(By Joe Queenan, Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2012)
I started
borrowing books from a roving Quaker City bookmobile when I was 7 years old.
Things quickly got out of hand. Before I knew it I was borrowing every book
about the Romans, every book about the Apaches, every book about the spindly
third-string quarterback who comes off the bench in the fourth quarter to bail
out his team. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but what started out as a
harmless juvenile pastime soon turned into a lifelong personality disorder. Fifty-five years later, with at least 6,128
books under my belt, I still organize my daily life—such as it is—around
reading. As a result, decades go by without my windows getting washed.
My reading
habits sometimes get a bit loopy. I often read dozens of books simultaneously.
I start a book in 1978 and finish it 34 years later, without enjoying a single
minute of the enterprise. I absolutely refuse to read books that critics
describe as "luminous" or "incandescent." I never read
books in which the hero went to private school or roots for the New York
Yankees. I once spent a year reading nothing but short books. I spent another
year vowing to read nothing but books I picked off the library shelves with my
eyes closed. The results were not pretty.
I even tried to spend an entire year reading books I had always
suspected I would hate: "Middlemarch," "Look Homeward,
Angel," "Babbitt." Luckily, that project ran out of gas quickly,
if only because I already had a 14-year-old daughter when I took a crack at
"Lolita."
Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true,
but the trash like "Hell's Belles" and "Kid Colt and the Legend
of the Lost Arroyo" and even "Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp"
that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any
case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book
every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the
Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston
Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.
A case can
be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing
with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers. If you
have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at
some level you find "reality" a bit of a disappointment. People in
the 19th century fell in love with "Ivanhoe" and "The Count of
Monte Cristo" because they loathed the age they were living through. Women
in our own era read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre"
and even "The Bridges of Madison County"—a dimwit, hayseed reworking
of "Madame Bovary"—because they imagine how much happier they would be
if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken,
illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach. A blind bigamist nobleman with a
ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day
of the week. Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.
Similarly,
finding oneself at the epicenter of a vast, global conspiracy involving both
the Knights Templar and the Vatican would be a huge improvement over slaving
away at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the rest of your life or being
married to someone who is drowning in dunning notices from Williams-Sonoma WSM
-1.32%. No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read
primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape
to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their
jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not
constantly say things like "Have a good one!" and "Sounds like a
plan!" A world where men do not wear belted shorts. Certainly not the Knights
Templar.
I read
books—mostly fiction—for at least two hours a day, but I also spend two hours a
day reading newspapers and magazines, gathering material for my work, which
consists of ridiculing idiots or, when they are not available, morons. I read books
in all the obvious places—in my house and office, on trains and buses and
planes—but I've also read them at plays and concerts and prizefights, and not
just during the intermissions. I've read books while waiting for friends to get
sprung from the drunk tank, while waiting for people to emerge from comas,
while waiting for the Iceman to cometh.
In my 20s,
when I worked the graveyard shift loading trucks in a charm-free Philadelphia
suburb, I would read during my lunch breaks, a practice that was dimly viewed
by the Teamsters I worked with. Just to be on the safe side, I never read
existentialists, poetry or books like "Lettres de Madame de Sévigné"
in their presence, as they would have cut me to ribbons.
During
antiwar protests back in the Days of Rage, I would read officially sanctioned,
counter-culturally appropriate materials like "Siddhartha" and
"Steppenwolf" to take my mind off Pete Seeger's maddening banjo
playing. I once read "Tortilla Flat" from cover to cover during a
nine-hour Jerry Garcia guitar solo on "Truckin'" at Philadelphia's
Spectrum; by the time he'd wrapped things up, I could have read "As I Lay
Dying." I was, in fact, lying there dying.
I've never
squandered an opportunity to read. There are only 24 hours in the day, seven of
which are spent sleeping, and in my view at least four of the remaining 17 must
be devoted to reading. A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker
sought to convey in "Dracula" is that a human being needs to live
hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula,
basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from
the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure
evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off
his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I
have not yet found time to read "Dracula."
I do not
speed-read books; it seems to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, much
like speed-eating a Porterhouse steak or applying the two-minute drill to sex.
I almost never read biographies or memoirs, except if they involve quirky
loners like George Armstrong Custer or Attila the Hun, neither of them avid
readers. I avoid inspirational and
self-actualization books; if I wanted to read a self-improvement manual, I
would try the Bible. Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or
politicians; these books are interchangeably cretinous and they all sound
exactly the same: inspiring, sincere, flatulent, deadly. Reviewing them is like reviewing brake fluid:
They get the job done, but who cares?
I do not
accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt
collars are a dramatically different color from the main portion of the
garment. I am particularly averse to being lent or given books by people I may
like personally but whose taste in literature I have reason to suspect, and
perhaps even fear. I dread that awkward
moment when a friend hands you the book that changed his or her life, and it is
a book that you have despised since you were 11 years old. Yes, "Atlas
Shrugged." Or worse, "The Fountainhead." No, actually, let's
stick with "Atlas Shrugged." People fixated on a particular book cannot
get it through their heads that, no matter how much this book might mean to
them, it is impossible to make someone else enjoy "A Fan's Notes" or
"The Little Prince" or "Dune," much less "One Thousand
and One Places You Must Visit Before You Meet the Six People You Would Least
Expect to Run Into in Heaven." Not unless you get the Stasi involved.
