In an essay at the TLS, Ian Sansom gently mocks bookish New Year’s resolutions. Some readers bustle pompously, declaring it the Year of Proust – and perhaps getting a book out of it. But Sansom’s plans to devote the year to Dickens, Henry James, or Simenon always fail. By February, he is back to reading what he likes when he likes, “in as disorganized and haphazard fashion as always.”
I belong to the club of reading by whim – but I embrace it. On New Year’s Eve, I, too, make grandiose plans, then abandon them in favor of independent reading. I might declare it a year of reading Jane Austen – which is every year – or The Year of Finishing Proust – because I got stuck halfway through the fourth volume. But then I pounce on Nobel Prize winner Anatole France’s Penguin Island, so smart and witty that all else must be put on hold.
Our hectic over-planning in modern life may be due to the ravages of the internet. In the days of dial-up, online book groups throve but had a greater air of spontaneity. We voted every month on the book we wanted to read, rather than waiting for someone to choose it for us. Nowadays, at blogs, vlogs, and other social media, there are countless organized reading events, which seem popular, if lonely. There’s nothing that dashes hopes of intelligent conversation like a Twitter discussion of War and Peace.
What is wrong with reading on one’s own, according to whim or mood? Why must everything be planned or directed? Does it matter if I read Annie Ernaux this month or next year? Does Gogol have to be on my reading calendar – say, for July 9 – or can I read him whenever? And will I get my knuckles rapped if I take a day off to read a Mrs. Pollifax mystery? (Yes, probably.)
In a house full of books, it is unnecessary to make reading plans.
I am speaking of Two Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson, the new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When I read a review today in The Guardian, I was very excited. Oh, my God, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I said ecstatically to my husband. Could we go to the bookstore and pick it up?
Unfortunately, we could not, because it will not be published here till August. This happens so often. Why can it not be published at the same time as the UK version?
Well, I can always reread Barrett Browning. I have a pink copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems, a little the worse for wear for being in the mudroom for ten years. I paid 40 cents for this at the Planned Parenthood book sale.
Of course we all read Robert Browning, but Elizabeth Barrett used to be overlooked. And yet readers everywhere know the opening line of her famous sonnet:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Time to beat the gloom of February by reading some of her poems.
AND NOW FOR LITERARY LINKS.
Will Self is writing a series of essays on reading for Lit Hub. And I think you will be especially intrigued by the autobiographical bits in the first one, How Should We Read?
Raised by bookish but undisciplined parents, I always felt I had just about the best introduction to reading imaginable: my American mother’s modish novels and zeitgeisty works on psychology mingling on the shelves with my English father’s English canonical tastes and his motley collection of philosophical texts (many of which came from my autodidactic grandfather’s own extensive library). And there were plenty of other books as well—acquired by my brothers or me at second-hand stores and flea markets. Nobody was remotely precious about these volumes: they were there to be read not revered. And since my parents had also decreed—in order to inculcate us with their own bookish tendencies—that we could have no television, reading was pretty much all we had to do: there was no street life in leafy middle class English suburbia in the 1960s, unless you liked watching lawns grow.
2. This week, the TLS published a review of Dorothy Whipple’s Random Commentary, first published in 1966, ” an assortment of writings from note-books and journals,” and reissued by Persephone.
Are you a fan of Dorothy Whipple? Persephone has been reviving her novels for years. I have enjoyed some of them, though I am not a mad Whipple fan. I remember reading a more or less “Virago vs. Persephone” article (in the Guardian?), in which one of the Virago editors said they never crossed “the Whipple line.” Well, Whipple is middlebrow, but some of the Viragos are too.
Anyway, the reviewer says,
We first meet Whipple in the mid-1920s. After her first love was killed during the First World War, she marries her employer, Henry Whipple, the director of education for Blackburn. She also struggles to establish herself as a writer, failing to sell a short story for five years. Modesty regarding her writing abilities and gentle wit suffuse these diaries. Whipple repeatedly berates herself for not working hard enough. Procrastinating, staring out of the window, or poking the fire – anything but writing: “When I have time to work, I don’t want to. When I haven’t time, I want to”. Whipple begins new drafts before finishing previous versions. Working on one book, she always wants to be working on another; “shaping and polishing” is her favourite part of the writing process. When her first novel, Young Anne (1927), is accepted for publication, the relief is palpable: “I’m not lost any more”.
