LITTLE ROCK — Idon’t remember the magic moment when glyphs on paper ceased swimming and coalesced into sense, but I know reading was my first obsession. I remember reading off-topic material while teachers tried to lead us chanting through the alphabet or multiplication tables. Because I was raised to be polite, my precociousness was rarely a problem-I was quiet, I caused no outbursts, and tried not to call attention to my habit. I made my little face a mask of mildness.
But people did worry about me when I would sit cross-legged on the floor, my elbows on my knees, my hands cupped over my ears, studying the copy of Two Years Before the Mast spread across my lap.
I blocked out the interfering world so effectively that even in those days before every odd thing a child did was seen as a diagnostic opportunity, my parents wondered if something was wrong with me. I devoured The Book of Knowledge, and moved on to the Encyclopedia Americana. But I wasn’t reading to learn, to mine these books for information they warehoused-though that was probably where I began to train my head to memorize trivia-or even for the stories they told. It seems to me more likely that I was reading for the sensation it provided me, the way running the text through mycognitive filters made me feel. It was decoding for decoding’s sake.
Why else would a 6-year-old “read” more than one of his grandmother’s paperbacks about Edgar Cayce, “the sleeping prophet?” I can’t make sense of all that “akashic records” stuff today; it was just nonsense. (One thing I remember from my early studies of Cayce; he claimed to be able to absorb the contents of any book by sleeping with the volume under his pillow. That method did not appeal to me at all. I don’t want to know what a book has to say-I want the sensation of reading it.)
Reading is still a little like that for me, though I’ve lost the childish ability to be genuinely lost in a book, but there’s still a pleasant narcotizing effect that helps me sleep, a mellow high that buffers me from present reality. Things like story and style and subtleties of word choice are more important to me now-I’m a much more discriminating reader, even abook critic, but deep down I’m still a text churner, enthralled by the nub of language, the atomic word that was there in the beginning.
Maybe this is why I read relatively slow. (And write even slower.) It would be more efficient if I worked faster, if I could knock out the requisite 500 words an hour but the truth is I don’t even think that fast. And the race, no matter what you’ve heard, is rarely won by the persistent plodder.
In any case, I usually have several books that I’m reading at any given time-one by my bed, one I take to the gym, one or two at the office andnow, thanks to the miracle of my iPad (worth a column in itself) a weightless library always at hand.
Actually the iPad has two e-book applications installed; a versionof Amazon.com’s Kindle and Apple’s own proprietary iBooks. My thinking on electronic books has evolved since I reviewed the Kindle in this space a little more than a year ago. I still believe there may be qualitative differences in reading from a screen rather than off paper, and there are more than sentimental reasons to prefer the concreteness of a book.
But I haven’t the luxury of processing one book at a time anymore; at the moment I’m planning on writing about several that I’ve either just finished (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) or just begun (William Gibson’s novel Zero History). For about a month, I’ve been trying to finish a piece on Philip Roth’s novels Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater because the Library of America has just released an edition (Philip Roth: Novels 1993-1995) that collects them. (An aside on how our lives have changed in the last 15 years; when the novels were published, I wrote lengthy reviews of them in this newspaper-the lengthy piece I’m working on now will very likely end up on the website we’re gettingready to launch.)
Also, I’m about 100 pages into Jay Jennings’ remarkable Carry the Rock-another book I’m planning to blog about. And I’m highly impressed with William Harrison’s new collection of essays, Mutations of Rollerball, which I received via e-mail, as a PDF. I’ve also got the collected works of John Kenneth Galbraith (again, thanks to the Library of America) I want to dip into and, yesterday, an unsolicited copy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steve Weisman, showed up at the house.
I still prefer the heft and substantial thingness of an actual book overthe disembodied texts I can read on my iPad. (I was pleasantly surprised when I downloaded the free Kindle app and several books I’d downloaded during my ’09 test drive showed up on the electronic shelf.) But I can see the utility of a device-I can probably leave my laptop at home on most trips, as well as the two or three books I genuinely carry.
I have written before that I have a tendency toward accumulation and curation-I tend to save things, to file and order them. Especially CDs, DVDs and books. Through the loving efforts of my wife Karen, who would prefer to live more lightly, I’ve been able to dispose of several thousand shiny discs over the past couple of years. And we’ve even divested ourselves of a few books.
Now I am able to give up the CDs and DVDs largely because I understand that I’m not giving up the content these discs contain-I can rip the music onto a hard drive; movies are similarly downloadable.
But both Karen and I have a superstitious attachment to some books, and I suspect our house will always be jammed with them. But we don’t keep them all.
On the flight I took from Dallas the other day I started reading the new Jonathan Franzen on the iPad. And I got high.
Perspective, Pages 82 on 09/26/2010