How Now Shall I Read?

In front of me are three books. One I’m halfway through, one I started last night, and one I plan to start soon. The first two I already like very much and the third I am almost sure I will like very much.

This is cause for a special gladness. When I am working my way through a good reading pile, I feel that I am at the most wonderful party: I want to talk with everyone before I go.

I know: the metaphor doesn’t make sense. A book is not actual company, not real conversation, which are immediate, responsive, and warm. And yet. If the book is well done—if it is any combination of considered and clear, graceful and true, funny and wise, urgent and heartbreaking—then it is not only like a monologue but like the best of monologues: a bridge between spirits, the expansion, somehow, of two selves. 

The words of any book that I love resonate in every corner of my brain. A billion synapses hum in perfect harmony. I want the feeling to last forever, and it seems the feeling could, if only the rest of my life consisted of reading books as good as this one. But the feeling doesn’t last, and I am, much more often than I’d like, in a kind of reading slump, alternately frustrated with the books (why aren’t they better?) and with myself (because I suspect it is not the books’ fault at all). 

It is actually that last parenthetical I am most interested in. While I am sure that my not being able to enjoy a book is sometimes either the fault of a poorly-written book or, more likely, a significant mismatch of interests, aesthetics, or expectations, I also know that at least sometimes, and probably more often than not, the problem lies with me. For example: once, I purchased a big, award-winning novel. I tried to read it—boring. It sat on my shelf for a few months. I tried again—still boring. It sat around again. I decided to try one more time. If I could replay the scene for you, you might hear an audible whoosh as I was (figuratively, but also kind of literally) swept away.

So I am convinced that, usually, the reader makes the book. As I prepared to write on this very subject, I came across a 1989 article by Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite, “The Virtues of Reading,” that takes a similar position. This excerpt in particular resonated:

It is best to approach books like people, not with preconceived demands but with sharpened attentiveness and a willingness to abandon ourselves to whatever they may bestow on us… But, alas, this attitude does not always preside over our encounters, because we are not always capable of maintaining our inner resources, so often discomposed, in a fit state of readiness. In times of unrest we turn to books in a disordered and agitated manner, angrily demanding immediate redemption—which they then forthwith deny us. 

Whoof—indeed. As someone whose “inner resources” are, most of the time, in some “discomposed” state, and who knows very well what it’s like to do things in an “agitated manner,” I know that I have asked too much of books. Flailing in a sea of anxiety, I have heaved my whole weight too quickly aboard the delicate craft of a book. Of course it sinks!

However, while I admire Gaite’s explanation (not to mention her prose), her point carries me (as it were) only so far. Yes, it is likely true that, with much focused practice and patience, I could read better and more consistently. It is also likely true that, by dint of growing older and continuing to read, I am developing more or less in that direction anyway. 

The problem with Gaite’s essay, and with other books and essays on reading I’ve encountered—and these are typically works by writers, extolling the virtues of reading—is that little or no attention is given to which particular books are to be read. Gaite does turn briefly to the “writer, whose prime responsibility is to… fight for an enthusiastic listener,” but her interest is in what writerly approach makes them most likely to fulfill their responsibility to a reader. Nothing is said of how a reader ascertains, for sure, whether they have failed in their unspoken contract with a book or whether a particular book simply isn’t worth their time.

I called this omission a “problem” with Gaite’s essay, but what I mean is it is a problem for me. Gaite knows what books she is talking about when she talks about reading being worthwhile; Gaite is a confident reader. I, on the other hand, am not a confident reader. I am predisposed, by my cultural and educational experiences, as well as by personal proclivity, to think that the books I read matter. That they make me, in some way, who I am. At the same time, I don’t know which ones will matter most, or in the right way.

After claiming a path as a literature major in college, I began to take reading more seriously. I intended to fill in every literary gap (I know—the hubris in thinking I could!). Henry James? Hadn’t read him, so I borrowed The Portrait of a Lady from the library. I tried many others, too, which I honestly don’t remember. I also don’t remember if I actually finished The Portrait of a Lady, though I think I did. What I do remember is the hum of guilt whenever I returned a stack of mostly-unread books. I was a reader, wasn’t I? So why was I more likely to go for a run in the woods than sit down and read on a nice afternoon? (Hindsight says it had mostly to do with the chemical effects of exercise on my anxiety-inclined brain.)

It is funny, but also kind of obvious, that I read with the most joyful abandon when I was a child, busy trying on all sorts of identities—basketball player, violist, poet. The stakes for failing in any of these practices were pretty low. Now that I have committed to reading as part of my identity, though, it’s easy for the fun to disappear. Moreover, I occasionally find myself needing to prove to other people that I am a reader—of the right kind.

So reading can be downright delicious—see the first few paragraphs of this essay—but it can also be fraught with frustration.

I polled a few reader friends to verify that I am not alone in my readerly hangups. To a person they affirmed one part or another of my experience: they, too, have had ideas about what they “should” be reading, but have also, often, struggled to enjoy or even finish those works. A doctor wrote about how she is inclined to think certain books will “make me more well-respected or more in the know, maybe more aware of important themes that could impact my professional abilities.” Sometimes, she said, the books fulfilled her hopes for them; sometimes they did little more than give her a title she could tick off in conversation. A graduate student told me she felt so obligated to read works associated with her area of study that she neglected more “fun” reads (“Did I spend that extra reading time reading extra history books? Absolutely not. I spent it watching reality TV and cheesy sitcoms”). A writer friend said that while he had worked to “relax the sense of guilt that comes so easily to me and just read what I actually want to read,” he is also acutely aware of “what I should read. I should read everything I would like to have read by the end of my life. If I would like to be someone who has finished Proust, at some point I need to do that. And better sooner than later. Yet, I do not want to be someone who is more focused on who he wants to be than who he is.”

Exactly. This essay is about figuring out how to read because reading matters to me, but at the heart of the matter is the tension between who I am and who I hope to be. Any practice that we care about has, I believe, this tension embedded in it. The second you identify yourself as a traveler you commit to a set of perpetually self-renewing questions about how and where and with whom and how often and in what way you travel. You are also committing to a lifetime of complicated traveling realities: there will be trips that you like but that ultimately won’t matter much, trips you struggled with but value immensely, trips you were right to say no to, trips you are glad you said yes to, and maybe even a particular trip you spend your whole life wanting to make, which also defines you as a traveler, even if—especially if—you never actually make it.

So much of the narrative we tell about the arc of a life has to do with figuring out the nouns associated with our names, but those nouns—reader, dentist, parent, botanist, restaurant manager—are actually the starting place, and not the end, of the journey. This fact can feel like a dilemma, an incomplete answer to matters I would like to be settled, but come to think of it, the reverse is more dangerous, a tidy ending, as false as it is forced, when there is yet more to be written. Or read.