In the movie The Wife, a jaded middle-aged female novelist takes aside a talented young writer at a Smith College reading and says to her: “Don’t do it.” The aspiring student writer stands her ground, insisting that “a writer needs to write.” The older woman sighs. “A writer needs to be read,” she says.
I understand both sentiments. A writer does need to write. But, oh, how often it feels pointless, when publishing is so hard, when all-too-soon even the published book feels as impactful as a rock settling to the bottom of the sea! (Continue Reading)
What book is top on your bucket list of books? What book have you always wanted to read but somehow never have? And what book would you feel incomplete without reading?
I’ve been hearing the term “aspirational” a lot lately. Aspirational recycling, aspirational eating, aspirational shopping, and so forth. “Aspirational” is a term applied to anything you do more out of hope than effectiveness. The other day when I confronted the stacks of books on my nightstand and environs, I realized that aspirational reading was also a thing.
And I was most definitely an aspirational reader.
I met Anna Marsh at a Yale alumni event where her name tag told me she had received a PhD in psychology there in 1985. I expected to hear stories of a career in academia, musings on current psychological research, and perhaps tales of her illustrious classmates (one of whom currently serves as Yale’s president). We did, in fact, do some reminiscing. But our conversation took an unexpected turn when Anna mentioned being a fiction writer.
I soon learned that Anna had completed a master’s in writing at Johns Hopkins after leaving her career in government. I wanted to know more, especially about the value of formal writing education in a person with a wealth of learning and life experience. (Continue Reading)
Last January in the midst of a blizzard, my toddler grandson and I found the only safe space near Burlington, VT area: an indoor mall. Pushing his stroller through the corridors, zigzagging through clacking toys, overpriced kiddie togs, and alluring fast food, I remembered the many hours I’d spent walking mall floors with my own children. I actually think my older daughter’s first word may have been “mall.”
And then, after exhausting the commericial clatter, we saw it: a library! (Continue Reading)
The other day I passed the beginnings of a new Amazon Books in Bethesda Row, a place where Barnes & Noble recently shut down. I still remember the days when Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember Borders?) were blamed for shoving out the independent booksellers. Now Amazon has come for them. (Continue Reading)
Good news from the latest Pew Survey on American reading habits: Americans are still reading books, and reading lots of them. Oddly, though, it seems that the older we get and the more time we have, the fewer books we read. 
(Continue Reading)
I am reading Proust. Again. And it’s like I never started.
After years of neglect, I decided to try to read all three volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. How depressing it was to discover a bookmark towards the end of Volume 2. I had no memory of making it so far. I also had virtually no memory of anytihng I had read. (Continue Reading)
I asked these questions last month (Audiobooks: The Chinese Food of Literature) because I noticed that listening to audiobooks was not as fulfilling as reading books. Audiobooks obviously have a place, and considerable merits. But even when I’m “reading” an audiobook, I still feel hunger for a book. A real book.
Despite the audiobook ads claiming that “listening is the new reading,” the experience I have with audiobooks doesn’t feel quite like “reading” to me. I wondered if anyone else felt similarly. (Continue Reading)
I’ve got that craving again, that gnawing, empty feeling I get when I am not reading a book. Over the holidays I tidily finished up Henry James’s Daisy Miller , Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo, and a nonfiction book. Since then I’ve been tearing through old magazines and listening to audiobooks. Just yesterday I spent four hours listening to an audiobook while on the road. And I will listen to more of it when driving into town today.
This audiobook is superb: Sebastian Haffner’s memoir, Defying Hitler. I look forward to finishing it. And yet I feel empty, and bookless.
Remember that old saying about feeling hungry again an hour after eating Chinese food? I’m beginning to wonder if audiobooks are the Chinese food of literature. (Continue Reading)
I am on page 608 of a book I hate. And the more I read it, the more I hate it. And yet I keep reading.
This has to stop. (Continue Reading)
Is there anything in life better than leaving the library with a new book? Well, yes, of course. Still, leaving the library with Hanya Yanagihara‘s A Little Life in hand the other day reminded me of a list I have been meaning to put together for decades. This list is supposed to contain life’s simple pleasures.
I’m talking about momentary delights, the ones you often overlook but that fill you with pure contentment tinged with possibility. I can only think of a few. Leaving the library with a new book in hand is most definitely one of them.
With Thanksgiving in the air, it seems appropriate to think of a few more. (Continue Reading)
Several years ago I combed my bookshelves and gave my teenage son some old paperbacks I thought he’d enjoy. Recently, while hunting for a book he asked me to send to him in college, I found the books neatly stacked next to his bed. I wondered if he had ever read any of them.
One he had probably not cracked open—or so I thought I had evidence to prove—was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I figured this because when I myself opened the book, the pages started shedding. (Continue Reading)
Another day, another article proclaiming that the death of reading is threatening our minds, souls, and civilization. The latest essay is Philip Yancey’s in the Washington Post.
I try reading these essays from start to finish without succumbing to click bait. I am determined to prove wrong that no one today has an attention span long enough to finish an article, much less a book.
Sometimes I manage to finish the articles. Not always. (Continue Reading)
Last month I published a poll asking for tips about summer and travel reading (READING ON THE ROAD). I had an ulterior motive. I was hoping someone could save me from lifelong habit of lugging books around the world that I ended up neglecting or destroying, sometimes both.
I can’t say that anything I learned is likely to save me, alas. But I did get some useful and fascinating advice. (Continue Reading)
Once upon a time, I’d fill a backpack with thick tomes I had been waiting for months to devour. Paperback or hardcover, it didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who read War and Peace on the beach (and, actually, my organic chemistry text on a cliff near the Oracle at Delphi – but that’s another story). Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m not sure that’s the best way to take reading on the road. (Continue Reading)
In a recent article about writer and photography critic Teju Cole, Norman Rush notes that Cole’s emergence as a social media superstar makes him a “kind of realm.” Beyond his fine reputation as the author of books and other print media, Cole is also an accomplished photographer and prolific “Tweeter” with a huge Facebook following.
Cole himself has observed that some of the finest “literary minds of our generation” express themselves by means other than traditional print media. Yet they often still write books. Presumably that’s because books are more serious than tweets. Books are also more likely to stick around long enough to reach posterity.
Is this valid? (Continue Reading)
More and more people tell me that this is no time for fiction. Nor do they themselves have time for fiction.
Even lifetime novel lovers say they feel that today’s times call for information, not retreats into fantasyland. Serious readers say they find it hard to immerse themselves in fictional worlds. One writer friend even admitted that she no longer has the attention span for books of any sort, including nonfiction, that don’t have immediate and obvious bearing on current events.
“Ever since the presidential election sticking my head in a novel feels like counting the angels on pins,” she told me. She says that now and then she does read an article in The New Yorker, but even that has to have immediate and obvious bearing on current events. (Continue Reading)
“I’m not reading fiction much anymore.” “I can’t read novels these days.” “More and more, I’m restricting my reading list to non-fiction.”
Few statements can rattle a novelist like these. And I’ve been hearing a lot of them lately. (Continue Reading)