Have a great reading weekend, whether you choose Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Dorothy Whipple, or someone else entirely.
Emma (Kate Beckinsale) and Harriet (Samantha Morton) in “Emma” (1996).
I have not been on vacation this year. Wow, am I ever cranky! I would love a vacation for a day at a library. That’s how desperate and cooped-up I am.
Are you a fan of Jane Austen’s saucy heroines? Do you feel more like one of them now that you take walks for “fun”? Emma is my favorite–the most controversial heroine. To those who dislike Emma, all I can say is, I empathize with her fantastic misreadings of character, because who wouldn’t live in a fantasy world if she had to take THE SAME WALK EVERY DAY?
So why don’t I stop walking and go somewhere in a car, train, or plane? A trip to California, or is it under lockdown again? (I checked, and it is.) Or to New York, which is the most expensive, exhausting, and crowded American city. Do I really enjoy masked glamour and sophistication? Somehow the vibe isn’t right. I’d be tired before I even got to the Strand.
Oh, she’s so cowardly, you say. We’ve been on so many adventures this year! Some of you spent spring break at Yellowstone Park, where the sewer analysis proved you’d been pissing and shitting Covid virus. Others spent summer vacation at Black Lives Matter camps, or waving guns at the governor of Wisconsin for imposing lockdown. And my favorite rockin-vacation is the Sturgis motorcycle rally. Think of the Covid spread! And think of the articles I could have freelanced! I don’t have a driver’s license, but I bet somebody would have let me drive a motorcycle in Sturgis!
Meanwhile, enough about vacation. I know you want to know what am I reading.
I gave up on Angela Thirkell’s Marling Hall. Though it is mildly funny, it sags in the middle. Darn, Lettice isn’t going to marry David Leslie after all, and the other guy is too bland. It is a short book, so I’ll probably finish, but why? Time’s a-wastin’! If you want to read Thirkell, I can tell you honestly that her ’30’s novels are better than the later ones. She wrote one a year, like her character Laura Morland, and they vary in quality. After a while she gets her own characters mixed up.
I read parts of Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, an earnest, well-written book by Nicola Gardini, translated from Italian by Todd Portnowitz. Why did I pick this one up? Susan Hill recommended it on a Best Books of the Year list. I assure you it is a lovely, enthusiastic book, but it isn’t quite for me because I am already a Latinist. Gardini explains in the introduction that he wrote it for people who may have studied Latin in high school or college and liked it then, or for those who are simply curious about it. This is a book I would recommend to my students.
And what’s on my bedside table? Please, God, help me choose a cozy mystery. Do I want a Michael Innes, a Josephine Tey, something in Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series, a Robert Barnard, or maybe an Amanda Cross?
Staying home is a small price to pay for safety.It is like having a bodyguard, only it’s not human: a house, a rented room, an apartment, a geodesic dome, whatever shelter we have. Here’s a typical day in the spring of Covid-19: we read our books, check the news, watch TV, check the news, clean the house, check the news. It is a privileged boredom. Think of the homeless. Think of the emptying food banks.
But everyone is in shape, finally! Whenever we’re claustrophobic, we go outside. The parks, of course, are closed, so when a friend snuck into an empty park to play Frisbee,the police sent him/her home. And here’s a very strange story: a mall outside of Omaha claims it will open next week.I joked, “We’ll be there.”
Business Insider says, “More than 13,000 Americans died last week from COVID-19, surpassing past weekly averages for other common causes of death like heart disease and cancer.”
Let us hope coronavirus goes away soon.
Fortunately there are still good books to read.
