Dispatch From the Front

And they shall be immortal, in a Really Bad Poem

I was going to start out by saying, “well I haven’t been reading much because I’ve been frantic to deploy my botanical troops before the weeds win the war,” but looking back, I see I’ve finished quite a few books.  I’m not sure how.  I don’t devote hours at a time to a book unless I am completely in its thrall.  (I once spent a whole morning darning socks just as an excuse to keep listening to the audio version of The Likeness.)  So, when did I read all these books, exactly?  All I can remember is a 20 minute sit-down with a cup of tea here (though I’ll admit I don’t look at a clock), a lunch there (I have a book stand; I do not dribble), and a few bedtime sessions.  That can’t be right.  I guess there is another way to take the expression that someone “inhales” books: not that each books is consumed in a single breath, but that she breathes them like the air.

Maybe it’s magic.

My list of books not-yet-blogged also made me think about the changes in my reading habits since I first swept out Villa Negativa and opened its doors.  I keep more books going at once, because when I finish them I’ll have to write about them.  I’ll set down Dorothy Sayer’s essays with the uncomfortable thought that I’ll have to address her rah-rah wartime Britishness, and pick up Vita Sackville-West.  Once I’ve figured out what’s going to happen to her main character, I’ll put down Vita and spend a Sunday morning inhaling (in the traditional sense) Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave.  Meanwhile, Dead Souls is (are?) taunting me in fulsome sentences, waving little tridents, trying to goad me past the third chapter, and Coronation Summer is looking all-too-demure on the bedside table now that I know (courtesy Wikipedia) Thirkell was a snob about her own books, which blows my mind.  Today I’m putting off the last quarter of The Crystal Cave, both because I don’t want it to end, and because I have already planned some stuff I could say about it in a blog entry, and I wonder if it would be cheating to start writing a review before I finished the story?

That’s the other big change.  I’ve been reading for themes and context.  Whole book-describing sentences pop into my head.  I’ve started doing sticky note tabs like I did in school.  I’ll think, “How would I describe what she’s doing with that character?  What other author does she remind me of?”  or  “Oh!  Megan Whalen Turner has totally read this!  I wonder if anyone else has noticed.  I could tie this in with something about The Thief.”

This is different from the way I generally read.  Not that I don’t read critically, but it stays inside, automatic and not at all distracting.  A background murmur.  Long thoughts play out in the shower about how Mary Stewart’s sort of landscape descriptions are a lost art, and how most modern descriptions of place are boring–why is that?  Good descriptions of place don’t have to be long, to be complete and evocative, so maybe that is the problem: most contemporary writers never learned to sketch.  They are more like pointillists, etc, etc.

The shower-thoughts are not formulations.  I may reach conclusions, but they are fluid, and half of the time I forget them afterward.  I will very, very rarely talk to Der Mann about something I’m reading, because my least favorite activity in the world is explaining things–and you can’t tell someone who hasn’t read it what you’re thinking about a book without telling them what’s in it.  We have enjoyable conversations about the books we read aloud together, but until now my private reading has been essentially private.  I mean, its essence was private.  The way I experienced books was as internal as a sore foot or the feeling of a laugh before you let it out.  You can say, “My foot hurts,” or “That was really funny,” but the other person doesn’t feel the ache you do, or the delighted squeeziness in the chest.  It’s just you and the author.  Or you and the characters.

That’s why I dropped my English major like a hot potato after my first year-and-a-half of college.  I didn’t want reading to be spoiled.  It was too important to me.  I didn’t want to meet novels with the knowledge that there was a paper to write at the end.  It was like getting a massage on a highway meridian, or never getting to see your lover except in the crowded break room on a factory floor.  It made me feel as icky as a tabloid journalist pretending to be someone’s friend for the scoop.

So, in place of English I studied Philosophy, a subject where you get to read literary texts created for the purpose of being analyzed.  (I also liked the idea of a completely useless degree, and I am a math paralytic with a fondness for the abstract.  Foolish, perverse child.)

fat philosophers have more fun

I haven’t read a smidge of philosophy since college, and remember very little of what I read there.  I only realized what sort of an education I’d received (for a long time I was under the impression, none) when I began noticing how much reading and writing philosophy had affected the way I think.  It had taken all my little analytical quirks and turned them into big analytical quirks.  In fact, it had done to me that very thing past persons feared education would do to their parishoners, serfs, and marriageable daughters.  It had taught me to think.  About everything.  In the round.

All the time.

If my experience as a reader has been private, then being a former student of philosophy has been downright isolating.  When I’m listening to the sorts of stuff people talk about when they talk about stuff, my inner commentary is a string of potential faux pas (people are deeply insulted when you notice shaky logic on both sides of a polarizing issue, they’d rather you just took a side and shouted), irrelevancies, and unfunny-to-anyone-but-me jokes.  Mostly, since I don’t enjoy revealing myself as a pedantic pariah, I keep my mouth shut.  And there is that whole thing about hating explaining myself.  Everybody else hates it too.  Conversation is not about conveying or receiving information, so explanations are beside the point.  Especially when your brain works at writing speed rather than speaking speed.

A year ago, if you told me that I would voluntarily sit down and write an essay about a book, I would have told you, no, that would be a waste of time, I’d hate it.  What I didn’t know was that writing about books could be like writing letters.  And even more amazing, getting letters back.

I utterly hatedloatheddespised writing research papers, but I used to be a big letter writer.  I stopped in my early twenties because I realized that writing letters to non-letter-writers is a burden to them.  So embarrassing!–I simply hadn’t conceived of someone not loving to get mail, because I loved it so much.  After that, I had a couple of good email correspondences that slowly dried up.  In the last several years: nada.

Letter-writing is a unique pleasure.  When you write a letter, you are making something with a definite structure, but that thing can be whatever it turns into.  If there’s a thesis it sort of just, emerges.  It reminds me of the way theses emerge in fiction.  Letters would be a perfect place to talk about fiction, if there weren’t the whole problem of explaining books to people who haven’t read them and probably won’t.  Blogging solves that problem, and also the problem of burdening non-writers with communications they can’t return.  My inner commentary, so unsuitable for conversation, is actually suitable here.

Fantastic!  But also not.  I seem to be hard wired for a certain length of literary musing.  Der Mann asked if I had ever thought about writing short interim posts and I said I had.  It makes sense to write both short and long ones, depending on how much you want to say about a book.  The problem is that once I start writing I always want to say roughly the same amount of stuff.  My letters were all the same length too.

Because I am a slow writer, this makes it impossible to do what I set out to do here: write a little something about every book.  I’m a completeist.  It niggles.  Once I’ve gone to the trouble of thinking all those distracting blog-post preparation thoughts, I feel like I’ve wasted something unless I go ahead and write the review.  I’ve missed out on a “pure” reading.  My shower thoughts have lost their comfortable idleness.

I don’t hate writing reviews, but I kind of hate what it’s done to my reading life.  If you’ve got this far you’re probably someone who has thought about how blogging has affected your reading, too–or hasn’t.  Do you like the change, or not?  What is it like for you to read a book when you are intending to blog about it?