Desperate Lines: On Reading

Carl Spitzweg’s “The Bookworm,” via Wikipedia, which also tells me that the painting was a satirical take on the navel-gazing turn of German society in the mid-nineteenth century — that’s not what we’re doing, but I do want that guy’s house.

Hot take: if I had not lost the ability to suspend disbelief, I would never have made it through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Perhaps it’s an innate dissociative tendency, but when I was a child, I suspended disbelief hard. I could so lose myself in the pages of a book that I lost track of where I was and everything going on around me. There are chunks of my youth that are lost to me because I was so entranced by a novel — whether it’s the one about the wizard school by she-who-shall-not-be-named or Crime and Punishment — that I did not know what was happening around me. These experiences lingered: I remember walking into the house my family was staying at, which belonged to my godmother, and she asked if I was okay; I had to reassure her that no, I was fine, basically, but I’d just gotten through (if memory serves, and if it does, it does so grudgingly) Marmeladov’s funeral and was shaken by it. I know we’d gone out to run an errand of some kind, and I think we grabbed a snack in a McDonald’s somewhere in Pas de Calais, but that’s all I’ve got. I was so entranced by Dostoevsky’s language, by the emotional timbre of the novel (Magarshack’s translation, thank god), that I have no better memory of it than that.

But then, in my teens, I got into writing reviews on the internet. You can still read at least some of them, though I’d caution against it: they’re not great. That act, however, taught me to read not for sheer transport, but for content. I needed to have opinions about the stuff I was reading, and it’s very difficult, even for a relatively skilled bullshitter like myself, to spin I forgot where and when and who I was, it’s that good into a couple hundred words to go up on the internet. I graduated from an online high school in 2008, a fact that gets funnier the further we get from 2008, and while I could theoretically have learned to read critically there, I did not, largely because my English teachers were facile in their analysis (I thought then), as well as overburdened by demands that they learn to wrangle new technologies in order to provide something like an education to disinterested teens who all already had their own shit going on (I think now). Instead, I lost that ability in the interests of a career I thought I’d have, as so many of us do.

But in losing that ability, I gained a different one. As the soil that grew that capacity fell fallow, I rotated my crops, and husbanded the art of reading critically. And in doing so, I learned how to read books that are actually language games, books that in their very form challenge what we think of as books. I learned that those were games I could play and win, if we define “winning” here as “actually enjoying it.” And Lord of the Rings is, fundamentally, a language game that Tolkien played against himself, where he wrote a foundational epic for a place that doesn’t exist as a translation of that epic which might have been written in a language he made up. Maybe not Oulipo material, but it’s goddamn close.

Look, I’ll admit it: I opened with this memoir bit because it made for a good opening line. What this piece is really about is reading books literally however you can. Let’s zoom out for a minute.

※

Book formatting is something I’ve grown sensitive to in recent years, though the catalyst was really stumbling across a beautiful hardcover edition of Finnegans Wake and finding it immersive and beautiful in a way that the shitty paperback I’d acquired was not and could never be, with its narrow margins and close-kerned text. The expansive trim and generous line spacing of that edition made the very act of reading the novel feel luxurious, a warm bath for the knotted back of the mind in a way that the cramped page layout and frugal use of endpapers in my cheap paperback could never be. (I used the paperback to prop open the side window of my apartment in school, and have never finished reading the novel.)

I have worn bifocals since I was 24, and even before that, I had repetitive motion injuries in my ulnar nerves from years of being a well-behaved child who read books, made lace, and (inexpertly) played the piano. These are facts about my body that I cannot change; even typing this, I feel a tell-tale warmth growing along the outside edge of my hands, which tells me I will regret a number of things tomorrow. But of all the things these facts have cost me (which is honestly not that much, because I am reckless with the flesh), the one I have most often mourned is the joy of the mass-market paperback book.

You know what a mass-market paperback is, even if you think you don’t: they’re the romance novels in the grocery store, the Warhammer 40k novels in a long brick at the shuttered Hastings or Borders, the high-pulp building material of the book world. They fall apart in your hands as you’re reading them; they’re the subject of a Beatles song, for fuck’s sake. They’re pocket-sized and rough — and some of the only print books you can buy new for less than ten American dollars. And I love them.

A selection of battered Livres de poche, from La Presse.

The French book market still does robust business in poche-sized books, but the French book market is a strange beast, beyond the scope of this article. In the English language world, the mass-market paperback — or MMP, if you want to be a nerd about it, which I am — has been dying a long, slow death for years. Somehow, it keeps hanging on, but who knows. In any case, I stopped reading them because it hurt my hands to do so, and I felt like an asshole with my glasses shoved down my nose, trying to focus through the close part of a bifocal lens on the 6- or 8-point type that filled the pages like a swarm of ants.

But while that particular format may or may not be struggling in English print, I didn’t bring up the French market for nothing. Poche, after all, means pocket, and this is a key part of what I’m trying to say.

