by Sara Nelson
So that’s how I came to spend my last official week of my book-reading year with nothing to read. Instead, I endured the usual jokes from my nephew about the time I forgot to put the flour in the peanut butter cookie dough, and went head to head with my mother, who, while Liza and I were out at the store, took it upon herself to reorganize the household refrigerator. And I have to admit, it wasn’t so bad. For once I even could see the wisdom in Leo’s response to all those Japanese-American books I tried to get him to read: maybe for just a little while I didn’t need to read books that would explicate my life. I could just live it.
Besides, there were plenty of stories and characters right in front of me at the Christmas Eve dinner table. There was Mom, who by example and recommendation had made me into the person I am. There was Liza, my lifelong partner in crime, without whom I might never have read Jane Austen and hundreds and hundreds of other books. And, of course, there were Leo and Charley, both of whom have been my affectionate reading foils for years, and who, for all their own needs and interests and schedules, only occasionally told me to knock it off when I nattered on about stuff they knew nothing about and about which they cared less. These are the people I read for, because of, and about, and they’re all here in front of me. Suddenly I shocked myself with a wayward, maverick thought: the question “So who needs books at a time like this?” actually crossed my mind.
But don’t worry, it didn’t stay long. By the time Leo and Charley and I had arrived back in New York, I was myself again. Did I mention that it’s three A.M., and I’m wandering my library in my pajamas, looking for something to read? Well, I am, and as always I’ve got some ideas. Maybe, I think, I should reread American Pastoral, the prizewinning novel by Philip Roth that I remember summing up, brilliantly, the experience of a Jewish-American family not unlike my own. But then, as will always happen if you wait long enough, the imaginary spotlight landed on an old book I read years ago. The book was Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, which, to many, may conjure up images of the William Hurt-Geena Davis movie. To me it will always be a book about a bunch of kooky relatives adjusting to midlife; remembering the last few days in the kitchen in Georgia, I suddenly feel particularly close to one of Tyler’s characters, the sister who feels the need to alphabetize her canned goods.
I read just enough to get sleepy, and then I get up and go back to the bedroom, where Charley has wedged himself into the middle of our double bed and is now snoring lightly beside Leo.
Tomorrow I’ll go to the bookstore, I think.
Maybe I’ve finally rubbed off on Leo a little bit; before he went to bed, he asked me to get him a book.
He wants a copy of Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, he said.
It’s nothing I would have picked for him. But hey, it’s a start.
Epilogue
A few days after my reading year ended, I went to dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since around the time it started. We were having a leisurely drink at a bar, talking started. We were having a leisurely drink at a bar, talking over the events of the previous year, which in my case amounted to a lot of name dropping of book titles. Eventually, she asked me what I was planning to do next weekend.
“I think I’ll take Charley to the museum,” I told her.
“Natural History?” she asked.
“No, MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art,” I said. “He likes looking at the Pollocks.”
“Well, that’ll be fun: a quick day trip over to Queens,” she said.
“Queens? MoMA is on Fifty-third Street,” I said. Right around the corner from where we were sitting, in fact.
“Sara,” she said, looking mildly alarmed, “it has been closed for renovations for the past six months. All the exhibits are in temporary quarters in Queens. The debate over this has been all over the TV news and in the papers. A campaign for the new site has been plastered in the subway stations and on the buses. Where have you been?”
Where had I been? I preferred to think of the question as Where hadn’t I been? Since beginning My Year of Reading Dangerously, I’ve been to Vermont, Key West, Fire Island, and Atlanta, if you want names of places to which I’d taken trains and planes. But I’ve also been to nineteenth-century London and 1980s Wall Street and twenty-first-century heaven. I’ve met powerhouse newspaper editors, self-destructive drug addicts, charming and unscrupulous financiers, and a couple of adulterous wives. I’ve also spent a lot of time with the real and remembered people in my life: with Charley, and Leo, and my mother and sister and brothers and late father, and with many dear friends.
But there’s a lot I haven’t done, a lot of places I haven’t gone. I didn’t take a major vacation last year, and I saw only a very few movies. I went to the theater only once, when my niece Rosie was in town, and I obviously haven’t set foot in a gallery. To tell the truth, I’ve been lost in more than a couple of conversations with people who tend to make references to new restaurants, important magazine articles, and popular TV shows; can you believe I’ve never seen Friends?
Not that I’m complaining. I’ve lived the past year exactly how I’ve wanted to—between the covers of books and in the places in my head that those books have taken me. I’ve been agitated, excited, enthralled, annoyed, frustrated, and sometimes a little bored. But I’ve never been lonely. As my friend Bonnie pointed out on New Year’s Day, to read a book is to have a relationship. And I’ve had dozens of them in the past dozen months.
But maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’m now “done” with my project. Maybe it’s time to get back to real life. They moved the museum. What else happened when I was too buried in my books to notice? I know that Charley grew a couple of inches and mastered multiplication and that Leo finished a couple of extracurricular projects. I understand that George Bush is still president and that we’re on the verge of war. I’m aware that the magazine that employs me continues to publish and, miraculously in this terrible economy, has even grown. But I know, too, that a lot of other important things happened in the world and in my family’s life while I sat in my library in the middle of the night and read about other worlds and other lives.
That’s, of course, both the good news and the bad news about reading: it takes you away from, as a great writer once said, your “proscribed little here to a vast and intriguing there.”8 And while I certainly did discover, this past year, that there were all sorts of connections between my world and the ones that authors have been creating for centuries, there’s also a lot to be learned by taking a break, by closing the book and looking around at actual, not invented, people and places.
How was your year? People have been asking me lately. Did you enjoy yourself? Would you do it again? At first, I was as mystified by these questions as I was when they asked me how in the world I would ever do it in the first place. “Of course I’d do it again,” I say, if “it” means walking into a bookstore or a library or a friend’s house or an editor’s office and letting myself be called to by the piles of paper printed with ink. Obviously, I can no more stop reading that I can stop eating, even if the latter would be more beneficial to my thighs.
But maybe it’s time to slow it down a little, to stop, as Mitch Albom might say, and smell the roses and talk to the husband and watch some TV shows. Maybe it’s time to take myself off a schedule for a change. Maybe it’s time to take a reading break.
I set out to read “whatever I wanted” and ended up with a reading list I could never have devised. I couldn’t have predicted, say, that A Million Little Pieces would turn up at the exact moment I needed it, or that spending some time with my mother would reintroduce me to Marjorie Morningstar. I had all the best intentions: to read a lot of nonfiction, to pay attention to poetry, to fill in at least some of the holes in my education. But as you can see from these pages, and from Appendix B, I never got to John Adams, or to Keats; I couldn’t even finish Funnymen. For a contrarian and a control freak, realizing that even my preferred pastime was out of my conscious control was a mighty re
velation.
How was your year? people want to know.
“It was great!” I tell them. And it was. It was also complicated. I was all over the emotional map, and for every moment that was exhilarating, there was one that was frustrating. For every reading experience that was edifying, there was one that was elusive. And just as I thought I had a handle on what I was doing and how important it all was, I realized I was as clueless as ever.
They moved the museum.
A truly great writer would have known how to answer all those probing questions about the past year.
“It was the best of times,” he would have said. “It was the worst of times.”
Appendix A
What I Planned to Read, as of
1/1/02
Ever the planner, I sat down a couple of days before beginning my reading year and made up this list of how at least to start. I knew there’d be other books, but I meant to begin with some clear intentions.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was too young when it came out, in 1964, and skipped over it in college when tastes ran more to, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Cakes and Ale. My mother was a big Somerset Maugham freak, and I’d read Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage, so this one left a hole.
The House of Mirth. The homework I didn’t do in college.
A Tale of Two Cities. Ditto.
One Hundred Years of Solitude. The most important book for a Latin American Studies major to have read in the 1980s. I did my duty, but since I read it in Spanish, I didn’t retain all that much.
Madame Bovary. As an AP French student in high school, I’d had to read Balzac’s Père Goriot, but somehow was never assigned this classic. It’s probably just as well, since a woman I know who did read it in college French says that her command of the language was so sketchy that she never knew Emma commits suicide.
In Cold Blood. Never read it, never—if you can believe it—saw the movie.
Empire Falls. I’d started the Richard Russo novel when a publisher sent me an advance reader’s copy, but got waylaid with something else around page 75. By the time I got back to it, I’d forgotten what had happened so far, and besides, it had just won the Pulitzer and all that attendant hype.
Gravity’s Rainbow, because all so-called smart people are supposed to read Pynchon.
The complete, or almost complete, oeuvre of Philip Roth. He’s one of my favorites, and I haven’t missed any. I even liked Sabbath’s Theater. So sue me.
John Adams. Am I the only person in America who hasn’t read the
McCullough classic? I told myself I was waiting for the paperback, which has now arrived.
Some biography of Dorothy Parker, who obsessed me, as she did most would-be writers who grew up on The New Yorker.
Restoration, by Rose Tremain, because I loved her Sacred Country.
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. See Gravity’s Rainbow. Insert the word “hip” before “smart.”
