Category Archives: Reading

A Reader’s House

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My wife and I bought a new house in July. We had a perfectly nice, though somewhat shrinking, home where we had lived for 14 years. We were doing some long overdue updates and repairs on our house while looking around at other houses with one eye. We had a list of “perfect home” requirements and figured it would take several years to find the right place. It took three weeks.

And so, in the time that this blog has been quiet, we have been updating, repairing, packing, moving, unpacking, arranging, rearranging, hanging and generally settling in. We have found a very comfortable, happy space for two adults, a 7 year old, five dogs and all their accompanying stuff.

We moved from our somewhat shrinking house to this house because it met the criteria of our ideal home list: large deck high off the ground with no ground access; big, flat backyard; large fenced area for dogs; lots of sunlight; big open kitchen with island; guest bedroom plus playroom plus office; living room with no television; more than one bathroom; walk-in shower; Chronicles of Narnia-sized closets; and garage all situated on a dead end lane. We found it quick, made a deal and moved. It happened fast.

And that now that we are more or less situated, I have a confession. This may or may not surprise my wife. I think it will not.

All of the things on this list are terrific. I like them all very much. I bought this house because it is a reader’s house. I bought it because there are so many nooks and places a person can settle down with a book and get lost for a few minutes or a few hours. I had one favorite reading space in our old house. There was a big, oak chair in my overcrowded office where I could sit and read. It was a tranquil place but not near any windows so all the light was artificial and night was the best time to enjoy.

Our new home has windows and glass doors through which sunlight pours. We’ve put couches and chairs near all of these, creating little sunlight wells. Most days I feel very much like a cat, slinking from sunny spot to sunny spot finding places to stretch my bones. In the two months we’ve been here, I think I have read as many books as I read all of last year.

Place, I think, is very important to readers. And it doesn’t have to be fancy or spacious. It just needs to be yours. There is palpable magic inside a reader’s house. You can walk through and feel those sanctified spaces, consecrated by time, attention and hours of holy focus, where the mind and heart are blended and unseen doors stand ajar in the places where mundane reality has been made thin through the constant press of imagination. This same phenomenon happens in good libraries and bookstores. That chill that arrives when you stand in a place and can feel, whether it is silent or not, a kind of vibrating hush, defining the space. This happens sometimes in church, often in the woods, but always in the sacred spaces where imagination has been loosened and allowed to prowl free. Amidst the noise and confusion, the complexity and turmoil, there are still sacred places in our tired and busy world. You will find them when you look. You can start by looking in a reader’s home.

Alone, Together: More Thoughts on Reading

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My post this morning missed a more elementary, obvious fact about why The Storied Life of AJ Fikry works so well. It is commonly believed that reading is a solitary act and that readers are, for the most part, selfish with the time they devote to their inner selves. There is, I think, a belief that too much reading carries a person far away from the company of others and makes that person a stranger, alienated from the fellowship of friends, neighbors and fellow citizens of the world. There is an expectation that too much reading makes a person strange, unfit for healthy relationships and the regular responsibilities all decent people must bear. In this belief, reading is a kind of madness, a flaw in one’s nature that separates us from other, more productive pursuits.

And yet, the story of AJ Fikry is exactly the opposite. Reading carries him into closer communion with others. His reading makes him brave. His reading widens his heart. His reading is not selfish. For Fikry, reading is an act of generosity as he constantly shares what he has read and relates his own reading to the lives of others. He reads to bring others in, not to push them out. His reading is a kind of communion, an act of radical belief in the importance of ideas and virtues and commitment. Fikry creates a family through books. He finds the people who best understand what he is about. He broadens the lives of others who felt their lives too narrow.

And it is exuberant love of sharing that makes his reading worthwhile. It isn’t an act of self focus that consumes the reader. The life of the generous reader is made larger through the time spent with books. Though sometimes, it is true, we may read to escape, we never read to make ourselves feel alone. We read to help keep ourselves together.