ANTHONY BURGESS’S ENDERBY NOVELS. This quartet of comical novels, Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, and Enderby’s Dark Lady, is delightfully quirky. I urge you to read them if you need light relief. Burgess tells the story of Enderby, a dyspeptic English poet who writes poetry in the lavatory, frequently using the toilet paper roll as a pencil holder and writing on toilet paper. In the first novel, he is fatally seduced away from his lavatory writing by an ambitious woman, Vesta Bainbridge, whom he unhappily marries–it ends badly. In the second novel, OutsideEnderby, which I just reread, he has supposedly been cured of poetry by a psychiatrist: he has metamorphosed into a bartender named Hogg. When a pop star, Yod Crewsley, celebrates publishing a book of poetry at a party at the bar, Enderby is astonished to realize the poems are plagiarized: he had composed them while living with Vesta, who is now married to the pop star. And then a disgruntled former manager shoots Crewsley, leaving Enderby with the smoking gun. His flight from the police to Tangier is hialrious, and at least his poetic muse speaks again in the muddle that follows.
The third book is equally funny, as I remember, but I am pretty sure I haven’t read the fourth. It is Burgess’s convoluted, poetic language that makes Enderby stand out from other satires about writers. And, let’s face it, what is a funnier subject than a poet? I do love Enderby.
Enderby’s poems are stunning, too.
LOUISE ERDRICH’S new novel, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN, is partly political, partly a poignant tribute to the resilience of American Indian identity. Inspired by the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, a chief of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, it tells the story of a tribe in crisis and their political organization to prevent Congress from disbanding them and taking their land in the 1950s.
There are two main threads: the hero, Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman at a factory, organizes the fight against termination. Thomas is charming, funny, shrewd, and spiritual: he has encounters with a snowy owl, a ghost, and spirtis in the sky. The other thread follows Pixie (Patrice), Thomas’s niece, a very smart high school graduate who is a skilled worker at a factory and determined to rise through the ranks. But life is a struggle:she supports her mother and younger brother financially, and plays the masculine role in the family, chopping wood, hunting game, and contriving to clothe and fee them. The whole family grieves over the disappearance of Patrice’s older sister Vera, who has disappeared in Minneapolis. The fight against Congress and the search for Vera are skillfully intertwined.
Gorgeous, lyrical writing, resilient characters, and a narrative interwoven with magic realism, ghosts, and unexpected events.
You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee (Don’t have to live like a refugee)—Tom Petty
Are you a refugee from February?
I’ve devised a perfect escape plan.
WHAT TO READ:It’s cold, so go South. The critics and I esteem the elegant prose of James Wilcox, whose nine quirky novels, set in the mythic town of Tula Springs, Louisiana, never fail to make me laugh.In Modern Baptists, the first in the series, Mr. Pickens, the middle-aged manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, is stoically facing what may seem insolvable personal problems.His half-brother, F.X., a failed actor and drug dealer, has been discharged from prison and has moved into Mr. Pickens’s den; Mr. Pickens has a crush on hisnew employee, Toinette, and steals her watch as a joke, but now she has reported it; he has a mole shaped like the state of New Jersey, which may be cancerous; and his mother, a senile resident of Azalea Manor, mistakes him for a gentleman caller and also asks him to install a Coke machine in her room. Wilcox writes spare, witty, perfectly-shaped sentences, and the humor in Modern Baptists is endearingly cozy, as well as offbeat.
WHERE TO GO:I like a good travel magazine this time of year.At Forbes, Katherine Parker-Magyar writes about “The Top Six Travel Destinations To Visit In Winter 2020.”“From Hummingbird Highways in Central America to snowcapped deserts in Central Anatolia, read on for the top six destinations you should visit this upcoming winter.” The photographs areheavenly.
WHAT TO WEAR:Naturally, it’s best to wear timeless classics: turtleneck, cozy sweater, corduroy pants, moccasin slippers. The look says “Preppy Refugee from the ’80s,” but you’ll stay warm. And you might try slightly more fashionable outerwear: swirl out the door in a stylish Shawl Wool Blend Winter Coat (I saw it at People magazine), or that less complicated garment, the Pea Coat. I bought my pea coat at the Army-Navy store, but you can get yours at The Gap or L. L. Bean. (Consult The Preppy Handbook for more fashion advice.)
