Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  It needn’t be either/or, though. You can listen to me and go read. I suppose the great advantage of having a conversation of this sort is that it gives us a chance to linger on the smallest details. Pleasure reading is a hungry activity: it gnaws and gulps at its object, as if desirous of swallowing the whole thing in one sitting. But we need to slow down, and at times even come to a dead stop, if we are to savor all the dimensions of a literary work. I wouldn’t love even the longest of these books as much as I do if they didn’t sustain my interest at the level of the sentence. The novel, it turns out, consists equally of the small and the large, the sentence and the overarching structure. Both must contribute to the ultimate design; both must be sufficiently good—sufficiently great, even with their flaws—if one is to find the novel satisfying. And this can be as true of translated works, where the sentences are those of, say, Alfred Birnbaum or Margaret Jull Costa, as it is of the books written in English.

  If anything, my interest in the sentence has grown over time. As a young person, I used to read more for plot and character: my eye would begin to drift toward the period if Dickens or James went on for too long. Now, though, I revel in the extra clauses and glide around the sinuous switchbacks with delight. I am better, now, at hearing the author’s particular, intimate, humor-inflected voice expressed in his idiosyncratically constructed sentences, and it is that voice which remains my constant companion throughout the book. Like Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager or Conrad’s linguistic mist, the companionable voice does not get between me and the characters; on the contrary, my awareness of its presence paradoxically helps me feel closer to them. Style, in this sense, does not function in opposition to content, but instead brings it forth and makes it real. In the novels I love, there is no battle between the individual sentence and the overall shape of the work, just as there is no conflict between authorial design and character self-determination. Each is the handmaiden of the other, and serves its designated part.

  I suppose this is even more obviously true of poetry. But I have just realized something, as I near the end of my self-imposed quest, where the pursuit of why I read has turned into a discovery of how I read. What I now understand is that I read poetry much as I read prose, and nonfiction in much the same way I read fiction. I read them all for meaning, for sound, for voice—but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself. The writer Harold Brodkey used to say, when he was alive, that literature consisted of one speaking voice plus one other genuinely existing thing. Or so I remember him saying. Perhaps I have simply amalgamated him to my own ideas, incorporated him into myself, as we do with our remembered dead. Perhaps he has amalgamated me, the way so many of my beloved writers, living and dead, strangers and familiars, have a habit of doing.

  Sometimes it is hard to keep in mind that they were all living, once—even Milton; even Cervantes; even Sophocles. We shouldn’t let time mummify them, as it tries to do. The best musicians, it seems to me, play Bach as if he had written the piece just yesterday, for them, and that is how one ought to read literature. But reading in this way entails maintaining at least two apparently contradictory beliefs. The first is that a good book exists as an independent entity, completely outside of time. The second is that every book is the specific creation of a particular person at a precise historical moment.

  For many years I labored under the delusion that biography and history dragged good art down, forcing it into generic categories. Now I know that is not the case. Nothing can drag a good work of literature down, and any additional insights that help you get a fix on it are to be welcomed. If the new information doesn’t help, it can be ignored with no harm done: the work itself is strong enough to withstand any such intrusions. With that in mind, I have occasionally brought in bits of biographical or historical information about some of the authors I discussed here. The function of such description was never to “explain” the literary works; explanation is neither required nor fully possible, when it comes to literature. If I offered a few biographical facts about the men and women who wrote these books, it was because I know such information interests us (as Wilkie Collins might have said) for the perfectly obvious reason that we are men and women ourselves.

  Because every author was originally a human being, capable of making errors and sometimes capable of correcting them, there is nothing predestined about the way any work of literature turned out. From the perspective of hindsight—which is our own perspective, as readers—the greatest books, and even some of the less great, may appear to have a quality of inevitability. But that was never actually the case. They could have gone this way or that. Some of the greatest did go this way and that, and we still can’t be sure which version we should be keeping. Think of Henry James, with his early and late editions, the latter entailing a massive, detailed rewriting of his own youthful style. Think of William Wordsworth, who did much the same thing, but more extensively and, many think, more damagingly, with his early and late poetry. And think of Shakespeare, with all those textual “cruxes”—those little crossroads, those moments of verbal discrepancy, at which numerous scholars are still parting ways.

  Before I ever had anything to do with the theater, I thought that the Shakespearean cruxes were entirely attributable to transcription errors. When Othello refers in some texts to a “base Indian” who threw away a pearl, and in others to a “base Judean,” I figured that was just because the written I and the written J looked so much alike. But now, having watched rehearsals at which playwrights changed their words until the last minute (and even sometimes after that), I wonder. The mistake wasn’t necessarily a mistake. It could have been that Shakespeare made both choices at different times: one pointing toward that exciting New World which had only recently been discovered, or else that exotic Eastern world after which the New World inhabitants were named; another toward the anti-Semitism that represented a different kind of prejudice—a prejudice Shakespeare had fully explored in an earlier play—rather than the one his black Othello suffered under. These by no means exhaust the possibilities. And Othello doesn’t necessarily become a better play or a worse play with either choice: just very slightly different.