Why We Read: A Review of Gabrielle Zevin’s Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

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I just finished reading an extraordinary book, Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. This post isn’t going to be a clever literary analysis or full of especially keen observations on the mechanics of a well-made story. I won’t gush on and on about the exquisite pacing, the truly-drawn characters and the subtle, satisfying twists that make this book so enjoyable. We can talk about all that some other time.

This is a thank you. I am grateful to the writer who made this story and to the friend who suggested I read it. This book found me at exactly the right time.

I am 40 years old. I am a reader. Since the age of 7, there has never been a time when I did not have at least one book in progress. There have been months and years when I have read less and more slowly than I had wanted. There have been entire years recently when I have felt my attention too scattered and dissipated to really enjoy my reading, but I have read anyway because it is a thing that I do. Reading is who I am.

This book reminds me of why I read.

I meet A.J. Fikry and recognize two things. 1: Individually, our lives are unsatisfying because they are too short and too limited. 2: We make our lives satisfying by connecting with other people. It is only by connecting our lives to other lives that we get to experience the richness and power of our purpose.

This is why we read.

We read to connect. We read to connect to the characters inside the stories. We read to connect to those people who have lived before us in other times at other places. We read to connect to the strange folk who spend their lives making up stories. We read to share ourselves with the world and to let the world share itself with us.

Life is full of plot twists. I hope it does not spoil things too much to tell you that Fikry becomes a father even though he is entirely unprepared for the experience. His life has been narrowed by loss and disappointment. He learns to make his life larger again by sharing it with his foundling daughter, Maya and through her with more and more people. As soon as he begins to open, his life grows and grows.

The novel is organized, in part, around journal entries Fikry writes for his daughter, in which he shares thoughts about the books and stories he has read. Each becomes a kind of sign post for life. The books he has read interpret the many frustrations, challenges and triumphs that make up a life. Fikry gives his daughter a love for books. In that love, she is given all the tools she needs to live a purposeful, joyful life.

As a father, I am inspired by the extraordinary gift Fikry has given his daughter. My own daughter is seven. I want her to be brave and curious and kind. I want her to feel at home in the world and help others feel at home as well. I want her life to be an adventure, full of purpose and work that demands her best attention and effort. I want her to connect deeply, as I have, with the people with whom she will share this world and with the people with whom she will share her shelves.

I am raising a reader because the world needs readers. The world needs thoughtful, reflective, curious minds tempered by generous, tender, expansive hearts.

I am grateful to this particular story at this particular moment for helping me remember.

This why I read. The world requires it.

You Have to Eat. You Have to Read.

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There are a few inescapable requirements for life. You have to eat. You have to drink. You have to breathe. You have to read.

Just as the body needs food, water and oxygen to sustain the basic biological functions of life, the mind needs words, images and ideas to keep itself humming in a productive, coherent manner. This is especially true for people who want to write.

Time is precious. We constantly make choices about what’s valuable to us in the way we spend our time. I often find myself caught between two conflicting but complimentary urges: the urge to spend my time reading and the urge to spend my time writing. I can’t spend equal time with both and so, in general, I find myself doing one at the exclusion of the other.

Stephen King offers a lot of really generous, useful advice to writers in his book On Writing. This, in particular, has stayed with me: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

He’s right, of course. The art of writing is primarily an act of digestion. We have to eat to live. We have to read to write.

Looking back, I am astonished to find I only read 7 books in 2013. I read a lot of other stuff, too. Lots of articles, blog posts and miscellaneous stuff. That other stuff matters, but the truth is books are the best diet. You can’t write books, if you don’t read books.

I know this is true. I write well when I read well. And so, in place of a new year’s resolution, which I abhor, I am undertaking a project. I am going to read 20 books in 2014. I am also going to write as much as I can. I’m going to stop thinking about the two activities as competing joys. They are two sides of the same act. The eating and the energy. The inhale and the exhale. The words you receive and the words you share.

