It was an uncomfortable Christmas gathering a while back, a guy I know only slightly trying to make small talk, asking about favorite tv shows. I explained we didn’t watch much tv. That it’s only on Friday & Saturday nights that we have supper in front of the big screen and watch a movie or two or binge a bit of some streaming series. He seemed baffled. “What do you do the other nights?” “We read.” “Oh,” he said, edging away, his attention turning more fully to the buffet table.
For much of my life, although I’ve savored the immediate experience of reading, I’ve thought more about what I can learn from a book, what I’ll carry with me and use after I’ve set it aside. As if the books are mostly raw material from which I’ll shape something artistic or philosophical of my own, as if each book is a signpost or a way station along this path I’m trying to walk as well as I can. I expect to be changed. I’ve been voracious in my book consumption – so much to know! These days I’m trying to be more indulgent with the immediacy of the experience. What is the poem or story or essay doing to me right now? How much fun am I having? Is it soothing, relaxing, hilarious, sobering? What happens when I read again something that made an impact in the past? How is it different from the last time? Once I sat on the floor in front of Germaine Greer as she spoke extemporaneously and extravagantly about language and literature and politics. She said that every time we use a word it carries the weight of every time it’s been used in the past and it affects the course of every utterance in the future. The idea shocked me. I believed her but I didn’t understand how it could be true. Four decades later it seems obvious.
Several years ago I ruefully admitted that even if I were to exceed any reasonable hope for my lifespan there would not be enough years left for me to read (not to mention re-read) every book in the house that I’m still interested in. This is partly due to being a subscriber to the Library of America for many years (we now have about 200), as well as to a monthly signed first editions club run out of my favorite bookstore. Then there’s the books I bought on spec, based on a review I read or some previous familiarity with the author. In those years, I might read as many as 25 or so, but I was buying twice that. Clearly unsustainable. Even when I quit the subscriptions, I was still buying more than I read. The stacks kept growing.
Finally I banned myself from buying books. I have a couple of exceptions and I’m happy to receive gifts, but I’m finally reading more than I’m acquiring. (It’s fair to ask why I, as a librarian, don’t rely on my excellent local library system to supply me with books. Easy answer – part of my preferred reading experience has always been the underlining and the marginal notes. The one time in recent years that I did borrow a library book I absent-mindedly underlined a verse before I could stop myself. In ink! I still feel guilty about it.)
A quarter of the 38 books I read this year are from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the last 11 of the 41 titles. Several years ago, Lynn borrowed the audiobook Unseen Academicals for one of our road trips. It was quirky and unexpected in its characters and twists and I loved it. On the next trip we listened to Wee Free Men and I loved that one even more, enchanted by the tough guy humor of the little blue pictsies and the gritty determination of the protagonist. Clearly I needed to read the entire series. When I instituted my ban I didn’t own all of them, so I allowed myself that dispensation, buying the inexpensive paperbacks in batches of four or five. The Discworld is a flat planet resting on the backs of four elephants, who stand on a gigantic turtle, sailing through the cosmos. The world bears enough of a resemblance to nineteenth century Britain (allowing for the existence of witches, werewolves, wizards, trolls, goblins, dwarves, & vampires, all jostling with humans) to be fertile ground for satire. I don’t think I’ve read anyone (with the possible exception of P.G. Wodehouse) who takes quite as much creative fun with the idiosyncrasies of the English language. Pratchett cracks open the eggs of our myths and scrambles them, with results both hilarious and poignant. Death becomes disillusioned with his job and quits. He takes up a post as a barman, leaving it to his young granddaughter to usher souls on from here to there. The tyrant who runs Ankh-Morpork organizes the thieves and assassins and “seamstresses” into guilds on the theory that organizing crime leads to a more stable society than attempting to eliminate crime. Pratchett mines the humor in our preening, rages at our cruel stupidities, is frustrated by our self-sabotage, knows that we will not be otherwise. That we manage to redeem ourselves over and over through honesty and kindness, often in spite of ourselves, even when riddled with uncertainty about the right thing, gives him hope. It is the most despised and discounted who make the most beautiful music. That hope finds its apotheosis in Tiffany Aching, a young witch who we follow across five of the late novels from age nine into her late teens. Tiffany struggles, fails. Her choices have consequences that she can’t undo. She is consumed with self-doubt but driven by a deep sense of responsibility, rooted in the love of family and the complex security of friendship. In the crisis of each of her stories, when she battles our elemental fears personified and works her way from childhood to the threshold of becoming an adult, it is the depth of her empathy and selflessness that enables her to succeed. She’s my favorite hero in all of literature.
