There’s a genre of books about books that’s worth a “deep dive.” They’re accounts of reading as a kind of active, life-sustaining enterprise in contrast to our widespread perception that sitting in a chair with a good book is not a working life. I frame it this way because much of the momentum in education behind “applied learning” leaves the reading disciplines out in the cold. This isn’t going to be scold for more readers, just a consideration that something valuable – yes, dynamic and useful too – is going on there. The kind of awakening that happens, the flights of the moral imagination, the rediscovery of the familiar that happen while reading are attainments that beg for application in our impulsive culture.
My partner is a reader. She devours books. . . first thing in the morning, a break at lunch, on car trips. It’s not simply that she loses herself in a book, she falls into them naturally. Books seem to be extensions of her mind; ways to think and feel through the world. Rigorous, beautiful, and comforting it is. I tend to use books more often than I read them. I’m usually in search of a useable quote or an attractive argument which creates a distance between me and text. It’s ungenerous and feels like I’m trying to overcome a book as I’m reading it. Like many of my shortcomings, I blame it on my training as a historian.
Good books about books, it seems to me, convey their author’s passion for reading but don’t insert a persona between reader and text. Is this a book that The Expert would approve? Nonsense. Usually, books that shame you into reading certain ones are best left half-read. This is a good place to mention Nick Hornby who hopes for people to read . . . anything. Romance novels, YA fiction, THE CANON, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re reading. His justifications are the (very) funny, wise, and sincere book reviews he wrote as reviewer for The Believer and collected in Ten Years in the Tub. You’re aware of Hornby’s voice but they’re accounts of reading rather than registers of proper reading lists – that is, they’re active, dynamic expressions of someone encountering a book, being changed by it, and bringing that experience out into the world. He loves books (books he doesn’t like are anonymized and let down gently) and recommends them in a spirit of conviviality. Another author of note is James Longenbach who explores – beautifully so – the tones and syntax of poetry to make vivid both the capaciousness of poems and their autonomy (see specially The Virtues of Poetry and The Resistance to Poetry). By autonomy, he means, I think, their ability to shape-shift themselves and elude our classifications and interpretations – they don’t ossify either, poems live for multiple readings and each reading is both a comforting recurrence and a discovery of something new. I think I need to see Rita Dove, Philip Booth and Kay Ryan, again.