Reading 101

A secret many writers keep close to the vest is how little reading of choice they do. Every so often it comes up, and is mentioned sorrowfully, regretfully, and in low quiet voices. What happened to reading? It isn’t how they—I—pictured life as a writer would be—with reading at the center of all other related activities? Wasn’t it reading, adoring reading, loving nothing more than a summer afternoon lying on your stomach on a sofa peering down at a book on the floor with a stack from the library waiting for when you finished up that one that gave you the idea of writing a book yourself? Wasn’t there something in grasping how a book made you feel that opened up the possibility of affording someone else that singular feeling too? Wasn’t there a moment when the book you were reading dissolved and you saw a whole other structure underneath it that made the book possible, and you wanted to build a structure yourself? Wasn’t there a book so wonderful you felt it with all your senses and the only way you could express how deeply you loved it was to write one in return? Reading, reading, reading aroused all those other feelings. Sure, there’s what happens and nature and big headline events, but they only seem like they might be a book after knowing and loving what a book is. Reading is the source.

I teach a course called Literary Fan Fiction that has deepened my understanding of not only the homage books pay to other books, but how many books are written because there is no other way to thank an author than by doing something in kind. This goes along with the idea Flannery O’Connor wrote so well about that the meaning of a story is the story. It does no good to say what it’s about or what it means. These extractions can’t do what a great story does, which is to get to you, get under your skin, maybe change you. Similarly, a comprehensive thank you note for a book might be a book informed by having loved the book. It might not be a one to one match, but a more general love of a certain kind or era of novel, or even the love of reading in general. Writers often have books they know they can read for a page or two that will fling them onto their own page. That’s the power of affinity and inspiration that can come of reading.

Why does the voracious reading of childhood stop? It’s pretty simple. When you are a child and not allowed to do anything or go anywhere or watch TV, you might figure out that if you ask to go to the library someone will take you and then you can load up on as much of other minds and worlds and creations as the library lets you carry away at one time. You can’t go anywhere but you can get lost. Books take you away. They give variety to the tedium of childhood. It feels almost like a trick—you aren’t allowed to have a friend over, but here’s E.B. White and Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte and Agatha Christie then, and there’s whatever kids read now. You figured out how to have a friend over.

One day, though, you’re allowed out of the house, you get a job, you learn to drive, and rarely have the aimless, helpless, long boring days anymore. Reading becomes an activity competing with many other activities rather than your one and only lifeline. Then if you get a job that involves reading and writing you have piles of reading you have to do, you read all the time in fact, so much that there isn’t time left over for the huge stacks of books piled up on your morose, ignored TBR pile. It’s not good. No one feels good about this. The mystery is not how you got into this condition, but what the remedy might be.

I don’t have an answer. I do know that I have been reading on this winter break and feeling the unique nourishment of being spirited away by the spirit of another mind. It’s a lovely interlude that I know can’t last. I’m not even going to make any resolutions about reading more in ‘23. I turned off my Instagram for the rest of break to stop the inundation of pictures of ambitious stacks. How times have changed. I used to be determined to read far beyond the suggested summer reading list. I wanted to read the most. I was that kid. Now I want to read this one book slowly, and read it again as soon as I finish.

I would have grown up anyway, but books made it look better up ahead.

Happy New Year, all.

I got a number of emails loving on the Marlon Williams video I posted last time. Here’s another. Enjoy!