“Antsy for adventure, I consider other ways to transport myself. I settle on a tried-and-true escape hatch, accessible to anyone with an armchair: reading.” – Melanie D.G. Kaplan, “Find your literary getaway.” Toronto Star, April 25, 2020.
“Reading is…going somewhere without ever taking a train or ship, an unveiling of new, incredible worlds. It’s living a life you weren’t born into and a chance to see everything colored by someone else’s perspective. It’s learning without having to face consequences of failures, and how best to succeed.” – Madeline Martin, The Last Bookshop in London.
As a lover of books, I don’t have to justify to myself the virtue of reading. Yet I always feel guilty when I spend a certain amount of the day just not doing anything but read. By removing myself away from reality & engaging my attention solely with a book on hand, am I simply trying to escape from the actual & meaningful way to live?
Just to placate my restlessness with this question, I look for books exalting the virtue of books & reading. I started with Christopher R. Beha’s The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me about Life, Death, and Pretty Much of Everything (2009). The great books he was referring to were the 50 volumes set of The Harvard Classics edited by Charles Eliot. He connected his dedication to read the entire set with some meaningful & tragic events in his life. It took him a year to complete his reading project which he described it as a “yearlong act of literary peak-bagging”. I thought about this 1-year deadline while I attempt to read all the books I have. But after a further reality check, I don’t think it is doable in my case.
Beha discovered that “one of the great pleasures of reading has always been that it created, long before the advent of Facebook, a virtual community that transcended time and place.” When he finished reading them all, he concluded that “nothing in my life is going to change in any visible fashion. But these books have helped me to find meaning in events – illness and loss as well as moments of great joy – that didn’t make sense to me. At the same time, life helped me make sense of these books. And so it will continue to go, for although I have read through the whole five feet, I’ll never be finished with them.”
Somewhat similar in thought, Nina Sankovitch, the author of Tolystoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading (2011), wrote: “For years, books had offered to me a window into how other people deal with life, its sorrows and joys and monotonies and frustrations. I would look there again for empathy, guidance, fellowship, and experience…I was trusting in books to answer the relentless question of why I deserved to live. And how I should live. My year of reading would be my escape back into life.”
One of my dream careers was to be paid to read, for example, as a researcher. I could sit for hours & nobody would question if I was working or not. I remember when I was still working in an Investment Department. There were several financial magazines being circulated around for the portfolio managers to read for current information. Being a manager in a support capacity, I put my name to be included in the circulation list. It seemed, though, that there was an unwritten rule on my case. I was only allowed to read them during lunch breaks or after-work hours. I found this silent protocol unfair, especially when I saw the big-wigs spend practically every morning of the working week reading the newspapers and the financial magazines. I started breaking the rule & began to read them whenever I got bored doing my regular work. One day my boss came to my office & saw me engrossed in a magazine rather than the computer monitor. She took issue & that ended my time as a paid reader.
As a professional reader, Maureen Corrigan in her book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading (2005), gave her insight of what books meant to her. She wrote: “I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or sometimes, profound epiphanies.”
Books help her face some of the realities in her life, such as when she adopted her Chinese daughter, Molly. She consulted several books to guide her through the adoption process. All the good things that Maureen Corrigan says about books should be taken with a grain of salt, simply because her financial being depends on her success as a book critic. But I still think she was on target when she said: “Words can summon up a skyline from the dark; they can bring back the people you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present.”
Perhaps the guilty feeling of spending hours of reading at home would have been mitigated if I did my reading in the library instead. It’s been my experience that this simple change in the scenery could truly bring about a difference in attitude. Whenever the wife wants to go out shopping, I drop her off to the mall while I go to the library to browse around. The wife doesn’t mind this arrangement since we invest our time in individual activities that we like. Then when we meet in our agreed-upon hour, we are both happy and have avoided the ever-present arguing if we had been together in the mall.