Here’s what I read in 2013:

Robert’s bookshelf: read

Cryptonomicon
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Welcome to the Monkey House
Player Piano
Nine Horses
A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement
A Feast for Crows



Robert’s favorite books »

Share book reviews and ratings with Robert, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

The Most Magical Time of the Year

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Just two more days until I’m on holiday. I get two weeks off for Christmas. This is my favorite time of the year. I’ll get to spend time with my family. I will eat too much. I will ruin my sleep schedule and completely lose track of time. I will read books in the middle of the morning, when my mind is fresh and eager for new thoughts and ideas.

I read best in the mid-to-late morning, but I don’t often get to read then. My reading time is usually pushed to the far edges of the day, when my mind is numb with sleep. When I read at the wrong times, I read slowly, gradually pressing my way through the pages one centimeter at a time. When I read this way, I get lost and confused. I lose the narrative thread and often find myself sidetracked. I don’t remember things as well and have to reread or just start anew in the middle of things.

When I read in the morning, my day has a kind of warmth. The words find me and follow me through the day. The story percolates in my head and I find it is my companion. The things I read are alive and vital and essential. Reading becomes an active thing. Reading becomes creative. When I read in the morning, I am making something, and the creative act sustains me.

I’m pretty tired right now and looking forward to some downtime. My head is a bit of a mess. Mentally exhausted. Funny, perhaps, that reading is the battery I crave when my mental reserves run so low. I’ve got the stack ready (virtual, for the most part). Just a few more days and I can dig in and destroy my time-sense. I can get a little bit lost. I’m ready to binge myself on books.

Not Now. Daddy’s Reading.

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I had a good Thanksgiving. One of the major pleasures of the long holiday weekend was the opportunity to read for several hours at one sitting on Saturday morning. That doesn’t happen too often. Between work, house and family, I usually read in short gasps these days. When I do read, I often find myself reaching for the kinds of things you read when your attention is frayed — blog posts, Twitter links, short articles. Nothing too taxing. The hard, long-form stuff gets pushed into my Instapaper account for later. Later never comes.

I am reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, a 900+ page wrist-bender of a book. This is the kind of book the Kindle was made for – light weight, easy page turning, no book mark to misplace.

Still, as I was reading, a part of my mind was busy wondering what my daughter thinks I am doing when I read the Kindle. I grew up loving books because my parents love reading. My dad read books and newspaper. My mom read magazines. I saw them reading. I saw the book in my dad”s hands. I watched him work his way through the pages. When he finished, the book changed. I could keep track of how fast he read, how quickly he moved through the pages.

My daughter can’t do that. She loves to read, but I wonder if, somehow, the experience of seeing me read on a Kindle or an iPad or an iPhone deprives her of some essential element that seals that love for reading. The outside of the book never changes.

Worse, when reading on the iPad, how does she know I am reading a book and not watching a video or playing a game or surfing the web?

It comes down to gestures and demeanor, I suppose. The act of reading is essentially a meditative act. The outward signs of the internal activity are steady, intent focus. I’m sure she can tell the difference from when I am reading and when I am doing something else. I wonder if seeing me read on a multipurpose device, like the iPad, diminishes for her that sacred sense I picked up watching my dad read. Or, if there is a sacred sense, if the positive feelings around that act will transfer to the device in general more than to the hidden object of my actual attention.

It is a bit maddening to consider.

I don’t worry so much about my daughter. She already loves books, both paper and virtual. I read in both formats often, so she knows books as objects are important to me. Still, I wonder in how many households will the love of reading become confused or conflated with the love of a specific device. In other words, will the tablet or eReader become fetishized in the same way that books are fetishized?

I had a terrific morning reading last Saturday. I read for a few hours, then played with my daughter, then read some more. Back and forth. Several times, she asked if I was ready to play.

“Not now. Daddy’s reading.” These aren’t words I say very often. Maybe I should say them more often. They are significant words which I think she will remember.

