Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
C.S. Lewis
There are book people for whom book reading is like breathing: They feel more at home lost between covers, tucked away with the world hidden and remote, forever keeping it at bay by turning the next page, cracking the next volume, than they ever do at any other time. Through most of my life I’ve envied such people, as I’ve envied travelers with more passport stamps than I have or ever will have, for all the lands they’ve seen and people they’ve met.
But living on the edge of a redwood forest as I now do, having as part of my day not just walking or running through that forest but also chainsawing fire wood or feeding the animals, I now feel at home with the understanding that I am a different sort of reader, one who has to read to live, yes, without question, but also one who would dive into the miasma of real-world experience with as much gusto as the printed word and let both nourish each other.
Yes, as C.S. Lewis tartly observed, one must clearly read every good book once every ten years. It’s essential! It’s necessary! And it will never happen.
We have to make peace with the need to throw out any such notions of one day being that super-well-read individual we fancied we might one day become. Even for those of us who are working writers, who need the nourishment of fresh words and sentences as palpably as a pregnant goat needs fresh alfalfa, still there is the reality of limited supply: of time.
Here at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods we offer the WCR Fellowship, a month for a mid-career writer to do nothing but write here in the calm and beauty of our spot low in the Santa Cruz Mountains – but I’ve often thought a writer might be just as smart to use the fellowship more for reading than for writing. As the father of a toddler, co-director of a center, clumsy handyman seeing to the upkeep of 4.7 acres, author and co-author, the idea of having a month in which I could read, say, ten hours a day every day for a month – it’s no less giddily intoxicating than it would be to imagine setting foot on Mars or finally being able to fly just by stretching out my arms, as my four-year-old self was always just sure I’d figure out eventually.
To binge on, say, Dickens or Dostoyevsky, two writers I’ve read far less of than I can believe, or in maybe the ultimate act of wish fulfillment, pick a good “By the Book” interview in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and read the books mentioned. Simon Winchester, for example, recently told the Times the following titles were on his night stand, and it would be fun to read that night-pile: “A bit of dog’s breakfast, I’m afraid. Top of the pile is Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, as I like to go to sleep in good humor. Then there is Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn, the history of the screwdriver; and a classic Folio edition of Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. I am on a Stefan Zweig bender just now, so I have The Post-Office Girl to hand. And Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands: I’m teasing this last one out, so I’m still not sure what happened to the dead man on the train.”
Or there is the option of using the month to read as many of the Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2015 as one can. Or any one of numerous individual lists of the best books of the year, like this one from Megan O’Grady at Vogue.
Most of us never get a chance like that: So what do we do instead? We try to cut down on self-lobotomizing social-media trolling, we cut down on our sleep, or we just accept that book reading will be limited to special occasions, like cross-country flights (though the improved selection of movies on most flights makes that harder and harder). Life intervenes, in short, which is fine and good, but the fantasy persists.
I think a lot of people are like me in needing some momentum: If I read more books, if I finish more and have that great feeling of being energized and challenged and even in a way altered, then I’m far more likely to dive into a new book – and make some real progress, not just knock off four pages then add it to my giant pile of books-cracked-but-barely-read.
I think the answer is to turn to social media not as a numbing distraction, but as a helpful tool to bring people together, the way that book clubs do, or good independents, like Bookshop Santa Cruz, which has a cool Winter Reading Program going, complete with a social gathering to get kicked off and fun incentives for reading three of eight selected books, like a cupcake and a flight of wine tasting. Sign me up!
So I’m going to take the plunge again. I’ve signed up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge, vowing as I have year after year to read a book a week, and my disgrace and disappointment if I once again fall short will be at least in a sense public.
But that’s not enough! What about if some of you join me? Use the comments section below to choose a goal for the number of books you want to read in 2016 – and then check back in as you make progress toward that goal, let us know the books you’ve read, how you liked them, whether you’d recommend them. Sound like fun? Click LIKE and share on social media if you’re in. Pete Danko and Wallace Baine will be taking part – here’s hoping a few others will as well.
First up for me: I have a few pages at the end of Glenn Stout’s excellent The Selling of the Babe to read, and I’ve just started Viet Thanh Nguyen’s amazing novel The Sympathizer. Tell us what you’re reading. Why not go for it?
– Steve Kettmann