Essay collections are my particular bread and butter. The year’s most remarkable read was The Glorious American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate. One hundred of ‘em, arranged chronologically from Cotton Mather in 1726 laying the groundwork for a particularly American style to expat Zadie Smith in 2008, writing about the continuing struggles to achieve the promise of America, in the guise of a lengthy review essay of Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. I read them in order, just an essay or two a day over the course of two and a half months. I was anticipating a random assortment of greatest hits, but Lopate had something much more ambitious in mind. Reading the essays in sequence takes one on a journey from the dreamy aspirations of the early colonists, into the optimism of the founders of these united states (compromisers all), through the despair of the mid 19th century, to the renewal of determination to confront the nation’s failures and celebrate its unique potential that characterizes many of the essays of the last fifty years. These aren’t just essays by Americans (i.e., people living in what are now the United States), and they are rarely explicitly about America; rather, each expresses a moment of the writer (and, perhaps, their audience) coming to terms with being a being in America. There are well known pieces – I was struck by how Walt Whitman’s “Death of Abraham Lincoln” from 1879 established the template for how we view Lincoln’s achievements and the tragedy of his assassination; and essays by writers I’d never heard of, none more touching than the story told by Sui Sin Far, a half Chinese half Caucasian who worked as a journalist in San Francisco under the name Edith Maude Eaton in the late 1800s. With features not obviously oriental, she writes of the struggle to be honest about her identity at a time and place where even if she didn’t choose to pass as white, it would’ve been safer to pretend to be Japanese, since the discrimination they faced wasn’t as virulent as what the Chinese had to deal with (and the majority couldn’t distinguish Japanese from Chinese physiognomy anyway). Politics, social movements, history, literature, economics – the whole story of the country echoes through these essays. If I were ever to teach a graduate seminar in American Studies, this would be my textbook.
From that Library of America stash, I dipped into two volumes – American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956, and Philip K. Dick: VALIS & Later Novels. When I was in my teens and early twenties I read a great deal of SF, but only very occasionally since then. The two classic novels I read, The Space Merchants and More Than Human, are fun, although the former is mostly of historic interest at this point. The Dick novels are pretty mind-blowing. I’ve read most of his earlier stuff (I suppose he’s best known for writing the book that became the movie Blade Runner) and they’re always fascinating and wildly inventive. When I first came across him thirty years ago I hadn’t yet read widely enough to appreciate how truly original and weird his books are. In these late novels he’s exploring the intersection of madness, paranoia, and religion, within a science fiction frame. Maybe God is returning to the planet he abandoned in the guise of an alien super-computer. Or maybe the narrator is slipping into madness. Maybe the author is struggling to tell the difference. Complex in structure, sophisticated in theme, written as if to intentionally keep the reader off balance. The best one can do is hang on for the ride.
I’ve been reading the annual Best American Essays every year since 1994, and continuing to get the annual volumes is another exception to my book buying ban. Each year there’s a different guest editor who makes the final selections from a trove of one hundred or so, culled by the longtime series editor. Each guest brings their particular sensibilities and concerns to the project, so each volume has a very different character. This year’s (guest edited by Alexander Chee) was not one of my favorites. Much of the writing was exceptionally good, but every writer was dealing with some kind of miserable trauma, whether having to do with their terrible childhood or their confusions about their sexuality or their addictions, or war or murder or some other dark and dreadful circumstance. Individually I liked most of them, but reading the whole lot over a period of a week and a half was unpleasantly overwhelming. Pity the young writer who comes here for inspiration only to discover that their relatively stable childhood clearly disqualifies them from ever writing anything that could one day be included. Best to stick to journalism. Or maybe just fiction. (“It’s all your fault, Ma, that I didn’t have enough trauma to become a great artist!”)