No worries. She didn’t feel neglected. “Okay,” she told me. “I’ll just grab a book and we can read together in our minds.” This was her way of saying we could each read our own books together in silence. I do believe this remains one of the main joys of human experience — the feeling that comes from sitting together in silence, enjoying one another’s company while swallowed up in the delicious isolation of your own books. It is a part of what makes libraries so comforting.

We spent the best part of our Saturday morning this way, she and I. I was reading my Kindle. She was reading a print book. We were reading together in our minds. I’m pretty sure everything is going to be okay.

 

Questions and Answers about Books I’ve Read

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Being a librarian, I spend most of my working day online — email, web searches, database articles, Twitter, Facebook, a few dozen blogs. Sometimes, really fun things capture my attention, like something washed up on the shore.

Today’s web gift was this Entertainment Weekly interview with Jonathan Franzen (“Jonathan Franzen on the Books He Loves and Loathes“). I enjoyed Franzen’s The Corrections and How to Be Alone very much. The interview is fun because it reveals Franzen as a reader to be a normal guy who likes Asimov but hasn’t yet actually managed Moby-Dick.

I like these questions so much I decided to have a go at them myself just for fun. Think of this as one of those silly games people play on Facebook, except interesting because it is about books.

What was your favorite book as a child?

That’s not so easy. All the books I read as a kid tend to wash together for me. As a kid, I loved the mere act of reading more than any one specific book. When I picture myself reading as a kid, I see myself reading The Black Cauldron series by Lloyd Alexander. I don’t remember specific plots, but I remember being completely captured by the stories, and I remember the look and feel of those books very well.

What is your favorite book that you read for school?

I remember reading The Sun Also Rises several times my junior year of high school. I was knocked out that the writing was so spare and there was so much dialogue. I knew there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that I didn’t really understand. I loved the way the story hinted at big, complicated, grown up things without coming right out and talking about them. That felt pretty true to life. The things people are willing to talk about are usually pretty trivial. If you listen carefully, people tell you more than just the things they want you to know. They end up telling you the things they need you to know.

What’s a book that really cemented you as a writer?

 Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson as a junior in high school helped me realize I could dress spiritual experiences up in words. It also made me comfortable with reaching for the big, vague ideas in my head and just keep turning them over on the page until I got the sense of what I was talking about. So much of Emerson for me is a blend between brilliance and bewilderment. He helped me learn how to toss it all in.
Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

I have read Stephen King’s The Stand at least 6 times. It is a totem for me. My original mass market copy fell apart so I got rid of it. The copy on my shelf today is the updated trade paper edition. I miss the mass market copy with the blue cover and yellow eyes. That book was my serious friend.

What’s a classic that you’re embarrassed to say you’ve never read?

I’ve never read The Red Badge of Courage. No one ever made me. Its not an easy book to just pick up and read if no one is making you.

What’s a book you’ve pretended to have read?

I nod sometimes and smile when people talk about Red Badge of Courage.

I have only read Leaves of Grass in snippets and snatches. I’ve read the whole thing in pieces but never in one continuous run. Still, I talk about it like a single, magical experience every reader should have. That’s not really being honest.

What’s a book you consider grossly overrated?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Don’t get it. Don’t want it. Way to many easter eggs hiding in Joyce’s work. A good book shouldn’t require a magic decoder ring.

T.S. Eliot is the same for me. To much work. Not enough substance.

What’s a recent book you wish you had written?

I was pretty knocked out by Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. He does some really tricky things in that story that simply amaze.

What’s a movie adaptation of a book that you loved?

I haven’t read Ender’s Game but loved the movie. I’m actually not sure if I want to read the book. I’m afraid it won’t live up to the film. I’m usually the other way around about these things.

What was an illicit book that you had to read in secret as a kid?

A collection of Greek and Roman mythology. It was illustrated with line drawing and photographs of classical statuary. All of the characters were naked, which my mother thought highly inappropriate for an eight year old. There was a conversation and it was decided that the text was suitable and that I wasn’t receiving any prurient satisfaction from the nude gods, goddesses and heros. Pretty tame stuff. Naked bodies were uncommon in my home. We didn’t even subscribe to National Geographic.

