Why I've Been Reading

a break from our regularly scheduled programming

I read a lot of novels growing up. There was a big bookshelf in one room of the house where my parents kept the books they had finished reading, and I remember sitting on the floor staring at the spines, and working my way through them. They were heavy on Robertson Davies and Evelyn Waugh, so I read all of those, plus some Murdochs, Bellows, Doctorows, and many more I don’t remember.

For my 8th grade graduation (lol), my parents gave me “luxe” editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Great Expectations. I put them on my own, smaller bookshelf and tried, several times, to read them, but couldn’t get into them, and I stared at those spines for years feeling a failure. Still, in high school and wanting my reading to signal something, I worked through other classics. The longer the more impressive, so I read Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch. There was now a vague list in my head, and I was checking items off.

As an English major in college, I continued to work through to reading lists, mine and the syllabi, and focused on contemporary fiction that would keep me up with the discourse (as we were starting to call it). I was reading what I felt I “should.”

I went to graduate school to get a PhD in English, so novel reading continued to be something I did in the middle of the day during the week, sitting upright, pen in hand, anxious about a pending paper or oral exam. Novel reading as leisure activity became less attractive, so I began reading non-fiction. Down I went, gleefully, into another loose canon. All the Kapuscinkis and Horwitzes and Didions and Feinsteins. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was also beginning to read as a writer, creating a base of knowledge and examples I would later draw upon when, after I became an English professor, I started writing non-scholarly non-fiction (so many negatives!), integrating what I subconsciously learned during those ABD nights. Then, for a spate, I reviewed books for newspapers and magazines, and my reading diet became a steady stream of galleys, both fiction and non, and all, of course, extremely contemporary.

About a decade ago I started Belt, which focuses on non-fiction, and I found myself in the opposite position I was in during grad school: non-fiction was now my day job, so I put novels back on the night table. When my son graduated high school and moved out, and my life became calmer, I started reading more. And that’s where I am now: someone who has plenty of time to read, and whose leisure reading is mainly fiction.

I no longer feel a need to prove anything through my choice of book to read. I often barely even remember them a day or two later, and that’s just fine. I am again like I was when young, sitting on that floor looking up at shelves of spines, deciding what to read based entirely on back cover copy and whim. Short or long, old or new, funny or devastating. It’s a gift and a solace: pleasure severed from ambition or duty.

Posting book stacks on social media—”books read in February.” “My 2022 in books”—is, thus, for me, entirely unappealing. Anathema are those spreadsheets some make with reading lists for upcoming months or years. I never worry that reading twelve Ann Cleves books in a row—as I did at some point last year—is “embarrassing” or “slacking off.” Nor do I feel any misplaced pride for plowing through a bunch of Wharton or Trollope. I laughed when reading Ross Douthat’s op-ed, I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities, in which he castigates himself for not having “read a complete 19th century novel for his own private enjoyment” in ages. He—and, he intimates, us all— have this problem. ( I do not.)

But it’s not a problem not to have read Hawthorne in decades. Nor is it noble to have read him. If there is one genre I abhor it’s the “reading per se is a moral good” one, followed by the “reading great books is even more morally good”. Nor do I find it interesting or beneficial to suggest reading some books is “better for you” than reading others. I am not a fan of fetish-y “reading books is the best thing ever” memes and sentimental “yay reading” placards. I’m not a fan, period, of reading, in the sense that fandom—such a big thing these days!—is a cultural stance I just never really get or take on myself (I think it’s very GenX of me to refuse to be a ‘fan’ per se). Of course, this entire line of argument is huge and hoary and there are many critical and theoretical arguments I could usher in here to now to further explain, but no one wants to read that long of a substack. My point here, now, today, is this: reading is one my life’s greatest pleasures, and, given my career, it’s been a glorious gift of the past few years to be able to decide what to or not to read based on random whims.

Last week I read Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means and it struck me as an almost perfect novel. I’ve lined up more Spark to read next. I also read Jeanette McCurdy’s bestselling I’m Glad My Mother Is Dead and was also happily surprised at how very good it is. People are talking about Rush’s Mating—I haven’t figured out why—and I read that so long ago I have no memory of it—so I might read it next. Or maybe something else. Not sure.