...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many-layered inner exchange, a to-and-fro which I long ago discovered that I need in order to locate myself in the world. Reading is a process that keeps the inner realm open, susceptible. Involvement in a book sets things going at a depth. (Sven Birkerts, "The Possibility of the Search," in Reading Life: Books for the Ages, 2007, Graywolf Press, p. 130)
Possibly I believed, as most survivors of higher education believe, that a book is somehow used up, finished, by our reading; that it is a device, spring-loaded with themes and characters, which discharges itself fully as we finish, and that anything else—our memories and references—constitutes a kind of dreamlike residue. I no longer think so. Reading infiltrates. Books stay alive, not just in the active imagination, but in the very structures of our awareness. (Sven Birkerts, "The Reading Life," in Reading Life: Books for the Ages, 2007, Graywolf Press, p. 21)
I have been thinking about how I read these days. (This is sort of a rehash of an earlier post, The Novel Channel, and for a while I decided not to add to it, but I kept thinking about it, and that post was over ten years ago, so...)
I like to read several books at one time. More often than not I get pushback from folks when I tell them this, but to me it's as natural as listening to different styles of music over the course of a day. My brain is receptive to different kinds of writing at different times of the day. First thing in the morning, over that first lovely cup of coffee, I like to read things that challenge me, more difficult and/or experimental books that I might not have the inclination for later in the day when I'm more tired or impatient. So, books like Finnegans Wake, Miss Macintosh My Darling, or The Anatomy of Melancholy are ideal for this. Poetry can work for this as well. Right now I am plowing, very slowly, through Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. It's slow going, and I find that about ten pages at a sitting is enough, enough to get through the first cup of coffee anyway. But it's stimulating (the prose, not the coffee, although of course that's stimulating too in its own way!), and it wakes me up. I usually return to Stein later in the evening for another ten pages.
For the last few years I have been working my way through all of the Arden Shakespeares (both the second and third series, not the first). I read all of Shakespeare a long time ago, but I really like the Ardens for their scholarship and overall presentation. I am nearing the end of this project, with only four or five plays left to read. The way I do it is first I read through all the critical apparatus that comes with the play, starting with the introduction and the appendices; I especially enjoy all the textual analysis, all the minutiae about the Folio, any quartos, details about editing, etc. Then I read through all the notes and glosses, paying special attention to any notes about textual cruxes or indications of staging. I do all this ahead of time so I can enjoy reading the play straight through without getting too distracted by the notes.
Sometimes I will just read the play out loud to myself, but usually for this pass through I like to read along with a recording of the play (the key aspect being reading along, not just listening; reading = eyes on the page). For the recordings, I read with either the Argo Classics (recorded primarily in the 1950s) or the Arkangel series from the 1990s. Sometimes the Argo readings can be a bit fusty, and overall I prefer the Arkangel (with some serious caveats, like: why have Hortensio stutter in The Taming of the Shrew?). I like doing this because it really helps to get an approach to phrasing, delivery, and dramatic effect, even though I acknowledge that those interpretations are only one way to speak these lines, and definitely not the only way or the definitive way. The next time I read through all of Shakespeare, I'll just read it all without the recordings and see how that goes. And yeah, I plan on pretty much rereading Shakespeare for the rest of my life.
So, in addition to my morning read and Shakespeare, I do like to have a story going, a narrative of some sort, usually a novel. Sometimes comics can scratch this itch, but usually it's prose fiction of some sort, and novels are it for me. This is all pretty fluid, and if the novel is compelling enough it can overtake all my other reading paths until it's done. This always happens to me with Pynchon novels and with Malazan books. Coming up over the next year: Alexandre Dumas' D'Artagnan Romances, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, Ovid, Boccaccio, more Elmore Leonard, rereading Homer and Pynchon (especially Against the Day), and much more!
I also like to have some kind of big reference book of some sort to dip into without worrying too much about continuity. Right now it's Garner's Modern American Usage (2nd ed.), which is ideal for this stream. And finally, I usually have some kind of music-related reading going on. Often this is satisfied by web writing, reviews, Point of Departure, Hoffman music boards, Substack, etc., and also by my stash of printouts, liner notes, articles, things I've accumulated over the years (my "vertical files"). Right now I am focused on going through all my Sun Ra files, including printouts of correspondence from the now defunct (and sadly unarchived) Saturn listserv. After that I'm going to continue with Ra by rereading Szwed and Youngquist.
So that's basically it: the texture of my reading these days. At bedtime, I like to read dry scholarly stuff to get good and sleepy and then touch off my journey to dreamland with some Krazy Kat. I love reading.
This seems about right...
