all doors were open, where cats came and went by night and the cellar and larder were mysteriously depleted, was determined to have the others. I got them. Although she may be ashamed of it later, a girl of fourteen has no difficulty, and no credit, in deceiving two trustful parents. I went out into the garden with my first pilfered book. Like several others by Zola it contained a rather insipid story of heredity, in which an amiable and healthy woman gives up her beloved cousin to a sickly friend, and all of it might well have been written by Ohnet, God knows, had the puny wife not known the joy of bringing a child into the world. She produced it suddenly, with a blunt, crude wealth of details, an anatomical analysis, a dwelling on the colour, odour, contortions and cries, wherein I recognized nothing of my quiet country-bred experience. I felt credulous, terrified, threatened in my dawning femininity. The matings of browsing cattle, of tom cats covering their females like jungle beasts, the simple, almost austere precision of the farmers’ wives discussing their virgin heifer or their daughter in labour, I summoned them all to my rescue.

And this brings us to one of the other big themes of the book: her feelings about her femininity. But that’s a post for later.

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.