by Pamela Paul
“She was coming out of the toilet stall,” I said.
Truthfully, seeing this apparition from my childhood inner world also had an almost stupefying effect. What could I say to her that hadn’t already been said? It was hard not to be struck into dumb silence. The day after I told Beatrice this story, she and I were running errands on the Upper West Side when whom should we see but Judy Blume rushing up the sidewalk; Beatrice also went nearly speechless with shock. This time, not wanting to let her down, I stopped to say hello. But Blume had just gotten a manicure and so Beatrice couldn’t get an autograph then either. For both of us, Judy Blume retained her status as a star at somewhat of a remove.
I’d met other authors before I started working at the New York Times Book Review, but this was under markedly different circumstances. As a freelance writer, most of the other writers I’d known personally were far below the ranks of Hitchens and Rushdie and Blume. We were more observers than participants and most of us were still just starting out. Like all authors, we desperately wanted our books to be reviewed (but only kindly, please), and were cowed by those charged with such decisions. None of us had won awards or written bestsellers at the time; most of us worked in isolated pockets of the five boroughs, typing away at manuscripts around the edges of day jobs and other assignments.
This kind of lonely work wasn’t always easy and it certainly didn’t feel glamorous. Writers often prefer to write alone but adore complaining together. And so a group of us banded together and met once a month to do just that. There was no need for us to do any reading or writing for our meetings; what we needed was commiseration.
We called ourselves the Invisible Institute. That’s how we felt, and to a certain degree that’s how we wished we could be if it weren’t for the fact that we simultaneously wanted people to read our work. Each of us had at least one book or contract under our belt; even so, we were far from sanguine about the process. One woman had seen her book of war reportage cranked out by a major publisher and left to wither on the back shelves with nary a bookstore reading or review. Another saw her book “orphaned,” the term used to describe what happens when an editor moves to another publishing house, leaving books in progress in the hands of a different editor, one who may hate the subject matter, dislike the author personally, or simply have no time to work on it. The Invisible Institute author in question was orphaned again, and again.
Here was a place to share those tales of woe. If a member’s article or book was overlooked or insulted, we were all on his or her team against the forces of darkness—editors who didn’t e-mail back when you proposed a story idea, assignments that went to other people, proposals that were rejected. There are all kinds of things to feel bad about when you’re a writer, from poorly attended book parties to no book parties, from books hidden in the back of the store to books not even stocked in the store, from bad book reviews to no book reviews, and writers are notoriously sensitive creatures. But we Invisibles knew we were also lucky. Many writers toil away unpublished for years and our work was at least getting out there. Even so, most of us were working double and triple jobs, pumping out stories about eye cream to pay for stories about health care or teaching three classes on the side or producing radio pieces for scant wages. Writing doesn’t pay, with the average fee per word lower today than it was in 1970—without being adjusted for inflation. We leaned on one another heavily in what felt like a precarious situation.
What could be more consoling than to know you weren’t the only writer out there plagued with doubt, envy, hard-to-articulate yearnings, and plain old nerves? I was never going to leave the Invisible Institute, ever. But once I became editor of the Book Review, I had to. I’d joined the other side and could not in good conscience or without conflict of interest continue on their team. The Invisibles threw me one last dinner party and then went on without me; no doubt I am now held accountable for any negative or nonexistent reviews among their members.
Basically, this made me a traitor. At least, I feel like one. As the editor of the New York Times Book Review, I now know whether my friends’ books are being reviewed before they do, and whether the review will make them cry. Having cried over reviews myself, I also know exactly how that feels. Yet here, on the other side, my priorities have to be different, no matter how much I appreciate an author as a reader or as a human being. I can’t help when a less than favorable review comes in, nor can I ensure that the editors handling books written by my friends will find them worthy of assignment. At the Book Review, we can cover only about 1 percent of those books published in a given year. It’s often a very tough call. Like all book-review editors, I necessarily have to view books as something to be sifted through and sorted, wheat separated from chaff, galleys tossed into dumpsters, unreviewed books sold to booksellers.
