On Reading

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

—Samuel Johnson

Many in education will frown at Johnson’s quote, as I would have as an English teacher. I made students read as a task and believed they profited from such reading, as did I, reading as a task in order to teach. Dr. Johnson was mistaken, but I appreciate the sentiment, because I’m retired now and may read what I like with no purpose in mind. It feels a bit decadent. A friend who retired from teaching before me said she was finally able to read in the afternoon without feeling guilty. I still don’t manage that most days, but my reading has expanded nonetheless. In the first two months of 2013, I’ve read:

            The Painted Alphabet: A Novel Based on a Balinese Tale, Diana Darling

            The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

            The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

            Manual para enamorarse, short stories by Mónica Lavín

            Notes from the Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys

            The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

            Maljuna Knabino, Agustín Cadena

None but the Spanish are new publications and except for them, the list is what happened to cross my path and hold my interest. The delightful Bali novel was a gift from a former colleague now teaching there. People have been telling me to read Joan Didion’s book for years. I was reminded of it by a Connie Willis interview in Talking Writing, an e-magazine. Thanks to Ms. Willis, I learned about Bennett’s witty, snack-size The Uncommon Reader in the same interview.

“Cloud Atlas” the movie led me to Cloud Atlas the book—a linking I usually do in reverse. Finishing it in December, I needed more David Mitchell immediately. Some writers affect me that way: I develop a craving for them. So I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s are the kind of novels that absorb me, linger hauntingly when I’m done, make airport waits and recovery from dental surgery bearable. Such are the comforts of reading by inclination.

In the reading as task category, the Spanish titles are by Mexican writers I’m translating. Reading in Spanish is not the effortless experience reading in English is. I stumble over unfamiliar vocabulary, or stop to ponder particular phrases, wondering how in the world I’ll render them in English. It takes a long time, but once I’ve translated one of these stories, re-reading it in Spanish becomes like reading something I wrote myself and have half-memorized.

Notes from the Hall of Uselessness is a chapbook in the Cahiers Series published by the American University of Paris. It contains two fine essays by Simon Leys, but I bought it for its pretty face, which arrested my progress in a Tattered Cover bookstore aisle. (Hello. Who are you?) According to the colophon, its text paper is Neptune Unique, dust jacket Chagall, and it’s set in Monotype Dante. It is also saddle-stitched properly, with thread. Such a book is a prime example of why I’ll never love e-books, although I read them on the plane. Oh, the tooth of the dust jacket, the elegance of the page design, the subtle chartreuse of small cap subtitles above black text! The chapbook’s title originates with Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi: “People all understand the usefulness of what is useful, but they do not understand the usefulness of what is useless.”

Maurice Sendak, explaining why he hated e-books, said, “It’s giving up a form that is so beautiful. A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.” Just holding this slender objet d’art makes me smile. May uselessness forever be cherished.

The Uncommon Reader posits the pleasant idea that Queen Elizabeth somehow becomes a reader in her old age. She has not read before, really, has had people to do that for her. In this fiction, becoming a reader transforms her as all who are devoted readers know it does. Her Majesty muses at one point, “I read, I think … because one has a duty to find out what people are like…” Before becoming a reader she’d been oblivious to people. Now she notices their behavior and moods. Reading offers vicarious intimacy with tribes other than your own, and hence, sensitivity to them. I’ve always thought we mostly bump about in discrete bubbles, unable to touch one another. Reading is a road through such isolations.

Partially raised in a small segregated Florida town, I had little contact with the black population and barely thought of them. They were beyond the glassy limits of my bubble. In 1959 at fifteen years of age I chanced into a second-hand store and found a faded copy of Richard Wright’s Black Boy. How’d I find such a thing in such a place? How’d I know to buy, for twenty cents, this treasure by a writer I’d never heard of? Fifteen, I walked out with that book in my hand and no idea how it would start fracturing my nascent worldview. I was blind and then, because I read, I began to see.