Reading Resolutions

by

Nicki Leone

 

For the past five years or so, I have had but one New Year’s “resolution” when it comes to books and reading—to read more books in the coming year than I did in the last.  It has been an easy and pleasurable resolution to keep, but I am fast approaching a critical point. I read a lot, after all. Sometimes two or three books a week.  At some point in the not so distant future, I’m going to find it hard to read more than I already do. The laws of physics are just against it, and besides, it would stop being fun. I haven’t hit that point yet, but I can feel it looming. Will I have to read three books a week? Four? Will I have to “cheat” by reading short stories and novellas so that I can kid myself I’m still reading “more”? Will I find myself “padding” the numbers by reading lots of easy fast and fluffy books just so I can say I’ve kept the tally up? I like brain candy as much as I like junk food, but I wouldn’t list cheese-powdered popcorn as part of my regular diet. BiblioBuffet contributor Lev Raphael wrote a scathing assessment this week of the who-can-read-more-books-competition Karl Rove supposedly had with our dear departing commander-in-chief. The thought that I might have the same approach to reading as Rove and Bush makes me feel a little ill. Obviously, some reading resolution reconsideration is in order. 

Or perhaps, it is just a question of bad phrasing. Thinking about it, I realized that when I first came up with the rather glib vow to “read more books in the coming year than you did in the last” I wasn’t really talking about tallies and totals. In that way lies madness. Mostly I was just thinking about how much of my life was devoted to reading. It wasn’t that I wanted to read more books. I just wanted to read more.

And what do I mean by that? To read more?  Well, I don’t mean that I’m going to set myself a series of “reading challenges” like “read more mysteries” or “read more African literature” or (as has been suggested rather emphatically by people who know me) “read more books that make me laugh.” I have fairly catholic tastes in literature, so I don’t need to be bullied into new genres, subjects or styles. It isn’t about what I want to read, but how I want to read.

I want more time. I used to have a girlfriend who complained about the time I spent with books. “Stop reading and start living,” she’d fume. Lately, life has been getting in the way of reading. The thousand little things life requires of us—dishes, laundry, taxes and volunteering, time spent doing things—have become a thousand and one, a thousand and ten, eleven hundred. I think it’s time to let reading get in the way of life again. There is a endearing scene in Olive Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree where young Will Tweedy says:

I found Aunt Loma sitting at the kitchen table, her long curly red hair still loose and tousled, the dirty breakfast dishes pushed back to clear a space. With one cat in her lap and another licking an oatmeal bowl on the table, she sat drinking coffee and reading a book of theater plays.

Mama never knew how often Aunt Loma put pleasure before duty like that. Mama liked to stay in front of her work. But then Loma was young—just twenty—and sloven.

I’m with Aunt Loma; there are times when pleasure should come before duty. The laundry can wait. I have a different girlfriend now and she has sensibly pointed out that there is nothing wrong with reading naked!

I want to take more care. Twenty years as a bookseller has made me a very fast reader. It was self-defense. On the sales floor, I had to be able to summarize (enticingly, in a manner designed to actually sell) any book on the bestseller list and most of the books receiving media attention at the moment. So I learned to read quickly, to suss out key points of plot, character and style as I read, and to know, when I finished exactly what kind of reader might be convinced to buy it. The downside to reading like this is that most books made no lasting impression on me. I used to blame my … aloofness, I suppose … on the fact that I was getting older and therefore less impressionable. But lately I’ve decided the fault could be in the way I read as well. Fast, with a goal to take in as much information in as short a time as possible. But who wants to go through life gulping down gourmet meals? I’d rather savor a good dinner, I think. It takes a little bit more attention and care to allow a book to actually make an impression, but reading is a creative process, after all.  The more you put into it, the more you get out of it.   

I want more exploration. Lately I have been asking myself how well I really know my books. When I received a biography of Samuel Johnson to review, I was interested in the subject. Mostly because the cover was a rather unusual and out of character portrait of the man who I mostly knew vaguely as “the guy that wrote that first dictionary.” As I became engrossed in Johnson’s life, however, I began to look for other books to supplement my reading, starting first with those to be found on my own shelves. Now, if you had asked me last month what kinds of books I had I would have told you about my attraction to Shakespeare and to Renaissance Florence, about how I liked biographies of artists and writers, and those travel accounts of intrepid Victorian women marching off into the wilds of Arabia. I would not have said anything about eighteenth-century philosophy.  And yet, after just a cursory look at one of my bookcases, I came up with not two or three, not five or six, but no less than fifteen different books that were about Johnson, his compatriots, or his era. I was a little shocked, actually. I had no idea I was such a rationalist. And now I’m looking at those bookcases and wondering what else I don’t know about myself. 

I want to rise more to the challenge. Here’s an admission that has me almost squirming in embarrassment. I don’t always get the books I read. I’m not afraid of big, thick, or difficult books. And I am not put off by stream of consciousness or experimental writing. But I have been known, quite often, to simply skim over the parts I don’t understand in the assumption that it will all become clear at some point. If it doesn’t, then I shrug and move on, and limit my conversations about the book to the parts that made sense. I am, in other words, a bit of a lazy reader. I don’t try very hard. Which begs the question, what am I missing? What am I missing not just in the book, but in avoiding the challenge? I can think of about twenty books I read last year—starting with Finnegan’s Wake and moving on down—that I know didn’t completely get.  Well, this year I’m not going to give in or give up so easily. This year, I’m not going down without a fight.

I want to exercise more judgment. I actually spend valuable reading time with books I don’t really want to read. Either because I was asked to review them, or because they are “important” and  I feel compelled to know something about them, or because I am going to be face to face with the author (there is nothing worse than trying to have a conversation with a writer who assumes you have read her book when you haven’t). My girlfriend, whose first bit of advice, when I asked her about reading resolutions, was to ignore the laundry and read naked, also offered this observation, “I think you should only read the books you want to read.” Which I thought was rather profound in its simplicity. I am going to learn to let go of that constant nagging pressure to “read everything” and this year, only read the books I want to. 

Life is too short to waste time with bad, boring books.  There is so much more we could be reading.


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.