Biking in the snow.
WHAT TO DO:So many fun things to do!Cross-country skiing (fun, I hear, though I can’t keep my balance)! Bicycling in the snow (I did this years ago, but it’s much safer now because you can buy special snow tires)! Check out Time’s list of “the 11 New Books You Should Read in February” and tread one of them.Or binge-watch Black Books, my favorite bookish TV series. Then there’s always Mahjong…
Reading is in a decline, according to a survey by Pew Research. The NEA and Gallup polls have done similar surveys with the same results. I am reluctant to believe them, because I know so many bookish people. That said, the findings fit the dystopian gloom of the country.
Over the years I’ve known many ardent readers, but even more non-readers. In my experience, few people continue to read after college. The average English graduate immerses himself/herself in celebrity biographies and pop psychology, which I don’t call “reading.” And then on the opposite track are the brilliant writers who rarely read except for work.
If you’re reading this, you probably love reading.You are unlikely otherwise to make your way to Thornfield Hall, the manse of Mr. Rochester. If it’s been a while since you’ve read Jane Eyre, let me refresh your memory: Jane, a plain but exceptionally witty governess, fell in love with the Byronic hero, Mr. Rochester, who, it turned out, kept a mad wife in the attic.He liked to compartmentalize his women.
It was indeed very Gothic at Thornfield Hall.
Why do we women readers love Gothics so much?
We all know reading can be a thorny path. Non-readers misunderstand readers, especially us novel readers, because they consider us idle. Why don’t you get some fresh air?(Where is this fresh air, I often wonder.) Or, in a brutal relative’s words, “You’re a non-participant in life.” Now that was a blow.
Ah, the fresh air fiends.Sitting on the lawn looking at their phones.That’s magic, isn’t it?And then there are the lawn mowers, the chainsaw wielders, the leaf blowers, etc.The air is polluted.
Mind you, I spend a lot of time outdoors, though I always take a book along. I used to ride my bike 20-30 miles every weekend with my husband. One summer I lolled on benches during our breaks reading Constance Garnett’s translations of Turgenev on my Sony Reader. On a 90-degree day, I sat grouchily on a trail, reading Rudin and refusing to go on until my husband fetched Gatorade and power bars from a convenience store.These days, I take shorter rides with him, because I got tired of the filthy porta-potties along the way!
Dear Reader, I married a reader.For a short time, we even had a lunchtime book club. We alternated reading Joseph Conrad and Edith Wharton.
And recently we divvied up the 2019 Booker Prize winners: he thought Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other was just okay; I considered parts of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments brilliant, but I’m going to pass on whether it deserved the prize, since I didn’t reread The Handmaid’s Tale first.
And so reading is in a decline…or not. Surveys have a lot to tell us, but they may not be 100% true. In reading, women seem to have an advantage over men.According to Pew Research in 2019, women read more books than men. “The average woman read 14 books in the past 12 months, compared with the nine books read by the average man, a statistically significant difference. The median number of books read by women was five, compared with a median of three for men, which was not statistically significant.”
I guess that’s one up for us women, isn’t it?
It’s only a survey.
As Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Time, time time, see what’s become of me While I looked around for my possibilities.—“A Hazy Shade of Winter,” by Paul Simon
It is nearly the Winter Solstice–my favorite winter holiday. I much prefer it to Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Tonight it is bitterly cold, though, with a thin layer of snow just fallen, lights blinking on the battery-operated tinsel tree, cats batting at ornaments, and the scent of jasmine tea wafting through the house. So here I am on the couch, cozily scribbling about two tenses, the past and future as I wait for the future brighter days. (The present rarely exists.It’s much too shattering.)
Here are my plans for the Winter Solstice: Read less! Do something! Save the environment! Act now!
Or maybe I should do that the day after the Solstice.