I realized from this small controversy that my mom couldn’t handle the more disturbing stuff I read later as a teen. I had to hide my Clive Barker graphic novels. They were everything bad — naked, demented and, occasionally, I suppose, depraved. I got them from a friend who got them from a comic shop in Nashville. They weren’t easy to get. I cherished them for the garish green sticker on the covers that read: “Not suitable for children. This is intended only for adults.” Super fantastic stuff.

What’s a book that people might be surprised to learn that you loved?

Native Son by Richard Wright. Not sure why, but people seem really surprised when I mention how much I enjoyed it.

If there were only one genre you could read for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I think I could satisfy myself by reading only science fiction from now on. The quality of ideas in good science fiction excites me. There’s no better way than science fiction to talk about the ways we live our lives today.

What was the last book that made you laugh out loud, and what was the last one that made you cry?

Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House has some wonderfully funny stories in it.

Room by Emma Donough choked me up a bit. I didn’t cry. If I did, nobody saw me and can’t prove anything.

What are you reading right now?

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Okay. That was fun. Now, its your turn. I’d enjoy hearing your take on any or all of these questions. Post comments here or blog them and post the link.

The Best Dads List

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I have a great dad. I hope you do, too.

So many of the values I carry with me come from behaviors and beliefs my father modeled. My dad taught me to be respectful, tolerant, and curious. He taught me to enjoy doing hard things, to set high expectations for myself and not settle for less than my personal best. He also modeled patience, but I’m not sure that one stuck.

I’ll write more about my dad in a later post. Tonight, I am thinking about great dads in literature. These are the dads we get to adopt from our reading. Aspirational dads who offer enduring examples of what it means to be a father.

Here’s the start:

  1. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird — He’s a obvious choice, I realize, but there is really no better example of a dad who is calm, rational and able to use the experiences of everyday life to create lasting moral lessons. Atticus is an exemplar for his kids. They don’t, of course, realize how special he is until they get some distance. When my daughter was born, a friend gave me a paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird wrapped in a homemade cover that read A Gentleman’s to Fatherhood. She was right.
  2. Oskar Schell’s dad in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — We never meet Oskar’s father. He dies in the World Trade Center collapse before the book begins. Still, the memory of his father’s life and the trauma of his loss motivate Oskar on a quest of discovery that brings him into greater awareness of the world and how it really works. Our fathers set us on paths to become the people the world needs us to be.
  3. The dad in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — The world we knew is gone, destroyed by war and nuclear winter. Civilization has collapsed. The survivors are crazed, amoral cannibals bent on destruction disguised as survival. The father shephards his son on a walk across the country in hopes of finding some better life. There is no reason to believe they will find it but the father keeps them alive, moving forward and, above all, protects the innocence and hope in his son because he knows his son is going to need that hope to help build a new world. In the event of nuclear catastrophe or zombie apocalypse, this is the kind of dad I hope I could be.

That’s my start. Let’s make this a team sport. What dads from literature inspire you?

 

Marginalia

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A colleague I respect very much died a few weeks ago. He taught history. We were friendly but never close. We rarely found ourselves in the same place at the same time. I never made an effort to correct that. I should have.

He loved books and the way books carry ideas from one person to another across time, across space. He loved books as physical things and wrote in the margins of the books he was digesting.

Before he died, he left a few books from his collection to my library. I am reading one of his those books now because I want to enjoy something that he enjoyed and want to benefit from the notes he left behind.

I am reading Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a personal favorite of mine, though I sometime find it difficult to explain why. My daughter, Emersey, takes her name from Emerson. Emerson was the subject of the first lecture I ever gave. I was a senior in high school.

Emerson is difficult. I struggle with him a lot. Sometimes he writes in oversimplistic aphorisms. At other times, he relishes long, overly florid abstractions that do not connect to reality. He is optimistic but often lapses into outright manic idealism. His philosophical work with Plato, Kant and Hume is beyond my grasp. His religious ideals are just plain silly.