When to read
Mine is a simple system: I read from morning till bedtime, with breaks for my job, family, meetings with friends, exercise, household chores and periodic review of my life’s greatest blunders. (Michael Dirda, "10 rules for reading from someone who does it for a living," Washington Post, 2024-05-18)
...any list of “best of X literature” is always going to be a better device for exclusion than for adequately representing anything but the preferences of the gatekeepers. (Aaron Brady, "Best American Poetry Pseudonyms," The New Enquiry)
...the hardbound anthology makes unavoidably visible the process of selection and exclusion--the fundamental impulse of the aesthetic. (Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, p. 157)
Systematic reading is of little help. Following an official book list (of classics, of literary history, of censored or recommended reading, of library catalogues) may, by chance, throw up a useful name, as long as we bear in mind the motives behind the lists. But the best guides, I believe, are the reader's whims--trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness--which sometimes lead us into a makeshift state of grace, allowing us to spin gold out of flax. (Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading, 2010, pp. 7-8)
The experience of reading is always the experience of language, even though many readers don’t stop often enough to acknowledge this. We read artfully arranged words that in works of literature create “meaning” only relative to their arrangement, which is not the arrangement to be found in newspaper columns or political speeches. A critic should be sensitive to the particular kind of arrangement—which includes the arrangement into “form”—found in a particular work. Even leaping ahead to “story” or “setting” distorts our actual experience of the work unless we also notice the way the writer has used language to create the illusion of story and the illusion of setting. (Daniel Green, "An interview with literary critic Daniel Green about his new book, Beyond the Blurb" by Edwin Turner, 2016)
A few years ago, it was treated as self-evident by certain folks that "print," which after all had been around for only 500 years, had no automatic claim on our attention, and that the book would soon be superseded by electronic media. The speakers--usually people who rarely read books--often spoke as if they couldn't wait for this to happen. People who do read books tried not to pay attention, while wondering if they were indeed the unadaptable dinosaur-types they were held to be. ("NB." Times Literary Supplement, 2000-02-11, p. 16)
Now, as sales of dedicated e-readers dwindle, ... it’s hard to imagine how we allowed ourselves to get so worked up. But e-readers did teach us something: in their patent inadequacy – in all their slow-loading, thumb-cracking, percentage-bar clunkiness – they showed us how perfect a literary medium the book is. It’s a paradoxical time, one in which the oft-announced death of the book coincides with a new fever of bibliophilia. Book-love is certainly evident in every corner of this volume, and Vincent Giroud’s words are representative: “Holding a book is a pleasure I am not prepared to give up, much in the same way I would not be tempted to ingest my food in the form of tablets.” Clever pun, that. (Adam Hammond, "Books aren't going anywhere--despite the threat of robot sonneteers," The Globe and Mail, 2013-12-21)Giroud's words come from his essay "A World without Books?" in The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? edited by Paul Socken, of which this article is a review.
This idea of the novel is gaining on me: that it is not, except superficially, only a thing to be studied in English classes--that it is a field for thinking, a condensed time-world that is parallel (or adjacent) to ours. That its purpose is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself. Enhancement. Deepening. Priming the engines of conjecture. In this way, and for this reason, the novel is the vital antidote to the mentality that the Internet promotes. (Sven Birkerts, "Reading in a Digital Age," in The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? edited by Paul Socken, 2013, p. 32)
The compressed living, communication overload, and fixation on speed dictated by connectivity can activate the memory of an alternative possibility, one which has been lost, but not irretrievably, that of a more organic life rhythm, of communication as a dialogic process, of a more leisurely flow. Such a slower rhythm, shaped through reading literature, allows a space for self-awareness, creates a space in which the reader can reflect on the movements of the reading process as they are played out; in which he can dwell on the flow of the text and reflect on the interplay between text and readerly subject. A kind of double reading is produced, whereby the reader reads the text and reads himself reading it at the same time, which in turn generates reflection at different levels: on the text, on the reading process, on the self as reader and as individual. The slowness enforced by the text can lead to a deepening of self-knowledge, both in terms of the insights suggested by the text and by way of the self-reflection that runs in the background of the reading process like a slowly turning prism. The reader's mind is set free to ruminate and explore, with no predetermined paths. The managerial superego, imposed by a culture which demands productive behaviour and measurable, "useful" outcomes, is suspended in favour of indeterminacy and intuition. A space is opened up in which the reader can experience a lost freedom and unfettered individuality. (Gerhard van der Linde, "Why Read against the Grain? Confessions of an Addict," in The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? edited by Paul Socken, 2013, p. 213)
Readers know that there are books for reading after lovemaking and books for waiting in the airport lounge, books for the breakfast table and books for the bathroom, books for sleepless nights at home and books for sleepless days on the hospital. No one, not even the best of readers, can fully explain why certain books are right for certain occasions and why others are not. In some ineffable way, like human beings, occasions and books mysteriously agree or clash with one another. (Alberto Manguel, "The End of Reading," from A Reader on Reading, reprinted in The Edge of the Precipice, ed. Paul Socken, 2013, p. 132)
Coover states that hypertext "presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author," but his tonal matter-of-factness belies the monumentality of the assertion. This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another. The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants. (Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 1994, p. 163)
A book gives great responsibility to our participation and commitment: reading keeps us awake and it maintains the forward motion of the text. The very nature of the book tends to emphasize the privacy and purpose of reading. Its nature is to build introspection, the way exercise improves a muscle. (David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie, 2015, p. 216)
More than with any other form of art, the relationships we have with novels are apt to approach the kind we have with people. For a long time, novels were typically named after people (Tom Jones, Emma, Jane Eyre), but that is not the crux of it. What makes our experience of novels so personal is not that they have protagonists, but that they have narrators. Paintings and photographs don’t, and neither, with rare (and usually unfortunate) exception, do movies or plays. Novels bring another subjectivity before us; they give us the illusion of being addressed by a human being. (William Deresiewicz, "How the Novel Made the Modern World," Atlantic 2014-06)
Those who set up oppositions between the electronic technology and that of the printing press ... want us to believe that the book—an instrument as perfect as the wheel or the knife, capable of holding memory and experience, an instrument that is truly interactive, allowing us to begin and end a text wherever we choose, to annotate in the margins, to give its reading a rhythm at will—should be discarded in favor of a newer tool. Such intransigent choices result in technocratic extremism. In an intelligent world, electronic devices and printed books share the space of our work desks and offer each of us different qualities and reading possibilities. Context, whether intellectual or material, matters, as most readers know. (Alberto Manguel, "Conversations with the Dead," NYR Daily, 2015-08-14)