Another approach that I could use is to join a book club. In the Foreword of the 3rd edition of The Book Group Book: A Thoughtful Guide to Forming and Enjoying a Stimulating Book Discussion Group (2000) edited by Ellen Slezak, Margaret Atwood wrote: “Book groups are the graduate seminar, the encounter group, and the good old-fashioned village-pump gossip session, all rolled up into one.” Ellen Slezak thinks that “book groups connect people and show us we’re not alone in the books we read, in the troubles we face.” What I gather from the contributors is that book club has its merits and can affect your life socially, literally and to stretch it further, psychologically. It is a great outlet to share your thoughts with like-minded people who love to read. If a book club is run properly, its longevity can run for years. That’s why in her Introduction to the book, Ellen Slezak listed 10 ways to form or improve a book club. To name one: control your divas. These are the women who monopolize & control the club to suit their interests. As she referred to the divas, I conclude that all book clubs are dominated by women. In spite of that fact, joining a book club can be a worthwhile investment of my time.
One of the things my wife and I want to do in our retirement years is to travel a lot. We have seen several beautiful landscapes & sceneries across Canada and the United States. We also travelled as far away as the Carribean & the Hawaiian Islands. We haven’t been to Europe & it’s our life-time dream to see some of the countries there someday. In the meantime, I refer to another collection edited by Victoria Brooks, Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame (2000). To name a few of these famous people & the places they either lived or made popular from their books: Rohinton Mistry, author of Such A Long Journey, Tales from Firozsha Baag and Fine Balance, in Bombay (now called Mumbai), the essay written by Margaret Deefholts entitled “Chasing Ghosts in Bombay”; Ernest Hemingway in Cuba written by Victoria Brooks entitled “To Have and Have Not in Cuba”; and Ayn Rand in New York written by Eric Miller entitled “Top of the World in New York.”
As a travel writer, you need to have keen eyes for details & the skill to describe what you see realistically. Let’s quote Margaret Deefholts as she describes the area surrounding Flora Fountain in Bombay: “Sunlight falls in sharp, hard lances between the buildings, and the air feels like damp flannel against my skin. I seek a patch of shade under an awning to listen to the patter of hawkers selling everything from small appliances to ghetto blasters. The sidewalks are lavish with displays of ready-made garments and an assortment of plastic toys and cheap gilt jewelry. Cars, buses, scooters, and motorbikes roar around the fountain’s circle, and people swarm antlike along the sidewalks.”
Words when phrased beautifully can strike a chord of emotions that lingers deeply within one’s being. Though you haven’t seen the place firsthand, you can imagine yourself being there & soaking everything what the author sees. Such is the power of the written word.
Writers are readers too. As my final source of authority on the value of reading, I now refer to the master reader & also a prolific writer, Harold Bloom. In the Preface of his book, How to Read and Why (2000), Bloom immediately tells us why we must read: “There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? …Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”
Bloom then plows ahead & allows the reader to ride with him in his journey of interpreting the works of his favourite writers of short stories, poems, novels, and plays. His gold standard, of course, is Shakespeare. Because of his many years of reading thousands upon thousands of books, Bloom can easily pinpoint any allusions, symbols, implied meanings, or ironies in the stories. Take for example, Ernest Hemingway’s short sketch, Hills Like White Elephants. Bloom writes: “The story is beautifully prefigured in that simile of a title…White elephants, proverbial Siamese royal gifts to courtiers who would be ruined by the expense of the upkeep, become a larger metaphor for unwanted babies, and even more for erotic relationships too spiritually costly when a man is inadequate.”
I may not be able to pick up the metaphor being an amateur and a lazy reader who aims only in finding out what the story is all about. That’s why oftentimes I have that blank face upon finishing a short story or a poem. Reading to discover deeper insights is an acquired skill. Right now I cannot measure to Bloom’s standard. But I must try and carry with me Bloom’s motivating words: “I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, nor to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”
Reading, like religion, is hard-wired in our DNA. We do it every day, whether we like it or not. If we spend more time in it than any other human activity, it is because we simply enjoy doing it. There shouldn’t be any moral judgment why we do one thing more than the other. And if there should be it should rest on our own shoulders & just disregard anybody else’s opinion.
7 July 2022