Any early novel by Stephen King. Lots of people say he’s the most underrated writer around. Marty Asher, publisher of Vintage Books, told me King is this generation’s Maugham—too prolific and too readable to be taken seriously in his lifetime.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. A confession: I’ve never read John le Carré. Clearly, I need a reality check.
Snowblind, by Robert Sabbag, because it’s a classic piece of journalism about a cocaine smuggler and because Bob is one of my dearest friends. This is one of the few books I regularly reread.
Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth, a novel about Jewish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century that was rereleased a few years ago. A foray into my roots.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison, which it shames me to admit I haven’t read.
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, because I remain chronically, deeply poetry-challenged.
The Collected Stories of Alice Munro, because my mother talks about them all the time, except that sometimes she gets them confused with the works of Alice McDermott.
From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman, because my understanding of the Middle East is woefully inadequate.
Praying for Sheetrock, by Melissa Faye Greene, because six separate people have told me it’s an extremely important book.
The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron, because everybody, including me, has read Sophie’s Choice.
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, by David Nasaw, because a review called it “a grand American story.” And I’m a sucker for same.
Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, because I once lent it, unread, to an acquaintance and insisted on getting it back within the week so I could read it. And I never did.
Appendix B
What I Actually Did Read, as of
12/30/02
So did you make your book-a-week goal? people have been asking me. The real answer: Yes and no. Sometimes I read a book in a day. Some things took a couple of weeks. And some that I read I didn’t write about. The final tally: a lot more than fifty-two books, even if I can’t name absolutely everything I dipped into or skimmed through. Here, though, is a partial list of what I read that I haven’t mentioned elsewhere in these pages:
The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff, a historical novel about a sex change, which paved the way for a truly amazing sex-change memoir that is just coming out, called She’s Not There, by Jennifer (formerly James) Finney Boylan.
The Anatomy Lesson, one of the few of Philip Roth’s books I didn’t remember. I loved it, as usual.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, because the author is Key West-based, not to mention brilliant.
Loaded, by Robert Sabbag, the latest from my friend. Given the time constraints I chose to read this instead of Snowblind—again.
Random Family, by Adrian Nicole Leblanc, which in my opinion will become the There Are No Children Here of its time.
The Only Girl in the Car, by Kathie Dobie, a memoir about a promiscuous youth, spent in New Haven, Connecticut, a scene of many of my own crimes.
Cakes and Ale, by Somerset Maugham, which was as good as my mother always told me it was.
Dorothy Parker, by Marion Meade. It was as if I’d waited my whole life for this one.
Think of England, by Alice Elliot Dark, a disappointment after her amazing stories, In the Gloaming.
A Boy’s Own Story, by Edmund White, a reread, after my letter to Robert Plunket.
Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link, a collection of stories so bizarre and inventive I actually broke with tradition and read the whole thing.
Mary Higgins Clark’s You Belong to Me. What can I say? I had a long plane ride for business and thought I’d experiment with something from the mass market paperback rack. It wasn’t bad, although I didn’t remember much of it once I’d landed.
The Sisters Mallone, a novel by Louisa Ermelino. She’s a friend, but I would have read it and loved it anyway.
I Want That: How We All Became Shoppers, by Thomas Hine, a sociological examination of why we buy things. “Shopping has a lot in common with sex,” Hine writes. How could I resist that?
The Ice Storm, by Rick Moody, who gets a bad rap in the New York literary community these days. So maybe it’s not PC to say so, but I loved the novel.
Gentlemen’s Agreement, by Laura Z. Hobson. You know the Gregory Peck movie? I didn’t. But this is one of those books about anti-Semitism every postwar Jew is supposed to have read. It’s a little stylized and dated now, but still somehow appropriate.
The Spooky Art, by Norman Mailer. Not so brilliant as, say, The Executioner’s Song, but it’s essays, and he’s eighty, which qualifies him, ironically, as a dancing bear again. This time, he’s just an old one.
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, a surprisingly readable novel about racism and family in South Africa, proof positive that prize-winners—this won the Booker—are not automatically homework.
Honor Lost, by Norma Khouri, the
kind of true-crime even I can’t skip: a horrific tale of a contemporary Jordanian Muslim killed by her family because she loved a Christian man.
Joe Gould’s Secret, by Joseph Mitchell. Two essays reprinted from The New Yorker (twenty years apart) about a homeless man who might or might not have been a literary genius. Its special appeal to Liza and me is that it mentions one of my mother’s relatives, Eddie Gottlieb, a newspaperman who was a contemporary of Mitchell’s and of Joe Gould’s.