Maybe you don’t carry books in your pockets like you did when you were a kid (and by “you” here I mean “I”). But the practice is still there, the same way I kick the lower corner of every fridge because the one my family had when I was growing up didn’t seal right at the bottom. The body remembers these things, and the body, horribly malleable and prone to injury though it is, can also learn.

※

Do you read anymore? Do you carry a book with you like you did when you were little? Do you feel a little weird without it still; do you wonder why you’re carrying a bag or so concerned with the size of your coat pockets still, even if you haven’t carried a book with you in years? Do you read, not just because text is the medium of digital communication — literally all of publishing is on Twitter, and even your IG tags are still words, words, words — but like, for fun?

Leo Tolstoy, as portrayed by Ilya Repin in all his insufferable glory.

I didn’t, not for some time after college. It took a year or more to get back to it, and that was mostly because I told people on the internet that I would (thanks for that if literally nothing else, Goodreads). While I had, as mentioned above, learned to read critically at a fairly young age, I had grown so used to reading because I had to, because if I didn’t I would have to have a conversation I would and will move mountains to avoid (“You said you would do it and you didn’t; why?” is how that conversation starts), because I did a major that’s all language all the time and my every waking moment was consumed with PDF scans of book chapters and JSTOR and “So-and-so suggests in whatever that….”

I wanted to read for fun, I really did. But I was mired not only in the sense-memory of reading for school — and no matter how much fun it is, reading for school is still qualitatively different from reading for fun — but also in the sense that what I read ought to be important somehow, that I should read, like, War and Peace (everyone’s go-to for lengthy novels one feels ought to have read, for some reason), and also that it had to be in print. Trees needed to be cut for this, ink jetted out, adhesive and cardstock alchemically married, or it didn’t count somehow.

The “somehow” is, of course, nonsense, except insofar as the experience of reading an ebook is qualitatively different from having a bunch of paper tied or glued together in your greasy little hands is different. To preemptively clarify: I am not here attempting to say that those qualitative differences don’t matter. They do, or I wouldn’t have spent all that time talking about book formatting just now, and I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of re-reading at least one book (specifically, The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, discussed passingly elsewhere) in another format if I hadn’t gotten the sense that the format I first read it in had done it a disservice. Those qualitative differences can make or break a book: if it’s too heavy (not in content but in the sheer weight of the object), too dense (too many words on the page, too many pages for the format), or even too obsessed with the book-as-object (see the above parenthetical on The Starless Sea), the medium cannot provide the sorely-needed massage.

I have learned better.

※

Whether or not you personally read like you used to, we as a society read as if written language were a hot new commodity with a very definite shelf life. Text is everywhere, and exponentially more people are literate now than at any other point in time.

Socrates, ostensibly anti-writing, via Wikipedia.

But nonetheless, a certain class of person mourns how they used to read. Maryanne Wolf, author of at least two books on reading and the brain, and Nicholas Carr, of The Shallows notoriety, are two who do, and both argue that the internet has done what Plato claimed in Republic that written language would do: made us less inclined to think deeply about the ideas we encounter. I mean, even if we leave out the people who got book deals out of the thing, there’s still that tweet about whether or not you’ve got the same brain you used to read lengthy novels in grade school. Hell, I’ve had that thought myself: man, I read Dickens for fun once (though as mentioned elsewhere, my idea of “for fun” might be skewed).

But whether the internet is rotting our brains or not is a moot point: while it is host to myriad mutating terrors, it’s just another way to transmit information, and like any way of transmitting information, it requires a certain type of personal infrastructure. Like interpreting speech, like reading books or signs, like watching a movie, there are specific skills required that you can gain, and they can, in many ways, enhance the basic set of skills you’re using. You know, like how even though I rarely if ever suspend disbelief, I can read critically in a way I couldn’t as a child.

It’s a matter of priorities, and a matter of habit.

※

The sculpture in question, and also me for the five years I worked on the Plaza.

There is — or was — a bronze sculpture in the Country Club Plaza here in KCMO. It’s called “Out to Lunch” and it’s by J. Seward Johnson, Jr., and depicts a young man in corduroy slacks, reading a book and eating a hamburger. It’s not a particularly precious sculpture: the boy is spraddle-legged on the ground, clearly ready to hork down a sandwich and snag a few minutes with this book before getting back to work. In my reading of the piece, it’s one of the few acknowledgements the Plaza makes to the people who work there (and I was one of them for years). The figure’s position also suggests that the book he’s reading is going to get a few drips of burger grease on it, and though the book is a hardcover, the position of the spine and how readily it lies open suggests that it’s been handled roughly. It might be a little big to fit in the boy’s actual pocket, but he seems pretty ready to try — especially if he’s on a 30 on the Plaza and managed to get a hamburger in a timely manner.