  The question of “better” and “worse” hovers over this book, because in talking about why I read and what I read, I am making judgments at every turn. I do not now intend to shy away from these judgments. They are at the heart of my enterprise. I would just like to stress that they too, like the works they apply to, could have come out differently. It is impossible for any one person, or even a large collection of people, to make literary judgments that will last for all time, or even for a lifetime. Knowing this, I have determined to practice to the full my right to be wrong. This is why I have included so many odd genres—science fiction, mysteries, journalism, diaries—along with the usual varieties of traditional literature. This is why I have cited living authors and even writers I know as well as those long dead. I would like the act of judging to be full of risk and vitality; I would like it to be a real choice. I am not interested in creating a museum of approved works—or if I am, it would be like the art collection Albert Barnes assembled in his house near Philadelphia, with remarkable Seurats and ageless Picassos hanging next to paintings by relative unknowns like Ernest Lawson and Charles Prendergast. For Barnes, they were all simply artists whose paintings he liked; the work of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries hadn’t yet hardened into an established hierarchy. Not everything at the Barnes Foundation is equally good. But the collection as a whole is alive with Barnes’s taste, and each room feels like a discovery.

  I cannot, of course, hope to reproduce exactly this kind of experience in the pages of a book. At the Barnes Foundation, as at most museums, you can go through the rooms in any order you wish. With this book, on the other hand, you are tied to my whims. You must take each subject, each observation, in the order I choose to dole it out. (Though “choose” is a loaded word here, and probably not an accurate o
ne: think about how compulsions work, and recollect those spirits who refuse to come when called.)

  Literature is by its very nature linear, by which I mean not just that each line of poetry or prose leads to the next, but also that each chapter of a book is meant to follow the one before it. Ideas get carried through and plot gets carried out, in nonfiction as in fiction. Even a collection—of poems, of stories, of essays—has usually been arranged by the author in a precise sequence, so that you jump in midway at your own peril. That is as true of this book as of any other. Its plot, so to speak, is intended to be followed from beginning to end. I may talk about circles and spirals, but what I have really constructed, it would seem, is a line. This is not to say that there aren’t digressions and anticipatory peeks and retrospective musings, but they are all meant to be encountered in the order in which they appear on the page.

  Certain kinds of art—sculpture, painting, architecture, and to some extent dance—free your glance to make its own choices, allowing it to roam as it wishes, focus on what it desires, and move at will from side to side or top to bottom. Even film, theater, and opera, though they are narrative art forms tied to the passage of time, leave some latitude for the eye: the plot may progress in a specific way, but the viewer’s gaze can dart into corners, peek at what is going on in the background, and still remain rooted in the story. Literature is not like this. The written word moves relentlessly forward, and you are required to take in the sentences in the order in which they come. If you stop focusing for even an instant, you lose the train of thought and must go back. There is only one pathway, and you and the author must follow it together.

  I have always found this to be one of the most salutary things about reading—that it forces me to submit to a pattern set by someone else. At any rate, that’s the way it is when you read through a printed book, a series of pages whose sequence has been determined by their author. Who knows how long this will remain true? The prophecies about the future of the book are becoming increasingly dire, the various freedoms offered by the screen more alluring; linearity itself seems under threat. Yet I would be sorry to think that this benign form of limitation, essential to how and why I read, could ever completely disappear.

  AFTERWORD: THE BOOK AS PHYSICAL OBJECT

  I have before me a cartoon from the May 7, 2012, issue of The New Yorker. In it, an older scholar, or monk, or scribe—a man wearing a long, double-pointed beard and a melon-shaped fur-trimmed hat—sits at a rough wooden table with a younger scribe who has his arms crossed triumphantly in front of him. The older man is examining something the younger one has clearly just brought him: a leather-bound, clasp-backed book whose pages he appears to be turning. “Nice,” the older scribe is saying, “but as long as there are readers there will be scrolls.”

  I don’t know if a young person would find this funny. I think it’s dourly hilarious—not laugh-out-loud, fall-on-the-floor hilarious, but pointedly funny. The joke is at my expense. It spells the end of the world as I know it, and it catches my own tone and that of most of my friends exactly. We are confident that books, as books, will never be obsolete. However many people adopt the new technologies, we are convinced that those cherished objects with which we have filled our houses, and our lives, are here to stay. After all, how could other people, even those unimaginable people of the future, bear to live without them?

  In my house—a house in which one book-filled room is rather grandiosely called “the library,” and in which various kinds of bound books have spilled over into four other rooms and the basement—fifty percent of the current inhabitants have already gone over to the dark side. My husband will no longer read a book printed on paper. An early adopter of all new technologies (“Inspector Gadget,” we used to call him, after a cartoon character who was prominent during my son’s childhood), my husband will only read what he can obtain on his Kindle or his iPad. If I have bought a new mystery and recommend it to him when I am done, he will not read the free book that is lying around our house. Instead, he will spend the additional $9.99 or $12.99 that it costs to get it digitally, and if it is not yet available in digital format, he will read something else in its place. Granted, he is always happy when I can recommend an old, out-of-copyright book that he can download at no cost, but that may be as much because he prefers nineteenth-century novels as because he is inherently thrifty. In any case, his affection for the paperless book is now matched by his explicit distaste for the heavy, dusty, un-self-illuminating bound version. He has become like one of those people in Gary Shteyngart’s futuristic Super Sad True Love Story—people who think that actual books smell bad.

