This week, I am on a reading diet. I am skipping all reading—whether it be blogs I love (sorry!), novels, articles, news stories (meh!), Facebook and Twitter statuses…you name it. It’s a challenge, for sure. But I am ready, and willing and eager to see where it takes me. (Actually, to be blunt, I’m hoping it gets me to higher word counts in a couple of writing projects.)
I am not the kind of person who takes things to extremes. (My mother really should have given me a middle name like “Moderato.”) But I believe in this challenge. It’s something that’s occurred to me plenty of times before: what would I do if I weren’t reading? What might I see beyond my iPhone screen, the pages of a book? What am I scared of?
I have always read to escape. It was a coping mechanism to help me forget my anxiety, to dull certain senses. It was a way to inhabit a secret, individual world. It was a condoned form of not playing well with others. And it was a way to foster my imagination, to make me feel like I’d been to far-off places or knew the circumstances of people I might never have the chance to meet. Later, it was an opportunity to make an immediate friend. If we read the same books, we were bound to hit it off.
Yet I have recognized that for me, a person with writerly aspirations, too much reading is a problem. How can I hear the voices of my characters? How can I develop something original when I am dousing myself with plot after plot of other people’s work? If I feel frantic without my book, my body is telling me something. And I’m finally going to listen.
Many of us may hide behind the general notion that reading is good for us (and of course it is), which is why we think it’s okay for our psyches to veg out in front of the computer screen rather than the television. Since Apple products have been invented, people are probably “reading” a hell of a lot more than in previous decades, but that does not mean we have rich inner lives. As philosopher/scientist Sir Francis Bacon said in his essay “Of Studies” (which I can’t read to quote from right now), too much reading is sloth. (When I taught this for high school classes, that line was a huge hit. I’m sure it was the only thing they took home to their parents.) Not only that, but my professor of Victorian literature in graduate school reminded the class often that Oscar Wilde thought reading had the potential to be very, very dangerous. What was that kid thinking behind those pages? What was he planning? In my case, I was reading sex scenes in Stephen King novels, and no one had a clue.
In an essay called “Why Bother” by esteemed author Jonathan Franzen, he talks about his own struggle with writing fiction, especially novels. Why tackle such a feat when it’s so isolating and arduous, when one makes so little money and gets so little broader recognition? Franzen’s fiction is second to none, and surely more people know the characters from Jersey Shore, whose messages and themes are violently less…uh…illuminating. Franzen decides that the reason to write, the reason to read and support other authors is because it helps create a community of people who recognize that nothing is simple.
That could also be the definition for depression, I know. But let’s be positive, shall we? Let’s say that he nails it, the exact and optimistic reason we read fiction. What do I learn from all the novels I read and long for? Why are so many avid fiction readers also progressive thinkers? Why is fiction a compulsion for some people? Because once you begin to look into the human psyche, you cannot easily confirm one simple worldview. Novels are not political lawn signs. They ask us to like people who we might normally hate or let ourselves visit a time we know nothing about or remind us that across vast continents and eras, we are not all that different from other human beings. There are grand, really grand schemes in this world. There is history and the future and what might happen to us and what already has, if we’re willing to look at it. And amidst all of that, there are the tiny details that transport us viscerally, connect us to others, remind us of the sublime that surrounds us when we are open to it: A pitch-black sky, a baby’s cackle, a butterfly resting on a wine glass.
So I will take a vacation from reading this week in order to return to it, and my writing, with more fervor.
(If you want to know the book from which Franzen’s essay comes, it’s called How to Be Alone.)
(In another show of how shockingly devoted I am to this small enterprise, I’m closing comments for this post. I’ve never done that before.)
(If you want to email me, please do, just know I won’t get to it until Monday, August 15th AS SOON AS I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING.)
Image: “Reading” by soyrosa via Flickr using a Creative Commons license.
(Uh-oh. This post is done. What will I do now?)
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