Thinking on Reading

by

Lauren Roberts

As Nicki Leone (“A Reading Life”) has noted in her current column reading is decreasing, a fact that impacts us not just as individuals but as a society. “Literature,” she writes, “like all art has the ability to bring the world inside ourselves, to make us understand what it is like to be someone else, something else, somewhere other than where we are now.” She is right. Reading makes us citizens of the world today, the world yesterday and the world tomorrow which is why Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Paul Dry Books; $9.95) is particularly important  now. It both celebrates and laments the state of reading, writing and publishing in a series of sui generis essays.

So Many Books is a small volume with big ideas. For here is an author known more to the Spanish-speaking world than the English-speaking one, an author who is able to utilize poetry, essays, books, articles on economics, and social and literary criticism to explore life in myriad ways. In this book, he applies a fresh eye to an old topic—the overabundance of books coming our way—and invites us along with him as he explores what this means to us as readers. The result is a brilliant, fascinating inquiry into the relationships among books, writing, reading and human lives.
 
Even if you are not a fan of “books about books,” this is one that should be read. There may be a lot of competition for our reading time, but who else has pointed out that one of those comes from the flood of books?  
 
“The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially,” Zaid writes. “If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.” Which is why, as he noted here, he “once proposed a chastity glove for authors who were unable to restrain themselves” since nothing else—radio, television, the Internet—has slowed down their production.

He states that the human race publishes a book every thirty seconds in a bland tone, then when that leaves you staggering at the reality, he drives home the point with this dig: “Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn’t read would pile up four thousand times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge.”

Yet in an essay entitled “Complaining About Babel,” Zaid effectively points out that unlike other the entertainment mediums of film, newspapers and television, “the book business is viable on a small scale … the minimum investment required to gain access to the market is very low, which encourages the proliferation of titles and publishing houses, the flourishing of various and disparate initiatives, and an abundance of cultural richness.” In the case of books,  he believes more books encourage cultural diversity because (Wall Street demands aside) no one book must have a large audience to be successful.

When Zaid wants us to reflect on the connection between books and conversation, he grabs us by the throat with this startling statement: “Thanks to books, we know that Socrates distrusted books.” Socrates believed conversation superior to writing, and that dependence on the latter encouraged intellectual laziness. Zaid maintains that the time/things ratio in Socrates’ day was exactly the opposite of today, that time was much more available then and has since become scarce for us. “Today,” he argues, “intellectual conversation and contemplative leisure coat infinitely more than the accumulation of cultural treasures. We now have more books than we can possibly read.”

Zaid pushes his readers to think about the role of books in their lives when he writes, “But the written word … doesn’t have to supplement speech. It can fortify it, or fertilize it. As dead matter, it can either suffocate life, or nourish it, kill or invigorate …’if books don’t encourage us to live life to the fullest, they are dead.’”

What is important about culture, Zaid continues, “is how alive it is, not how many tons of dead prose it can claim … The superiority of some cultures or cultural media over others, when it exists, resides in the liveliness or level of vitality they produce ….” In other words, the success of books should not be solely tied to sales records, number of titles or printings and other corporate valuations, but to “creative vitality, which we can sense if not measure … [it] makes us think in abstract terms, with chaotic results for many endeavors … the true role of books … is to continue our conversation by other means.”       

So Many Books is not a volume to be tripped through, to be read from beginning to end in one smooth session and returned to the shelf. Zaid is an intellectual in the best sense of the word, and his musings carry considerable weight. He has written a book meant to be dissected, argued with, thought about and taken to heart. If properly read, it will cause you to think or re-think  your own reading. If properly read, it will change your life.

“What does it matter,” he asks, “how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.”

So, dear readers go forth and read. Then live.

    

Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it