  I, on the other hand, think they smell wonderful. Sometimes, when I have ordered an old book on the internet and it finally arrives in the mail, and after I have thrown away the packaging and poured myself a drink and sat down in my favorite chair, I open the cover and sniff the pages before I even start to read. I always think the smell of that paper goes with its feel, the tangible sensation of a thick, textured, easily turnable page on which the embedded black print looks as if it could be felt with a fingertip, even when it can’t.

  Okay, so I’m a fetishist. But I am not the kind of fetishist who routinely haunts antiquarian bookstores and spends hundreds or even thousands of dollars on first editions and other hard-to-get volumes. I don’t care that much about the book as physical object, and in fact I’m somewhat opposed to its being valued excessively as a form of concrete art. One of the great things about books, I’ve always thought, is that they are mass-produced, so there isn’t any such thing as the “original” one. The writer, unlike the painter or sculptor, can both keep his work and give it away, and my copy will be just as good as his, or yours. I like the egalitarian aspect of the printed book as work of art.

  The digital book is also egalitarian, in its way, but as a work of art it lacks solidity. I’m not just talking about a printed book’s heft or weight (which, I’ll admit, can also be a disadvantage, to weak wrists or weary packers), but, more important, the way its print stays put on the page. When you read a digital book, the words can change size and reflow at the touch of a button. Page numbering, left-and-right layout, space breaks, type design—all this means nothing on an electronic reader, or means only something temporary, something to be manipulated by the Reader of the reader. Length and placement become infinitely malleable. A Victorian novel that is 875 pages long on my iPad becomes 2,933 pages on my iPhone; if I enlarge the type one size, those numbers become 1,030 and 3,647, respectively. If I then change the font from, say, Palatino to Cochin, the corresponding numbers go up again, to 1,284 and 3,995 (plus the whole reading experience may alter, either slightly or hugely, depending on what kinds of prior associations I have with those different typefaces).

  What this means, in practice, is that someone who remembers specific passages in the spatial way I do—as in “I think it was on the left-hand side of the page, not more than two or three pages before a chapter break”—becomes lost in the amorphous, ever-varying sea of the digital page. Oh, sure, I can perform a word or phrase search using that little Sherlock Holmes–like magnifying glass, and eventually it will probably take me to my desired passage. This is immensely useful if you are away from home. But it feels like cheating to me; or rather, what it actually feels is external, as if something else (not I, not the Reader herself) is doing the remembering. So the process is not, for me, the same as leafing through the book I take off my own shelves, the exact book in which I first read that passage and through which it imprinted itself on me. That, I suppose, is the main reason why this entire book had to be written at home, in the place where almost all my books dwell, and not in the various other locations where I spend, hourly or seasonally, a good bit of time.

  I do read, though, on both my iPad and my iPhone. Most of the mysteries I read these days are purchased in digital form, if they are available that way. When you want a mystery, especially a sequel to a mystery, you generally want it right now, and the e-book v
ersions, with their near-instantaneous materialization on your tablet or e-reader, are designed to supply this kind of gratification. There is also something about the swish of a finger on a glassy surface, the sudden flip of the visual screen, that seems the perfect way of turning the page on a page-turner. One zooms through the book, mentally and actually. It is annoying that you can’t then lend out or give away these newly finished mysteries, as I am in the habit of doing with my bound books, but I assume this is a technical glitch that will someday be resolved. For the moment, it is a difficulty that is more than made up for by the ease of acquiring and carrying around these often disposable novels. Recently I filled a whole ten-day period of foreign travel with the three collected volumes of Michael Connelly’s excellent Harry Bosch mysteries, stored up on my iPad and waiting for me every time I had a spare moment to read. I like Harry Bosch just fine, but I don’t plan on reading these novels again anytime soon, so it was with no compunction that I edited them off my screen once I was done.

  I am also a great fan of Project Gutenberg and all its copyright-free nineteenth-century novels. If you wanted to read a bunch of thrillers but didn’t feel like paying for Michael Connelly, you could just download thirty or forty Wilkie Collins mysteries. Gutenberg books tend to be slightly typo-addled, and there are occasional format problems at chapter and section breaks, but these are minor quibbles when the price and availability are so right. Writers I have spent a fortune acquiring in obscure hardcover editions—William Dean Howells, for instance, who for a long time was barely reprinted anywhere—can now be readily obtained at no cost whatsoever. And the books are eminently readable in this form. Surprisingly, I find that even Henry James works well in his digital manifestation. The last time I read The Wings of the Dove, it was mainly on my iPhone, as I commuted back and forth by subway or sat in a café. I don’t recommend this for first-time readers of James: you might have a hard time keeping track of the sentence, much less the whole plot, on the phone’s small screen. But if you already have an overall sense of where the novel is going, this is not a bad way to reconnect with its detailed pleasures.