Close
friends rarely lend me books, because they know I will not read them anytime
soon. I have my own reading schedule—I hope to get through another 2,137 books
before I die—and so far it has not included time for "The Audacity of
Hope" or "The Whore of Akron," much less "Father John:
Navajo Healer." I hate having books rammed down my throat, which may
explain why I never liked school: I still cannot understand how one human being
could ask another to read "Death of a Salesman" or "Ethan
Frome" and then expect to remain on speaking terms.
Saddling
another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a
huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani
without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro. It's also a way of foisting an unsolicited
values system on another person. If you hand someone whose mother's maiden name
was McNulty a book like "Angela's Ashes," what you're really saying
is "You're Irish; kiss me." I reject out of hand the obligation to
read a book simply because I share some vague ethnic heritage with the author.
What, just because I'm Greek means that I have to like Aristotle? And Plato?
Geez.
Writers
speak to us because they speak to us, not because of some farcical ethnic
telepathy. Joseph Goebbels and Albert Einstein were both Germans; does that
mean they should equally enjoy "Mein Kampf"? Perhaps this is not the
example I was looking for. Here's a better one: One of my closest friends is a
Mexican-American photographer who grew up in a small town outside Fresno,
Calif., and who now lives in Los Angeles. His favorite book is
"Dubliners." A friend once
told me that he read Saul Bellow because Bellow seemed like the kind of guy who
had been around long enough that he might be able to teach you a thing or two
about life. Also, Saul Bellow never wore belted shorts.
This is how
I feel about my favorite writers. If you are an old man thinking of taking
early retirement, read "King Lear" first. Take lots of notes,
especially when the gratuitous blinding of senior citizens starts in. If you're
a middle-aged man thinking of marrying a younger woman, consult Molière
beforehand. If you're a young man and you think that love will last forever,
you might want to take a gander at "Wuthering Heights" before putting
your John Hancock on that generous pre-nup.
Until
recently, I wasn't aware how completely books dominate my physical existence.
Only when I started cataloging my possessions did I realize that there are
books in every room in my house, 1,340 in all. My obliviousness to this fact
has an obvious explanation: I am of Irish descent, and to the Irish, books are
as natural and inevitable a feature of the landscape as sand is to Tuaregs or
sand traps are to the frat boys at Myrtle Beach. You know, the guys with the
belted shorts. When the English stormed the Emerald Isle in the 17th century,
they took everything that was worth taking and burned everything else.
Thereafter, the Irish had no land, no money, no future. That left them with
words, and words became books, and books, ingeniously coupled with music and
alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.
This was my
experience as a child. I grew up in a Brand X neighborhood with parents who had
trouble managing money because they never had any, and lots of times my three
sisters and I had no food, no heat, no television. But we always had books. And
books put an end to our misfortune. Because to the poor, books are not diversions.
Book are siege weapons. I wish I still
had the actual copies of the books that saved my life—"Kidnapped,"
"The Three Musketeers," "The Iliad for Precocious
Tykes"—but they vanished over the years. Because so many of these
treasures from my childhood have disappeared, I have made a point of hanging on
to every book I have bought and loved since the age of 21.
Books as
physical objects matter to me, because they evoke the past. A Metro ticket
falls out of a book I bought 40 years ago, and I am transported back to the Rue
Saint-Jacques on Sept. 12, 1972, where I am waiting for someone named Annie
LeCombe. A telephone message from a
friend who died too young falls out of a book, and I find myself back in the
Chateau Marmont on a balmy September day in 1995. A note I scribbled to myself
in "Homage to Catalonia" in 1973 when I was in Granada reminds me to
learn Spanish, which I have not yet done, and to go back to Granada.
None of this
will work with a Kindle. People who need to possess the physical copy of a
book, not merely an electronic version, believe that the objects themselves are
sacred. Some people may find this attitude baffling, arguing that books are
merely objects that take up space. This is true, but so are Prague and your
kids and the Sistine Chapel. Think it through, bozos. The world is changing, but I am not changing
with it. There is no e-reader or Kindle in my future. My philosophy is simple:
Certain things are perfect the way they are. The sky, the Pacific Ocean,
procreation and the Goldberg Variations all fit this bill, and so do books.
Books are sublimely visceral, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a
perfect delivery system.
Electronic
books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who
have vision problems, or who have clutter issues, or who don't want other
people to see that they are reading books about parallel universes where
nine-eyed sea serpents and blind marsupials join forces with deaf Valkyries to
rescue high-strung albino virgins from the clutches of hermaphrodite centaurs,
but they are useless for people engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair
with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can
depend on. Books that make us believe, for however short a time, that we shall
all live happily ever after.
—Adapted
from "One for the Books" by Joe Queenan, to be published Thursday.
With permission from Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA).
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