When did I first come across Ukiyo-e, the woodblock prints of “the floating world” of 18th & 19th century Edo in Japan? I’ve no idea, but it seems to go back to my teens. I’ve had a well made volume reproducing Hokusai’s 100 Views of Mt. Fuji on my shelf for several decades, but have ever only occasionally glanced at it. Excellent plates and a delightfully idiosyncratic but deeply researched introductory essay and notes on the individual images. Over a stretch of two or three months this year I’d take it up sometimes in the late evening, poring over the images after reading the notes; following the sequences, trying to imagine what it was like to have books like these as one’s main entertainment at the end of the long day. Impossible, of course, for a 21st century American to more than glimpse it. But I imagine it occupying an analogous space to the blockbuster movies in our culture. These books weren’t considered high art, although the best of them might nuzzle up to that status in their day (and we certainly view them that way now). They were the work of skilled craftsmen, dedicated to evoking a sequence of emotional responses from their middle class audiences. The experience of these pages, the confident line of the painter brought to the page by the sure hand of the carver, is a mix of divine and mundane, supernatural beings establishing the background against which tourists and pilgrims, merchants and craftsmen, monks and dignitaries live their days, the magnificence of Fuji always in the distance, the ever-reminder of the infinite spiritual mystery against which we play.
The first time I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was when it came out twenty years ago. I thought then that it was as good as a novel could be – plot, characters, writing, themes, breadth – everything operating at peak experience. I was happy to find that decades later the impact was just as powerful. I’ve read almost all of Chabon’s books and they’re all excellent, but this one is particularly fine. Among the things that Chabon is very good at is describing how a person changes over time. Most often, when a novelist writes an epic that covers decades, the characters that we follow are, at best, only superficially changed. They suffer their disappointments, learn (or don’t learn) their lessons, but the actors that might play them in the movie wouldn’t need but a little aging makeup. Same man, suit just a little more worn. Moustache now instead of clean shaven. But that’s not how aging works in the real world. All that we’ve forgotten turns us inside out, the dreams we thought we had are remembered in fractures, the weight of the good and evil that we’ve encountered and participated in reshapes us endlessly. We meet Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay at the cusp of adulthood, excited and optimistic as they launch The Escapist, their comics competitor to Superman. Watch them as life tangles and tosses them, nearly breaks them. Some scars never heal. Where does hope come from? How does love survive? How does it change? Sometimes all that makes a person at fifty the same person they were at seventeen is the series of inaccurately remembered events that no one else has. A life is so much longer and deeper and more mysterious than most of us can conceive when we’re young. Showing what it’s like is one of the gifts the great novelists can bestow.
Took my fourth stroll through John McPhee’s Draft No.4: On the writing process, which collects and revises several essays that previously appeared in The New Yorker. McPhee is incapable of writing a dull sentence (no, wait – of course he’s capable of writing one; but he won’t allow himself to publish it) and reading him about structure inspires me, makes me eager to get back to my keyboard. The title comes from his claim that it’s only when you get to the fourth draft, when you finally have all of the elements of the story where they need to go and you’re up to the final polishing so that each word and each sentence has the impact you’re after, that writing becomes fun. Up to then it’s simply terrifying hard work. That certainly reflects my experience. When I saw the first reviews of Draft No. 4 (it came out in 2017) I hadn’t read any McPhee, although I knew a bit about his reputation. Maybe the book would be helpful as I tried writing longer essays. I was astonished at the smooth vivacity of his writing, the clarity, the cleverness of how his lengthy explorations were constructed. Oh yes! I want to be able to do something like that! I vowed to read it again every six months. I haven’t quite stuck that schedule, but each time I do go back I get more from it. The buying ban kept me from exploring his work further, so it wasn’t until Lynn gave me The John McPhee Reader at last year’s birthday that I read him in depth. I realized then that because of the particular focus of Draft No.4 I’d come to think of McPhee as primarily a technician, devising his elaborate under-structures, fussing over finding just the right word or simile. With The ... Reader I begin to see the depth of his artistry and how much the craft is in the service of that grand artistic enterprise. What can you do with a piece of writing? Can you structure it in such a way that the reader feels the experience that you’re writing about? I see how radical the early works were for their time, those long essays from the sixties with McPhee himself very much a participant. Radical compared to the generation of journalists just before him, that is. Montaigne was doing much the same thing in 1585.
