How Reading Changed My Life (2 page)

While I was in that club chair with a book, Hazel Rochman and her husband were in South Africa, burying an old tin trunk heavy with hardcovers in the backyard, because the police might raid their house and search it for banned books. Rochman, who left Johannesburg for Chicago and became an editor for the American Library Association’s
Booklist
, summed up the lessons learned from that night, about the power of reading, in a way I would have recognized even as a girl. “Reading makes immigrants of us all,” she wrote years later. “It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”

While I was in that club chair with a book,
Oprah Winfrey was dividing her childhood between her mother in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville, but finding her most consistent home between the covers of her books. Even decades later, when she had become the host of her eponymous talk show, one of the world’s highest-paid entertainers, and the founder of an on-air book club that resulted in the sale of millions of copies of serious literary novels, Winfrey still felt the sting as she talked to a reporter from
Life
magazine: “I remember being in the back hallway when I was about nine—I’m going to try to say this without crying—and my mother threw the door open and grabbed a book out of my hand and said, ‘You’re nothing but a something-something bookworm. Get your butt outside! You think you’re better than the other kids.’ I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time.”

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running
away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or at least as blind, to that joy as had been my girlfriends banging on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—“that stupid book,” they usually called it, no matter what book it happened to be. While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

There is something in the American character that is even secretly hostile to the act of aimless reading, a certain hale and heartiness that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. This is a country that likes confidence but despises hubris, that associates the “nose in the book” with the same sense of covert superiority that Ms. Winfrey’s mother did. America is also a nation that
prizes sociability and community, that accepts a kind of psychological domino effect: alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any sort of turning away from human contact is suspect, especially one that interferes with the go-out-and-get-going ethos that seems to be at the heart of our national character. The image of American presidents that stick are those that portray them as men of action: Theodore Roosevelt on safari, John Kennedy throwing a football around with his brothers. There is only Lincoln as solace to the inveterate reader, a solitary figure sitting by the fire, saying, “My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”

There also arose, as I was growing up, a kind of careerism in the United States that sanctioned reading only if there was some point to it. Students at the nation’s best liberal arts colleges who majored in philosophy or English were constantly asked what they were “going to do with it,” as though intellectual pursuits for their own sake had had their day, and lost it in the press of business. Reading for pleasure was replaced by reading for purpose, and a kind of dogged self-improvement: whereas an executive might learn far more from
Moby Dick
or
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
, the book he was expected to have read might be
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
. Reading for pleasure, spurred on by some interior compulsion, became as suspect as getting on the subway to
ride aimlessly from place to place, or driving from nowhere to nowhere in a car. I like to do both those things, too, but not half so much as reading.

For many years I worked in the newspaper business, where every day the production of the product stands as a flimsy but eloquent testimony to the thirst for words, information, experience. But, for working journalists, reading in the latter half of the twentieth century was most often couched as a series of problems to be addressed in print: were children in public schools reading poorly? Were all Americans reading less? Was the printed word giving way to the spoken one? Had television and the movies supplanted books? The journalistic answer, most often, was yes, yes, yes, yes, buttressed by a variety of statistics that, as so often happens, were massaged to prove the point: reading had fallen upon hard times. And in circles devoted to literary criticism, among the professors of literature, the editors and authors of fiction, there was sometimes a kind of horrible exclusivity surrounding discussions of reading. There was good reading, and there was bad reading. There was the worthy, and the trivial. This was always couched in terms of taste, but it tasted, smelled, and felt unmistakably like snobbery.

None of this was new, except, in its discovering, to me. Reading has always been used as a way to divide a country and a culture into the literati and everyone
else, the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi. But in the fifteenth century Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so began the process of turning the book from a work of art for the few into a source of information for the many. After that, it became more difficult for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books, to seize and hold reading as their own. But it was not impossible, and it continued to be done by critics and scholars. When I began to read their work, in college, I was disheartened to discover that many of them felt that the quality of poetry and prose, novels and history and biography, was plummeting into some intellectual bargain basement. But reading saved me from despair, as it always had, for the more I read the more I realized it had always been thus, and that apparently an essential part of studying literature, whether in 1840, 1930, or 1975, was to conclude that there had once been a golden age, and it was gone. “The movies consume so large a part of the leisure of the country that little time is left for other things,” the trade magazine of the industry,
Publishers Weekly
, lamented in 1923. “The novel can’t compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor,” the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in 1960.

