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I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time.” Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”
I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
This is a country that likes confidence but despises hubris, that associates the “nose in the book” with the same sense of covert superiority that Ms. Winfrey’s mother did. America is also a nation that prizes sociability and community, that accepts a kind of psychological domino effect: alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any
For many years I worked in the newspaper business, where every day the production of the product stands as a flimsy but eloquent testimony to the thirst for words, information, experience.
There was good reading, and there was bad reading. There was the worthy, and the trivial. This was always couched in terms of taste, but it tasted, smelled, and felt unmistakably like snobbery.
Reading has always been used as a way to divide a country and a culture into the literati and everyone else, the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi. But in the fifteenth century Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so began the process of turning the book from a work of art for the few into a source of information for the many. After that, it became more difficult for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books, to seize and hold reading as their own. But it was not impossible, and it continued to be done by critics and scholars.
Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The
We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print.
Mockingbird. Reading is like so much else in our culture, in all cultures: the truth of it is found in its people and not in its pundits and its professionals. If I believed what I read about reading I would despair.
But even in such primitive form, the writing down of symbols told of something hugely and richly revolutionary: the notion that one person could have a thought, even if that thought was only about the size of his flocks, and that that thought could be retained and then accessed—rethought, really—by another person in another place and time. The miraculous and transformative quality of this was immediately apparent to some and denied by others:
Reading became a democratic act, making it possible for the many to teach themselves what the few had once learned from tutors. The president could quote Mark Twain because he had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the postman could understand the reference because he had read it, too. The Big Lies of demagoguery required more stealth and cleverness, for careful reading of books and newspapers could reveal their flaws to ordinary people. Not
books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.
Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.
And the truth was that I probably could have gotten a column out of most of my phone calls, determined as we all were to explore, analyze, and understand our own lives through conversation. Perhaps my editor understood intuitively what I came to believe when I considered the abiding interest that so many women have had in reading fiction (and writing it, too): perhaps, as a group, women are more interested in deconstructing the emotional underpinnings of other people’s problems, of parsing relationships, connections, and emotions, of living emphatically. Kafka
Perhaps women feel more of a need to escape their own lives and take up those of others than men do.
women seem to see reading not only as a solitary activity but as an opportunity for emotional connection, not just to the characters in a novel but to those others who are reading or have read the same novel themselves. We pass on beloved books to friends, discuss them on the phone.
But none of these others can be conjured up exactly as they were. A book—the book that was, for some reason, the book—can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.
To end a novel with an exclamation point—how audacious I found that!
As for casual acquaintances, I do not care if they read it or
The despotism of the educated was in full flower: there was a right way to read, and a wrong way, and the wrong way was worse than wrong—it was middlebrow, that code word for those who valued the enjoyable, the riveting, the moving, and the involving as well as the eternal.
But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated, and that some of them are not addressed by Homer.
Too much of that discussion concerns itself only with the cerebral and not with the emotional. Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychosocial one.
“This unusual book,” it reads, as though no more specific adjective were available, “may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart—but you will never forget it.” And, of course, that is how Salinger’s novel has been thought of since it was published in 1951: not in terms of its literary merits, but as a book that has enabled generations of adolescents to feel more like human beings and less like visitors from another planet. Scarcely anyone reads it after age twenty-one, which is irrelevant, perhaps even desirable, to readers under the age of eighteen who find in it proof
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Parents who have opposed it most frequently complain that it shows a complete disregard for the authority of adults. And indeed it does, which is why adolescents, whose need to disregard the authority of parents is deep and real and transient, perennially place it on their list of favorite books. It challenges the established order, as do many great books—as do many of the books on the banned books list.
so can a book be personal, political, and entertaining, all at the same time.
As someone who reads the same books over and over again, I think Ms. Paterson is wrong about that, although I know what she means. I have sat on the edge of several beds while Green Eggs and Ham was read, or recited more or less from memory; I read A Wrinkle in Time three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn’t bear for it to end, wanted them all, Meg and Charles Murry and even the horribly pulsing brain called It, to be alive again as they could only live within my mind, so that I felt as if I killed them when I closed the cover and gave them the kiss of life when my eyes
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And I think I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am. For some of us, reading begets rereading, and rereading begets writing. (Although there is no doubt which is first, and supreme; as Alberto Manguel writes in his wonderful A History of Reading, “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading.”) After a while the story is
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There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read. “The rest you learn from books,” the novelist B. J. Chute, my senior writing instructor at college, said after she had taught us to send out submissions in a manila envelope, with a SASE for the inevitable rejection.
Why would anyone aspire to be president of the United States or of General Motors if they could write like D. H. Lawrence instead? That’s what I remember thinking.
She concluded that the process of scrolling down, reading in a linear fashion, on a machine she associates with haste, were all antithetical to reading for pleasure. “The screen,” she says, “turned me into a reluctant reader.”
The scrolling of the screen had not been the equivalent of turning the pages. A laptop is portable, but not companionable.
Both those in the business of books and those in the business of computer technology realized something that we readers apprehended most deeply in our hearts: that people are attached, not only to what is inside books, but to the object itself, the old familiar form that first took shape four centuries ago.
But a computer is no substitute for a book. No one wants to take a computer to bed at the end of a long day, to read a chapter or two before dropping off to sleep. No one wants to take one out of a purse on the New York City subway to pass the time between Ninety-sixth Street and the World Trade Center. No one wants to pass Heidi on disk down to their daughter on the occasion of her eighth birthday, or annotate William Carlos Williams on-screen.
And in his history of reading, Albert Manguel concludes, “It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.”
“I think it well behooves us to realize that we are not the first generation to fear the changes that seem to engulf us. Plato, lest we forget, argued in the Dialogues that if people learned to read and write, poetry would disappear, for it was only in the oral tradition that poetry could be preserved properly.”
That’s because people like the thing itself. They don’t eat mashed potatoes with gravy because they just need to be nourished, but because mashed potatoes and gravy are wonderful in so many ways: the heat, the texture, the silky slide of the gravy over your tongue. And that is the way it is with books. It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm.
Books are the means to immortality:
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
A special thank-you to teachers and librarians. If not you, not me.