I’m not being ekphrastic for no reason, I swear. I’m talking about my bronze comrade-in-toil because Johnson has captured a particular approach to reading that I think is easily lost. There’s an intensity and a desperation to the figure: caught in a job that needs escaping from, the figure has only a little time to keep body and soul together, which can’t be done through the kind of emotionally and physically demanding labor that makes up the work he’s dressed for. So he’s doing what is, I think, the most sensible thing: wolfing down some food to keep powering through the rest of the day, and reading something to keep his mind occupied when he gets back to whatever he’s got to do to make rent.

What I’m getting at here is that reading doesn’t have to be precious, and it doesn’t have to be confined to the book object. Don’t get me wrong: I love the book object, and I have nothing against being precious with it. I have too many books in my house, and follow too many Bookstagram accounts to hold strong positions against either, and it’s 2021 (Jesus) and the world is in open upheaval around us, so whatever gets you through is what you should do. But reading, and seeking refuge and mental refreshment in books and words and ideas, is also an act of desperation. It’s not all sweater paws and mugs of hot tea and the gentle susurrus of page against page; it’s also clutching a book in one hand while the other holds a subway pole or a sandwich, or squinting at an ebook on your phone in the break room at work, or tooling around running errands while an audiobook rambles in your ears. The reading life, unfortunately, doesn’t issue you a comfy chair and a certain number of unoccupied hours (we’re not all Maryanne Wolf, setting aside an hour a day to sink into Magister Ludi); the reading life is the life you make it.

This desperation is not, I think, confined to me and the guy in the sculpture. I’ve talked to so many people who say they no longer read, or wish they read more, or whatever: I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that if you’re reading this piece, chances are that you’ve also uttered some variation on the sentiments just expressed. And what I’m saying is, you can if you want to. It’s a matter of what you do with your hands.

※

Literally this morning, as I was lying in bed, I looked over at the book I’m currently reading in paper form. It’s The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, and it’s fucking great. Engrossing, stylish, exciting and weird (and Weird, if you get my drift). I’m really enjoying it, and I also really enjoy reading in bed in the mornings, and today’s my Sunday. But I had put my phone on top of the book, and this, it transpired, was an insurmountable barrier in that moment. I picked up my phone and fucked around on Facebook instead.

A friend gave me this book holder, though, and it definitely makes the whole reading process easier.

But that’s a choice that I made, and it’s a choice I could have made differently. I know too well how difficult that choice can be to make, because I pick the glass disaster box over the book on a regular basis. Even there, though, I’ve been able to game my own brain a little bit: I put the Libby app, my primary source of ebooks and audiobooks, right on my home screen; I intentionally put my social media apps one or two steps beyond that for a reason. As mentioned, this is a qualitatively different experience, but nonetheless, it gets the books into my organs of perception (and aggravates my ulnar nerves in a different way from holding a book, because I am an absolute idiot with my elbows).

There are patterns to our movements. There are things we do with our hands, things that we reach for a look at and check. Smartphones are definitely some of those things, but those too can be used to read more. And look: as mentioned, it’s 2021, we’re all going to die, any books you read in any form still count. It’s easy to feel like they don’t — I used to think I could only count books I read in paper form using my miserable little hands to turn the printed pages on their sewn or glued bindings, but that was bullshit of me. And while more difficult to track, fanfic counts, too, as does whatever the fuck Cory Doctorow and others like him are doing these days, releasing whole books into the wilds of the internet.

Sure, it’s fun and easy to mourn the loss of time for sustained, deep reading — but maybe that’s less necessary to your personal health and happiness than it seems. In the last benighted year or so, I’ve read more than I’ve read in the several years preceding combined, and the quality of that reading as an act has not, as far as I can tell, declined substantially (though in fairness, I’m not sure it was that good to begin with). I fled in desperation to the world of words, because doomscrolling only gets you so far, and it has welcomed me back with open arms.

I’m not here to tell you, dear reader, how to do that; I try to stay out of the business of telling other people how to live, largely because I am making a bit of a hash of it myself. Besides, there are plenty of other guides out there, and there’s no wrong way to do it (though if you really want, here’s some good pieces about how to read more). What I am here to do, however, is to exhort you to embrace the desperation that, I think, many of us feel in the face of a world battered by plague, poverty, and violence, and let it carry you to the solace and the structure and the joyful challenge of the written word. It doesn’t have to be sustained or deep or only engage in great works of literature; it just has to be done, however and wherever and whenever it can be.

Has to be done, really? Again, I’m not trying to tell you how to live. But I think the answer is yes, it does. Not because they’re good for you or whatever, not because, as Stephen King maintains, they’re a perfect form of entertainment, but rather because, as Margaret Atwood has it, “A word after a word / after a word is power” — power to entrance, to challenge, to give structure to the protean terror of the present, to give form to the history that led to it.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)