Monthly Archives: January 2008

I recently had the great joy of reading Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader. A celebration of the uncommon reading experience, which surely must not be so uncommon. For isn’t it many a reader who has learned how one book leads to another, how books can rip the world open wide, and how reading indeed is like a muscle? But then this might just be the company I keep. Those kind people who care to befriend a girl with obsessive compulsive reading habits who spends the rest of her time writing stories and then writing blog posts all about the reading.

For we are apparently rather uncommon, me and the company I keep. Britons aren’t reading, Canadians read less than Americans (as noted in the Descant blog a couple of weeks ago). Alan Thicke’s not into books. Also via the Quill and Quire blog, I’m told (and by Steve Jobs no less), that, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception [of the Amazon Kindle] is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

I would argue indeed that the conception of the Kindle is flawed, from top to bottom, but the rest is codswallop. The polls are just wrong, Alan Thicke is an idiot, and Steve Jobs must get out less than I do. Because I’ve been getting out lately and looking around to find that readers are everywhere. That reading is just as common as its ever been, and in a time and place in which “Books” is graffiti, can anything be so dire?

Ridden public transport lately Steve? Have you noticed all the people reading? And they’re reading books, you know, many of them. Which means that when these people left their houses this morning, packing a book in their bag was as essential as putting on shoes. Did you know that reading on transit is so exasperatingly common that in Toronto we’ve even got a blog devoted to it?
Sure there are probably too many reading Jodi Picoult, The Secret or The Da Vinci Code, and I do remember last summer when everybody and his brother had a copy of the new H. Potter. But let us not get into technicalities now. To more people than to others, a book is a book is a book.

And now, let us pretend that a bookstore is a bookstore. Which we all know isn’t actually true, for there are Bookstores and they’re called Independents, but that’s another story for another day. But today, just for now (economics aside), imagine the Big Box bookstore. Those of us who boycott have a variety of reasons for doing so, but the people who venture inside are really only after books. Maybe they’re not bothered about the politics, or the Big Box is the only game in town. But in my experience these stores are often crowded, and never so much in the scented candle aisles as in the places where books are. For it seems that people still like to browse books, touch them, thumb through them, and yes, even buy them (discounted or otherwise).

Have you been listening Steve? And I mean really listening, to conversations. Because people are talking about books. And yes, sometimes they’re talking about Tuesdays With Morrie, but we shall not be discriminatory. Today a book is a book. Though it was only yesterday when I overheard two people spend twenty minutes passionately debating the book versus the film version of The Kite Runner. It was this morning when a stranger in the elevator sang the praises of the title in my hand— The Gathering, which she’d just read, adored, and she promised that I’d like it too. Last month when I was reading Guns Germs and Steel I was interrupted every quarter of an hour by people I’d never seen before who wanted me to know that they’d read it, they’d loved it. And these were individuals who didn’t look bookish in the slightest.

The library near my house is always crowded. The Toronto Public Library system is said to be “thriving”. And yes, modern libraries are about much more than books, but whenever I go there, it’s always three deep in the checkout line. Further, the children’s area is perpetually crowded, with kids for whom coming to select new reads is a weekly ritual, just like it was for me when I was little. When the book spines were golden and the chairs were all small.

And speaking of crowds, have you ever seen what happens to those boxes of free books out front of houses, Steve? You know, when residents are moving, or clearing space, and the books go out in a cardboard box, and at once the swarms descend. They really do. I’m not saying all the books get taken, but free books draw individuals from far and wide. The crappy paperbacks or outdated textbooks might get left behind, but the box will be rummaged through, for within every box there’s the chance of a treasure.

Nearly every middle-aged woman I know is in a book club. Reading is sexy. I want to look like The Bookslut. “What are you reading” starts good conversations. As I type this my husband is beside me reading The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. On the weekend we walked past a man in a cafe who looked exactly like Salman Rushdie, and then halfway down the street a girl walked by with her nose stuck in Midnight’s Children.

Reading is everywhere. It’s not the company I keep, and I don’t think it’s just because I live in a city. Reading is so widespread that those of us particularly passionate do so like to kvetch that the masses are doing it wrong, but right or wrong, they’re doing it. Go outside and see: a book is a book, and everywhere I turn, someone is reading one somewhere.

I’ve got this bizarre delusion about books in the world. Most of it, I think, due to a phase when I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek too earnestly, and four times in a row. And ever after I’ve been obsessed with books as an element of the natural environment (for don’t books come from the trees after all?).

Even Tinker Creek itself, Dillard figures, runs through the night as like “a closed book on the shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale”. In the winter, her reading is sustenance; she fears running low on provisions: “What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.”

In Pilgrim, Books and reading are embedded into the ecosystem. Reading is a part of the seasonal cycle, as Dillard writes of the island where she comes to read in “every month of the year,” where she “straddle[s] the sycamore log over the creek, curling [her] legs out of the water in winter”.

And I think I know what she’s talking about, the reading experience being planted right into the earth, like a root, like a river, like a muskrat. A delusion that may have come about the evening I was reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a ladybug landed on my page, refusing to go away no matter how I poked it, and so I had to read that page over and over again.

One of the great spiritual revelations of my lifetime took place the spring morning I was reading on my front steps, and pink blossoms and maple keys were falling onto my book in such abundance that I had to sweep them off the pages to see what the words said, and for a brief time after that, I knew the answer to every question there ever was.

Which is romantic stuff, all of this. Except that Annie Dillard’s bucolic reading spot was situated near Roanoke Virginia, whose temperature today is listed at 7 degrees, according to The Weather Network. The temperature on my front steps, according to the same, is ten degrees lower, not including the wind chill. If I went out to find a sycamore log to read upon, even with my legs curled, very soon I’d freeze.

Winter shatters my delusion, for no book could ever be planted in this cold cold earth. Or more literally, out in this cold cold air. Which seems like a frivolous thing to whine about, I know, but though I am certainly no pilgrim, so much of my reading does get done out of doors. Particularly in this in-between moments I catch,while I’m standing around waiting for something, be it a bus or a friend. And have you ever tried to turn a page wearing mittens? Gloves? I’ve even mastered reading whilst walking, but reading in mitts just seems impossible.

So reading in the winter becomes an indoor sport. Though in my house, and others I’m sure, conditions are still far from optimum, as the cold leaks in through the walls. As I turn the pages with icy fingers, my nose turning blue, I start longing for The Slanket.

Winter reading only makes me miss the summer. When adventure was just a bike-ride away, involving a picnic blanket and someplace green to read upon. When holiday destinations were just reading-destinations disguised (they call them beaches). Sitting outside reading on my lunch breaks, acquiring freckles on my shoulders. Raindrops falling, spotting the pages before I closed them and dash inside, leaving an ever-lasting reminder of that reading moment imprinted upon my book.

I think a whole summer could be spent reading summer books, but a winter of books about winter would only make me sad. Though you are welcome to disagree with this as you like. Two recent exceptions I can think of are Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Frozen Thames, majestic and tiny respectively, but icy alike, and both might be read and reread an entire winter long, with no need for resorting to wildflower-learning ever.