 Reading Without FrontiersbyLev RaphaelMy creative writing teacher in college gave me sweeping advice when I asked how I could become a good writer: “Read everything.” And she smiled. She couldn’t have chosen a more open student to hear those words. From elementary school on, I had been haunting my local library and reading without boundaries. No librarian ever told me a book was too advanced for me or that any subject was off-limits, and my parents were just as open-minded. I read about dolphins and World War I, I read humorists like Robert Benchley and P.G. Wodehouse, folk tales from around the world, science fiction authors of all types, Dumas, poetry, books about magic, books about codes, anything that caught my eye. It was all usually above my official grade level. I read every mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor our library had, just because I was at first drawn to her resonant name. It turned out this 1930s author was hilarious, with one series featuring a professor sleuth who looked like Shakespeare, and another sleuth who was a crusty Cape Codder. I owe my mystery writing career in part to her example, because she struck such a lovely balance between comedy and murder. At home, I read all my brother's Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks and even the books he hid under his bed in an old battered briefcase, sexy spoofs of James Bond featuring someone called The Man from O.R.G.Y. (hey, it was the Sixties), and a 60s novel about free love called The Harrad Experiment. The Roman author Terence wrote that nothing human was alien to him. That's how I felt about books. I wanted to read or at least sample everything. With my college professor’s encouragement, my range expanded to better known writers like Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Dreiser, Melville, Hawthorne, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells and dozens of others I stumbled on one way or another. The list included dramatists like Tennessee Williams and poets like Auden and Merwin. Some were on course lists, others were mentioned in courses or books or articles or by other students. I was always eager to try a new author. And today, because I’m often in the middle of half a dozen books, you’ll find a biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Teddy Roosevelt, a thriller by Charlie Huston, stories by Edith Pearlman, a study of Gilded Age architecture in New York, a book about how birds build their nests, a book about Bible translation, and much more in my TBR pile, by my reading chair and at my bedside. Which is why I’ve never quite understood readers who put very strict limits on what they read. Over the years as a reviewer and an author on tour, I’ve met all kinds of them. There are the readers who refuse to read anything about religion because “it’s inherently oppressive.” Or the readers who only want happy books. Or the fans of mysteries and thrillers who despise “Literature,” which they will sneeringly define as “books about boring people doing nothing.” Their opposites are people who look down on crime fiction as “escapist.” The list goes on: readers who refuse to touch anything translated from another language; books by minorities however defined; books with too much sex or any sex at all. I read blog comments by women who dismiss male authors, because they seem to feel freer to express their contempt than men who won’t read anything written by a woman (but keep quiet about it). The subset is people who won’t read a book where the author is one gender and the protagonist is another. None of this is exactly a question of taste, it seems more a question of exclusions and prejudices. I can’t relate to limiting yourself to reading books in only one genre, or that were written in only one language, or that offer only one vision of life. Even though I’ve traveled many tens of thousands of miles in my life, some of my most amazing voyages have been in and through books. I don’t think any set of trips I take could ever take, for instance, could come close to offering as rich an experience as Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a huge book I aspire to read at least once more in this lifetime. Written in the 1930s about the explosive Balkans, it’s travelogue, history, cultural criticism, political survey and thriller all rolled into one. West’s is one of a wide array of books I’ll always treasure because they’ve changed, challenged, or transported me. I hope I read many more that broaden my horizons in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Books mentioned in this column:
Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-six years along with a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of twenty-one books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he's seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can't identify, and he's done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His latest book Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile is his second e-book original. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.
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