And yet, I am drawn to Emerson. I keep pressing my mind against his prose, believing there is something profoundly rewarding at work in there. Emerson celebrates direct experience. He requires scholarship to have a purpose. He sees poetry and art as a vehicle of transcendence. He understands that religious salvation is about the here and now, rather than the hereafter.

We are kindred spirits, though we do not yet understand one another very well. I keep working with him, and he, I believe, with me.

We are both prone to extremes. We both struggle with ideas as a necessary precondition for experience. We both find refuge in nature but believe our times are moving toward an extraordinary manifestation of greatness. We are patriots in that we believe the genius of our country is in finding and feeding the spirit of creativity and innovation. Emerson wrote during the ascendancy of this genius. I am uncertain if I am writing closer toward it apex or if that spirit has crested and now makes it slow descent.

Emerson wrestled with the ancients — Plato, Jesus, Socrates.

Emerson speaks to the 21st century. I am not yet sure what he is saying.

All of this sits in my mind as I read through the pages that my now gone colleague also read. I see the lines that he underscored and the words scribbled in the margins. He read this book mostly as an attempt to tie earlier influences to Emerson’s later works. He notes passages from journals that correspond to later essays. His notes are not profound. They are thin and few. They stop 105 pages in.

I want to ask why he stopped making notes there. Did he not finish beyond that point? Did he stop making the connections solid with notation? Later this evening, I will have read past the point where he stopped keeping notes. I will keep going, enjoying this one last connection we share to a thinker we both admire. It is enjoyable to hold this book he held and consider the value of things he thought worth noting. I will keep going and I will want to ask him, why this note? Why not this?

I will want to ask him why he thinks Emerson matters and what we should be taking from him that can be a benefit to everyone else.

But I can’t ask these questions. It is one way conversation. I have his book, scratched partway through with marginalia. It is insubstantial, not enough. I am on my own to explore this life that matters, for some reason, to both of us. I wish I could explain better why I feel such a responsibility to work with Emerson and why it is a comfort to know that, at least for a little while, I had a companion traveling the same road.

Books are not sacred objects

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I am a book person. For a long time, I believed that meant I was ordaned by Powers Greater Than Me to save books. I rescued books from free bins. I bought them at yard sales and flea markets. I stole them from basements. Wherever books were being mistreated and neglected, I was there to play rescue. I took these sad, saved creatures home, placed them on my shelf and never read them.

These were anxiety-ridden years. I was wracked with guilt at the numbers of grubby-spined tomes on my shelves that would never be read but yet could not be removed. I had to keep these these shabby miscreants because I “might” someday read them. I now understand that this condition is called hoarding. It is a psychological disorder that is treated by a regimen of meds, therapy and appearance on a cable TV reality show.

Now I am recovered. I have found balance, and I can once again enjoy books. I read eBooks. I can stop reading books that I am not enjoying and, sometimes, recycle the paperbacks. I give books away. I sell them. Sometimes, yes, they go into the trashcan.

I love books because of what’s inside. I cherish ideas. I adore controversial opinions well-stated. I like to wear other people’s lives and walk around in their borrowed skins for a few hundred pages.

Books are made to be used. Reading books makes my life larger, better.

But simply having books for the sake of having them is a bit of a burden. Much better that books be put to a good use. And so I find myself defending the idea that books, once no longer read, are great fodder for doing crafts. I’m not crafty but I appreciate the clever soul who can fashion a Kleenex holder, lamp or work desk out of old, unused books. Books worth reading should be read because reading is a sacred thing. Books that are no longer worth reading should be used some other way.

Rebecca Joines Schinsky says all of this much more eloquently that I am able. Read her blog post “Books Are Not Sacred Objects“. Spread the word. If we can get past the idea that all books are sacred objects, we might be able to convince non-book people that reading is a pretty great thing.