I was a comic books kid (Dan and I sitting on the floor with the latest releases in the little comics and teen mags section at the front of the Rexall drugstore). Spider-man! Batman! (Superman, not so much). Characters complicated by self-doubt, but trying so hard to do the right thing. The visual enchantment of the black line and bright reds, oranges, greens. (My earliest memory has me on the living room floor as an infant, mesmerized by a sheet of the Sunday funnies). The comics have evolved as I’ve grown older, the best of them a heady mix of art and craft, entertainment and profound human mystery, and while I’m not an avid comics consumer, I’ve dipped in from time to time. This year I finally got around to Watchmen, reading it in the deluxe hardcover edition (larger pages, refreshed colors). I’ve been aware of its reputation for years, but that hadn’t prepared me for how powerful it is. Two generations of costumed vigilantes struggling with egos, loss, power, desire, failure. All the human stuff, exaggerated and heightened by the comic book frame. The effect of poring over these pages late in the evening, pool of light spilling across them, is not unlike a refracted view of a Marvel movie. There are the pounding dramatic impacts, but you can slow them, repeat them, each panel triggering the next set of linked images in the mind's eye, ever circling back to see how we got here. We enjoy the movies passively, but experiencing the book engages the active involvement of each individual imagination. This is not illustrated text or images enhanced with words; this is collaboration, words and images equally essential in getting the stories across, in imposing the experience envisioned by the creators. I learned about this collaborative effort of making comics over a decade ago. After Lynn and I started reading Gaiman, around the time of American Gods, I became curious about the work that brought him his initial fame – The Sandman. Lynn began buying me the five volumes of the Absolute editions, one each year for Christmas, starting in 2009. These editions (DC does them for quite a few of their most successful series) are archival quality slipcased books, pages larger than the originals, with more vivid coloring and many extras. Volume 1 includes Gaiman’s initial pitch and conception and, most illuminatingly, his full script for one of the individual issues. Here you begin to see how the writer works with the penciller (who does the initial drawings that are then finalized by an inker before they’re turned over to the letterer and the colorist – specialists all). The writer will have their own notion of how the characters look, how the settings should be realized, how the pages might be laid out. But over a long series, a feedback loop is created as the images the penciller develops (completed by the inker and the colorist) work their way into the writer’s brain, leading to new storylines and a richer understanding of the psychology of the characters. With Netflix’s Sandman series coming up in the fall, I re-read Absolute Sandman volume 1, from which the video series is drawn. Over the course of the first dozen or so (of what were eventually 75) issues, Gaiman opened the world of comics into a universe that can contain all of myth, that tackles the mysteries of existence as deeply as the material he draws from, while remaining uniquely true to his own visions (and those of his collaborators). In one award winning issue, which echoes the visual style of the old Classic Comics, we see Shakespeare’s troupe perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the faerie king and queen that they portray. Elsewhere, Cain and Abel repeat the tropes of their tortured relationship endlessly. Most poignantly we watch as Death bestows her tenderness and Dream (The Sandman) learns a little more about the psyches of these humans whose unconscious he inhabits and shapes. From the most horrifying of nightmares Gaiman finds Hope, the unconquerable. So many people still think of graphic novels as some cheap bastardized throwaway, which is weird in an age where movies, and particularly big blockbuster movies, are the dominant cultural art form. But the experience of Watchmen or The Sandman can be as rich and profound as any other encounter with great art. I’ll call them great literature, feeling a twinge of pity for those who believe the term’s fences are too restrictive for it.