There was certainly no talk of comfort and joy, of the lively subculture of those of us who forever fell asleep with a book open on our bedside tables,
whether bought or borrowed. Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens’s latest novel and who kept battered copies of
Catcher in the Rye
in our back pockets and our backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that
Pride and Prejudice
never went out of print.

But there was little public talk of us, except in memoirs like Ms. Kincaid’s. Nothing had changed since I was a solitary child being given embossed leather bookmarks by relatives for Christmas. It was still in the equivalent of the club chairs that we found one another: at the counters in bookstores with our arms full, at the front desks in libraries, at school, where teachers introduced us to one another—and, of course, in books, where book-lovers make up a lively subculture of characters. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing,” says Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Reading is like so much else in our culture, in all cultures: the truth of it is found in its people and not
in its pundits and its professionals. If I believed what I read about reading I would despair. But instead there are letters from readers to attend to, like the one from a girl who had been given one of my books by her mother and began her letter, “I guess I am what some people would call a bookworm.”

“So am I,” I wrote back.

I
T STILL SEEMS
infinitely mysterious to me that there are some of us who have built not a life but a self, based largely on our hunger for what are a series of scratches on a piece of paper. There remain in the world, six millennia after a list of livestock on a clay tablet created reading, cultures in which the written word is a mystery, a luxury, even a redundancy. Stories are still told beside fires and streams by people bent almost double from working in the fields, told as richly as the ones my father and his brothers tell when they have a meal together and set to work embroidering the ever-changing tapestry of their past. There is something both magical and natural about
the told story, the wise man spinning a tale at a table in medieval Europe giving way to the mother talking about family history in the kitchen with her children in a small apartment in Chicago. That power of the spoken word was even given a new kind of life at the tail end of the twentieth century, when publishing houses began as a matter of course to do what beforehand only libraries for the blind had done: to release audio versions of books, although audio books sometimes seem to me to have more to do with saving time and alleviating the tedium of travel by car than they do with the need to hear the syllables of a sentence caressed by the human voice.

But the act of reading, the act of seeing a story on the page as opposed to hearing it told—of translating story into specific and immutable language, putting that language down in concrete form with the aid of the arbitrary handful of characters our language offers, of then handing the story on to others in a transactional relationship—that is infinitely more complex, and stranger, too, as though millions of us had felt the need, over the span of centuries, to place messages in bottles, to ameliorate the isolation of each of us, each of us a kind of desert island made less lonely by words. Or, not simply by words, but by words without the evanescence of speech, words that would always be the same, only the reader different
each time, so that today, or next year, or a hundred years from now, someone could pick up
A Tale of Two Cities
, turn to the last page, and see that same final sentence, that coda that Dickens first offered readers in 1859: “It is a far, far better thing …”

The Sumerians first used the written word to make laundry lists, to keep track of cows and slaves and household goods. But even in such primitive form, the writing down of symbols told of something hugely and richly revolutionary: the notion that one person could have a thought, even if that thought was only about the size of his flocks, and that that thought could be retained and then accessed—rethought, really—by another person in another place and time. The miraculous and transformative quality of this was immediately apparent to some and denied by others: Aristotle turned Alexander the Great into a great reader and champion of books, which led Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy I, to create the world’s first great library in Alexandria. But Socrates thought books were a waste of time, since they could only “remind one of what one already knows.”

Perhaps, seeing his disdain rekindled on the printed page 2500 years after he first felt it—and understanding, surely, that some readers, reading his words, were indeed learning something about Socrates
that they had never known before—the great thinker would change his mind. The clay tablet gave way to the scroll and then to the codex, the folded sheets that prefigured the book we hold and sell and treasure today. Wealthy households had books of prayers hand lettered and illuminated by monks; great soldiers kept their dispatches on paper. The French and English modified Gutenberg’s press and then mechanized it to set down religious texts and the books of the Bible. Martin Luther nailed his written manifesto against the excesses of the Catholic hierarchy to the door of a church in Wittenberg and began a war of words that led to the Reformation and, eventually, to Protestantism; the Declaration of Independence was set in type and fomented, in relatively few words, a new way for men and women to look at their own government.