The process echoes those painful inventory nights, tossing stripped books into the garbage at B. Dalton, only now I’m the one ordering the books dumped. And so it goes. The Book Review is meant to serve readers, to point them to the most important and best-written books of the season, and to preserve the opinions of our critics. While worthy books are overlooked all the time, I have to keep my sympathies and sorrys to myself.
That’s not my only betrayal. Sometimes it is now I who “strip” books out of my life. I finally own so many that on occasion I turn to my collection and, as if on Tinder, scan my eyes over the shelves, swiping left on books that I then peel away from their companions and set aside for donation—to a library, a school, a friend. Getting rid of books, harshly brushing them away in favor of other titles, something I never thought I’d do. Where is my loyalty? My devotion to the book, to all books?
It’s jarring to remember a time, not so long ago, when all I wanted was to own those books, to be among the writers who wrote them, to be a part of this world, a hope so inarticulable, so fundamental, so all-important that I could barely admit it to myself, let alone to other people. For a long time, I tried to content myself with reading other writers; I didn’t quite realize I’d become one.
Now that I’m a writer as much as a reader, I realize the two aren’t so different after all. This isn’t to say that there aren’t exceptional writers or that being a writer isn’t an achievement, but rather that the achievement is more common than I’d once supposed. Aren’t we all writers these days? We live through text. With our status updates and our e-mails, many of us spend our days writing down more words than we speak aloud. Anyone can write a book or post a story and find readers. Even those whose book reviews live exclusively on Amazon or Goodreads or in diaries or in the text of e-mails are still active creators of the written word.
All of us are writers reading other people’s writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people’s words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn’t, but thank goodness someone else has.
Ultimately, the line between writer and reader blurs. Where, after all, does the story one person puts on a page end and the person who reads those pages and makes them her own begin? To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They’re also theirs.
This makes all of us spies among friends. When we read, we are spying on someone else’s imagination and inhabiting it; the authors and their characters are momentarily our friends, even if they betray us, or we them. Even if we dislike the book or give it a negative review or give the book away when we’re done. We peer into the lives they lived and the lives they conjured out of observation and inventiveness, dipping into them and then departing from their pages, taking with us what we will.
Epilogue
The Lives We Read
Because what people read says so much about them, I can�
�t help wanting to know what other people are reading. Most of us do this. We crane our necks into our neighbor’s personal space on the subway and pretend to tie our shoes so we can see the title that person is holding while standing in line. We try to decipher what’s happening on someone else’s tablet and iPhone. E-readers are especially noxious in their opacity. You want to blurt out, “Can you please just show me the cover? I need to know.”
This results in a lot of what-are-you-looking-at looks. Mind your own business. But in my case, at least, this is my business and I can’t. The moment someone lets me into his or her home, my gaze veers to the bookshelves, forming impressions of people I don’t know and discovering unknown aspects of people I thought I knew well. Is the person an alphabetizer? Does she have a thing for historical novels? Do the books appear suspiciously on display for show—distinguished spines and ornamental jackets, artfully selected for the color of the binding, nary a bad movie guide in their midst?
It’s hard not to wish that everyone—my friends, my family members, writers I know and don’t know—would keep a Book of Books. What better way to get to know them? You could find out so much if you could get a read on where other people’s curiosities lie and where their knowledge is found: What are you reading? And what have you read? And what do you want to read next? Not knowing the answers to these questions means you miss a vital part of a person, the real story, the other stories—not the ones in their books, but the stories that lie between book and reader, the connections that bind the two together.
And the stories that bind readers to one another. Reading may be solitary, but in the aggregate books unite us. Stories allow us to share other people’s experiences communally—across schools and cities, countries and languages. When a child in Uganda reads the same life-changing novel that the thirtysomething lawyer recalls reading while growing up in Illinois, a connection is established across class, culture, and time.