When Uncle Bill Green (the world’s most dangerous poet) died in St. Louis late in ‘21 his family suggested that rather than sending flowers or money, the best memorial would be to go to the local public library and check out a book of poetry. Since I’m no longer subscribing to any of the periodicals that helped me keep track of contemporary poetry I decided to borrow Best American Poetry 2021 (this is the one I accidentally put an underlining in). That was fun, so I made the annual series another buying exception and am now about halfway through the 2022 edition. “Best” is just marketing, of course; but most of them strike me as quite good – by which I mean they make effective use of sound, sense, and image to illuminate aspects of the human self trying to make its way through the mysteries of the world. The ones I like the best rattle me, disarrange my thinking, agitate my emotions. Matthew Walther had a silly excuse for an essay in the NYT a while back in which he proclaims that TS Eliot killed poetry a hundred years ago with The Wasteland. “We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.” (That I read this around the same time I was reading Jim Harrison’s long poem “The Theory and Practice of Rivers” amplified the silliness of his claims.) Walther doesn’t actually make an argument, never articulates what “good poetry” is. The essay is simply clickbait at a level the NYT should be ashamed of. Walther is a prolific conservative Catholic essayist using the occasion of the anniversary of The Wasteland’s publication to rail against the decadent evils of the modern industrial world. It certainly is the case that poetry doesn’t occupy the same space in the cultural landscape that it once did. Neither do live theater, radio plays, or the habit of friends getting together in the evening to play music, although all of these things continue to thrive in their modern forms. There are indications that the movie theater going experience has peaked and will never again have the cultural cachet it once did, but people will keep making movies and many people will keep seeing them in theaters. That the cultural artifacts that have the broadest popular appeal shift over time isn’t new, surprising, or cause for alarm. You have to wonder how much contemporary poetry Walther actually read before concocting his claim about our incapability for it. I wonder how he’d critique Ada Limón’s The Carrying, which I finished for the 3rd time this year. I still haven’t been able to put it back on the shelf, so I’ve been working my way through it again, just reading one or two poems in an evening every couple of weeks. She’s currently the US Poet Laureate, but I latched on to her a few years ago. There was a poem in the American Poetry Review that so knocked me out I immediately ordered this, then her most recent book. It’s been a long time since a poet I was unfamiliar with moved me as much as she does. Structurally, the poems are incredibly tight and rhythmic, and her sensitivity to the conflicts that underpin most human emotions, the struggles of love and loss in particular, resonate deeply. Doors flutter open in one’s mind, pathways unshuffle, shadows illuminate, the heart pounds with a gentle welcome hurt. Admiration for her technical skill, the way her rhythm bounces from line to line, rhyme intensifying the story. I’m flipping through the book, looking for a representative excerpt, but her poems are so beautifully taut and tied together it seems unfair to wrench a few lines out, as if they could give you a glimpse of what the poem is like. But I’ll try this one, plucked at random. She’s in New Orleans, standing by the river, having just left the urgent care doctor for some unspecified ailment that’s left her “in a raging battle / with my body” “vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics villain / nobody can kill.” Then,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth –
a woman, by a river, indestructible
Read it aloud, for the rhythm, let the visual blossom in your mind. Again and again, Limón goes to the dark, finds hope. Poetry is far from dead, and Limón slays dragons.
