my mind on books

A few years ago A.J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, about his cover-to-cover reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which seemed like a daunting enough task, but now there is Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea (Perigree, 2008), which Nicholson Baker reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times.

Complete Review has additional links for Reading the OED.

I came across this passage from A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman that offers another perspective on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (See also discussion of Carr’s article at edge’s Reality Club)

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading — Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; me-centered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension — has produced illiteracy. (“Right to Remain Silent” excerpted in A Blue Fire p. 170)

How Fiction Works by James Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is an Amazon pick for “Best of the Month” for July 2008 and due to be released on the 22nd (though already available in the UK).

Product description from the publisher:

What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

Here is Wood’s review of Atmospheric Disturbances at the New Yorker (Atmospheric Disturbances is the “neurofictional” book I’m reading right now).

For those (like me) who might need a little more help, or just enjoy reading about reading, another recent title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form by Thomas C. Foster (Harper, 2008).

… a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage, but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,’ p. 1)

Indeed The Black Swan itself is part of my “antilibrary,” among the unread books that do seem menacing at times (or promising at others, or like sirens calling me away from whatever book I’m actually reading), but when I saw this quote at the interesting Total Library Project at SpaceCollective at least I had the book to refer to…

One of my former occupations involved reading and summarizing a great deal of academic journal literature, especially in philosophy, so that after reading many glosses and discussions of the canonical works it seemed like I knew them, without having actually read them, as celebrities seem familiar just because they’re talked about so much. Thus I can appreciate Pierre Bayard’s point in ‘How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read’ that the distinction between having read or not having read a book is too simple to capture the many ways of relating to literature. His wonderful examples of the variety of literary relations seem to belie the whole anti-conceit of non-reading, however. I’ve just copied the table of contents with a few notes since it gives a good idea of the topics and works discussed.

Ways of Not Reading

1. Books you don’t know – the librarian in Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil demonstrates “that reading any particular book is a waste of time compared to keeping our perspective about books overall”

2. Books you have skimmed – Paul Valery: “it is enough to have skimmed a book to be able to write an article about it…, with certain books it might even be inappropriate to do otherwise”

3. Books you have heard of – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose: “it is wholly unnecessary to have held a book in your hand to be able to speak about it in detail, as long as you listen to and read what others say about it”

4. Books you have forgotten – Montaigne: “whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read”

Literary Confrontations

5. Encounters in society – Graham Greene, The Third Man: “a nightmarish situation where the hero finds himself facing an auditorium full of admirers impatiently waiting for him to speak about books that he hadn’t read” [The character Rollo Martins writes westerns under the pseudonym Buck Dexter and is confused with a “highbrow novelist” named Benjamin Dexter.]

6. Encounters with professors – Laura Bohannon “Shakespeare in the Bush” about reading Hamlet to the Tiv: “it is wholly unnecessary to have opened a book in order to deliver an enlightened opinion on it, even if you displease the specialists in the process”

7. Encounters with the writer – Pierre Siniac’s Ferdinaud Céline: “it may be important to watch what you say the presence of a writer, especially when he himself hasn’t read the book whose author he is.” [a complicated plot in which the book the author thought he wrote was changed by the typist]

8. Encounters with someone you love – Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: “the ideal way to seduce someone by speaking about books he or she loves without having read them yourself would be to bring time to a halt.”

Ways of Behaving

9. Not being ashamed – David Lodge: “the first condition for speaking about a book you haven’t read is not to be ashamed” [describes game of Humiliation in Changing Places, in which participant scores points by coming up with books that nearly everyone has read, but which he hasn’t, exhibiting one’s lack of cultural knowledge, so competitiveness conflicts with desire to appear well-read.]

10. Imposing your ideas – Balzac, Lost Illusions: “one key to imposing your point of view on a book is to remember that the book is not a fixed object, and that even tying it up with string will not be sufficient to stop its motion.”

“Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are two-sided. Janus is the tutelary deity of criticism and the symbol of genius.” p. 143, citing Balzac p. 372

11. Inventing books – Soseki, I Am a Cat: “we follow the advice of a cat and an artist in gold-rimmed spectacles, who each, in different fields of activity, proclaim the necessity of invention.”

p. 157

But our anxiety in the face of the Other’s knowledge is an obstacle to all genuine creativity about books. The idea that the Other has read everything, and thus is better informed than us, reduces creativity to a mere stopgap that non-readers might resort to in a pinch. In truth, readers and non-readers alike are caught up in an endless process of inventing books, whether they like it or not, and the real question is not how to escape that process, but how to increase its dynamism and its range.

also Soseki, Grass on the Wayside

12. Speaking about yourself – Oscar Wilde, “To read, or not to read,” Selected Journalism, also “The critic as artist“: “the appropriate time span for reading a book is ten minutes, after which you risk forgetting that the encounter is primarily a pretext for writing your autobiography”

p. 178 The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in—a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there.