Mins you, reading is my life. It is action. It expands our world, shapes who we are, and helps us survive the worst of times. It is also a drug: the best books lift us above the hysteria of the twenty-first century. I especially love the Victorians, who take their ethical dilemmas seriously, and interweave morals with the action of the plot. I personally can shrug off the end of the world if I have a copy of Bleak House. I’m stocking up on Victorians for 2030, the year climate change becomes irreversible.
As so often happens, I have read almost too much (150 books) this year, but I have also discarded tomes that started promisingly and then fizzled.I have a dismaying pile of partially-read new books on the nightstand:I gave up on most of these after one-third. When I tell myself to read less, I want the time back I lost on those books.
“Reading less” is a bizarre resolution, I know. I see a lot of: “Read harder!” “Read faster!” “Do the Goodreads Challenge!” That is so darling, so peppy, so optimistic, and yet so wrong.I have no team spirit.Yet it does kill time making checklists, photographing book hauls, scribbling in Planners, reorganizing TBRs, and photographing cats sitting adorably beside piles of books (my cats are not photogenic). And I consider those activities “reading less,” so I’m allowed to do them, even though I don’t join the team.
We who live at the end of the world don’t have much team spirit.Icebergs melting, impeachment hearings, the rollback of women’s rights, defunding Planned Parenthood, building the wall, Facebook scandals… we are exhausted. It is an angry age. Sometimes we wonder as we look around, What have humans contributed to the earth? Well… I’m not sure humans have done much. They can’t work together for change. It has been a chaotic year. But then we can’t see the future. Hope on, hope ever!
Well, it is officially tomorrow (after midnight). So I guess I’d better get ready to save the world.
And here is the video of Simon and Garfunkel singing “A Hazy Shade of Winter”
This afternoon I spent two hours reading a book.You know how I know?It’s the influence of the internet. Everybody tracks the numbers online:calories, carbs, steps, and, most important, hours spent reading. They use apps; I’m doing it in my head.
Since I got Wifi, I have read hundreds of thousands of book posts and professional reviews. Some are brilliant, most disappointing. I thought I would like being acquainted with all these readers. But guess what? It often turns into a challenge-by-the-numbers–a bit like paint-by-numbers.
Or is it all in my head?
This time of year, everybody calculates the numbers.The New York Times posts “The 100 Best Books of the Year” and the critics’ “10 Best.” Before New Year’s Eve, all of us bloggers will post our 10 Best of the Year. At Bustle and Book Riot, writers are also worked up about numbers. They lament they may fail to meet their Goodreads Challenge goals, and urge each other to read The Grinch Before Christmas and other picture books to get their numbers up.
I spent a week reading and marveling over Dombey and Son (900 pages), while others read it (or perhaps skim it?) it in a day.
And if they say it on the internet, it must be true.
The odd thing is that in real life I read more than most people. I never thought, Oh no!I only read two hours today! The year I read 170 books, I glumly told my doctor it meant I no longer had a life. He told me to stop tracking the numbers.
The reading life has changed with the advent of Twitter and other social media. (That is hardly original, but true.) Ten years ago, I looked forward daily to long old-fashioned narrative posts from Yahoo groups on Trollope, Dickens, Austen, and other Victorians. Some of the members were common readers; others were intellectuals; all were well-read. The emphasis was on close reading, not facile reading. But people got older and retired, or went back to work. Some of these groups survive at group.io, but the Goodreads and Twitter groups cannot replace those that folded.
But I do wish I were like Thomas Hardy, who read six hours every night, according to one biography. Yeah. I could do that!
Will they get off the phone to read David Copperfield?
The other day I blogged about a teacher who claimed in a post at a Millennial blog that she hates the classics.Not only does she loathe Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Bronte, but she believes that Thomas Hardy wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the seventeenth century.
I wish I hadn’t read this woman’s boastful declaration of ignorance.Why ? Because I do not want to be the kind of person who despises the younger generation.
“This is the end,” my husband said, laughing.
It is, though we laugh. We dismiss this problem from our mind, because it is not our line of work.