The year’s reading wasn’t all thrilling and illuminating. The biggest disappointment was Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, which has been sitting impatiently on my shelf since it came out in 2011. I’d see it over there, fat and bold, full of promise, just begging to be pulled into my lap. I’d greatly enjoyed his previous novel, Kafka on the Shore, so I had high hopes, but I was done in by the flat, clichéd writing, the red herrings, the twists and turns that too often went nowhere. I’m not convinced that some of my reaction to the writing isn’t the fault of the translators, but I’m not capable of judging. Perhaps, in his mash-up of genres, he was trying to mimic a California noir style; something hard-boiled and slick, clipped and menacing and unadorned. I’ve read plenty of Hammett and Chandler and Cain and if that’s what he was shooting for, the bullet didn’t make it. Frustratingly, although I’d just as soon forget that reading experience, it tugs at me as much as the books that I loved. The intricacies of the plot, absurd and jagged, still hold fascination; the multiplicity of points of view at the climax still jitter in my mind, like a 16mm film on a broken sprocket. Maybe my reaction was some lack in me comes a whisper from some subterranean canyon of consciousness. Maybe I ought to read it again.
When I worked in the candle factory, most of the people I worked with did not read. Joe, the assistant shift supervisor, twenty-two, bright guy, had never travelled as far from his hometown of Oshkosh as the big city of Milwaukee, less than 100 miles away. He and his friends watched a little tv, but this was long before the internet and the ubiquity of smart phones. Their knowledge of the world was gleaned mostly from what they could directly experience. They were intelligent, but profoundly ignorant. I wondered what it was like in their heads. When a man on the news program says “China” what images form, what impressions, what assumptions? In my mind bloomed thousands of years of history and philosophy and art, the complex politics of the modern world. What did these non-readers, these anti-readers think? My friends, college educated all, dismissed them when I raised the question – said they were mentally impoverished and there probably wasn’t anything going on in their heads worth bothering about.
I didn’t believe it. Watching them make their ways through the world I knew their inner lives were as complex as mine, but so profoundly different. A much smaller world, sure. But perhaps a world where the boundaries and the borders are sharper, where your place and the ways in which you connect to other people are clear, where what is expected of you and what you can expect of others is understood, despite how often any of you fail to live up to it. What concerns you are the immediacies of your life here today, the strategies you concoct for making your way, negotiating your path against those you love and those who are your enemies. What people think who live a hundred miles away doesn’t have much of anything to do with that.
Were they more secure in their lives than I was in mine? They say that reading (like travel) broadens the mind, although it’s not clear what that actually means. Certainly, if one is paying attention, it opens the mind to ambiguity and doubt. Reading may be even more powerful in this way than travel. I know people who’ve travelled extensively and yet seem never to have paid attention to the lives of the people in those other lands beyond seeing them as part of the scenery. They look at the differences between how they live their lives and how the people in these foreign lands live theirs and it just reinforces their belief that their beliefs are the correct ones. Travel narrowing the mind, rather than broadening it. But when you allow yourself the deep experience of novels and poems and histories and philosophies, you have to confront the multiplicity of beliefs in the human world. You have to question the inviolable status of your own.
Don’t you?
Every word I read, every word I write carries the breath of everyone who ever spoke it, in every language, in every place, in every time. We are all tethered, each one to the others.
Cervantes and Montaigne my contemporaries, Crazy Horse and the Lady Murasaki and the water sorcerers of Chichen-Itza. Empires rise and fall, tyrants amass armies and are overthrown, heroes walk the earth sung and unsung. We’re all there. No one is remote.
The woman in Tehran risking her life by refusing the hijab lives as close to me as the guy around the corner with his MAGA hat perched belligerently on his balding head. Her college kid cousin in Missouri, living just as dangerously by insisting on wearing her hijab to class is nearby as well, along with that kid making Afropop beats in Nairobi, the mother in Ukraine heading for the Polish border, kids huddled in the back seat of a borrowed car. They’re all no more than an arm’s length, the heart’s length, away.
We are capable of believing the most amazing things, for good and ill, untroubled by our contradictions, pursuing our great dreams of generosity and destruction. When a book tells a true story, whether fiction or nonfiction or something other or in between, it beckons us into all those other lives. Sure, you can reject it, turn your back on it, cling to the world that you think you know. Or you can allow yourself to be changed.