I’d like to think others would get as much out of a Book of Books as I have gotten out of mine. For each of us, the books we’ve chosen across a lifetime reveal not only our evolving interests and tastes, but also our momentary and insatiable desires, the questions we can’t stop asking, the failings we recognize in ourselves at the time, and the ones we can see clearly only years later. We pass our lives according to our books—relishing and reacting against them, reliving their stories when we recall where we were when we read them and the reasons we did. Most people, I’m convinced, are not just searching for cocktail-party fodder when they ask what someone else is reading. They are trying to figure someone out, to get to the bottom of him. They are looking for clues.
My clues are all here, on these pages. On the pages of my Book of Books. When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.
Acknowledgments
With my previous books, I had many people to thank who helped me with research and interviews. This book is different in that I only had to look inward and “interview” myself. I still needed lots of help. I want to thank everyone involved in the editing and publishing process: Paul Golob and Gillian Blake, Tracy Locke and Patricia Eisemann, Maggie Richards and Stephen Rubin. This is my fourth book with Henry Holt and they make clear why editors and publishing houses matter. I couldn’t be more grateful for the passion, intelligence, and dedication they bring to the hard work they do. Thank you to my agent, Lydia Wills, the best, who found me this editorial home.
At the New York Times, I am lucky to have a boss who loves to read and loves books. My gratitude to Dean Baquet, who always asks, “What are you reading?” and almost always has a better answer than I do. I want to thank all my colleagues at the Times, especially at the Book Review. I get to spend my days with the smartest book people I know. I feel like I have the best job in the world, and I have Sam Tanenhaus to thank for that opportunity.
Some poor souls read this book in embryonic form and I thank them for their forbearance: the extremely talented Trish Hall, my dear old friend Mindy Lewis, my mother-in-law, Debra Stern, my still best friend, Ericka Tullis, my brilliant editor friend Vanessa Mobley. I must take a moment to say that my colleagues and friends Susan Dominus and Sarah Lyall are geniuses and I feel fortunate to know them and to have persuaded them to read this book. You couldn’t ask for more precise or insightful editorial suggestions. They know how not to make you feel bad about bad writing. They also are surely responsible for any stylistic flair on these pages. Please read everything they write.
I want to thank my family, especially my late father and my brother Roger, the big galoot. Here is what I say to you: E.
Michael, Beatrice, Tobias, and Theodore: The only thing I didn’t enjoy about writing this book was the time it took away from you. I hope it gives something back to you someday, because you are my everything.
Also by Pamela Paul
By the Book:
Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review
Parenting, Inc.:
How the Billion-Dollar Baby Business Has Changed the Way We Raise Our Children
Pornified:
How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony
About the Author
PAMELA PAUL is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees book coverage at the Times. She is the author of By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. Prior to joining the Times, she was a contributor to Time magazine and The Economist; her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, and Vogue. She and her family live in New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction: Why Keep Track?
1 Brave New World: You Shouldn’t Be Reading That
2 Slaves of New York: The Literary Life
3 The Trial: A Book with No Ending
4 Catch-22: Never Enough
5 The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Required Reading
6 Into That Darkness: Voyeurism
7 The Grapes of Wrath: Among Readers
8 A Journey of One’s Own: Books That Change Your Life
9 Anna Karenina: Heroines
10 Swimming to Cambodia: The Company of Narrators
11 Wild Swans: Inspirational Reading
12 The Secret History: Solitary Reading
13 The Wisdom of the Body: In Love with a Book
14 The Magic Mountain: Different Interpretations
15 Autobiography of a Face: On Self-Help
16 Flashman: I Do Not Like Your Books
17 The Master and Margarita: Recommendations
18 The Hunger Games: No Time to Read
19 A Wrinkle in Time: Reading with Children
20 Bad News: Tearjerkers
21 Les Misérables: Why Read?
22 A Spy Among Friends: Other Writers
Epilogue: The Lives We Read
Acknowledgments
Also by Pamel
a Paul
About the Author
Copyright
MY LIFE WITH BOB. Copyright © 2017 by Pamela Paul. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Kelly Blair
Library of Congress CIP data for the print edition is available.
e-ISBN 9781627796323
First Edition: May, 2017
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