This problem of barely literate, proud, classics-bashing students is becoming the norm, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Scholar, and The New York Times. We have all read about students who demand “trigger warnings” and decline to read books on the syllabus that may trigger bad memories. (That makes for a lighter reading load, doesn’t it?) And if I may interject something controversial, we all have been (choose one or more) cyber-bullied, sexually harasssed, threatened, beaten, mugged, raped, or traumatized by war. Reading great disturbing literature can even be therapeutic.
Nowadays, it is worse, he says. Instead of just making phone calls, students write 3,500 texts a month and take countless selfies. He says, “ I disallow screens in my classes and make freshmen write papers by hand, preferably in cursive. Between classes, I sit on the quad and count the kids rushing from one building to another as they focus on that tiny screen to see what monumental things have happened during their 90 minutes offline.”
In The American Scholar, Paula Marantz Cohen, dean of the Pennoni Honors College and professor of English at Drexel University, writes about teaching a 10-week one-credit course on Dickens’s David Copperfield. Most of the students read very little, but committing to one long book a semester gets them to engage with a classic. She is proud of the success of this program and has expanded it. She wrote in 2016, “A filmmaker colleague will teach John Ford’s classic exploration of racism, The Searchers, in the summer, and an art history professor will teach Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, paintings that depict the evolution of surgical procedure, in the fall, when they will be hanging together in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Again, sounds like a light load, doesn’t it? But many students admitted to Cohen that they thought David Copperfield was the magician! Now they’ve read the book.
Bravo! Whatever works.
N.B. There have always been mediocre, even bad, teachers. I do not mean to idealize the teachers of my generation. During my teaching days, I once sat in on a college composition class in which the students were asked to do two things: free writing for fifteen minutes (most spent it surfing on the net on their computers) and then the teacher went around the class and asked each student to identify the beginning and end of a paragraph in an essay. No discussion of the essay, mind. Just look at the indentations. Surely we weren’t first-grade prodigies, but we learned about paragraphs from the Dick and Jane basal reader!
Mind you, I read a lot, but I can’t read a book a day. And yet I am hooked on Jo Walton’s column at Tor about her monthly reading. Often she reads 30 books in a month, and her musings are fascinating. In July, she read “just 14 books.”
Actually, “just 14” made her human. Much as I love her writing, it is impossible to keep up with her reading. I had read “just 13 books” in July, which I thought a respectable number, since it included a seldom-read Latin oration and a big novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
More and more people these days write about how many books they read and how many pages an hour. These stats became popular, as far as I can tell, in the 21st century. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, a bibliomemoir about reading a book a day to cope with grief, Nina Sankovitch informs us that she could accomplish this feat because she reads 75 pages an hour. Wow, that is a lot of pages! And then while I read her reviews I kept calculating how many pages she read per hour, how many hours a day… And that was not not the point.
This challenge started four years ago, when I was working two jobs that required a lot of time and physical presence, but not a lot of brain power. I wasn’t reading as much as I used to. I wanted to read, but I was just tired and overwhelmed. So, being the stubborn sort of person that I am, I decided the best way to force myself back into reading as a habit and hobby was to read 30 books in a short amount of time.
Is Courtney a superhero? When did she shower? But I must interject that I will never, as she suggests, add picture books to a TBR stack so I can say I have read 30 books in a month. That way madness lies!
Katie at Books and Things on Booktube recently posted a fascinating video, “How I Read As Much as I do.” She reads during her commute to her publishing job in London (one hour each way), reads books for work, and listens to audiobooks while she walks, shops, or cleans. Sometimes she and her boyfriend listen to audiobooks together. (Awww… I never listen to audiobooks, but I’m relieved that I can keep up with Katie’s reading.)
Although I’m “a big reader,” as we used to say, I am astonished by the common reader’s obsession with numbers. Some years ago, I read an interview or article in which Ron Charles, editor of the Washington Post Book World, and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda discussed their reading habits. Both said they read 20 to 25 pages an hour. (But where is this article? I can’t find it.) They read, they think, they take notes…and they pay attention.
We’re so used to being tracked now–steps, calories, book challenges, clicks on the internets–that we don’t even question whether the data is meaningful.
The internet brings people together, but it adds up to a lonely scene.
