Reading for Pleasure

When my daughter Jada visited SPA in the summer before 2nd grade, she was given a new book to read before school started.  Knowing her enthusiasm for reading, I asked her later if she had liked the book.  When she said that she would have liked it better if she didn’t have to read it for school, I asked with dismay, “Jada, do you know what I do for a living?”  Yet I do understand the pleasures of reading change when it’s required.  Even innate curiosity resists coercion.

Still, I know that most English teachers started as kids who loved reading just as most teachers were kids who loved school.   In 6th grade my best friend and I had reading competitions, and we each totaled over 100 books in a month.  I don’t think either of us cheated beyond including an occasional novella.  Having just finished a sabbatical which let me read more than I have in years, I realize that some books create an appetite for other books. Shelfari tells me I’ve read over 60 books this year and asks if I want to set a goal for next year.  I’m not much on goals like that, reading isn’t a competition like it was in 6th grade; it’s more like breathing now.   

Preparing for this class has made me think more about words assembled into novels versus those in other forms.  A few weeks ago I finished a memoir/natural history/philosophical nonfiction book on trail in the Boundary Waters (it rained a bit), and after that I read a period fiction book that seemed to start as a semi-literary mystery.  While reading Amagansett I found myself trying to label it, to classify it somehow.  I picked it up off a friend’s bookshelf, a friend who reads seriously, so I expected something people tend to call ‘literary’.  Yet the opening scene was a body being recovered from the ocean by a pair of basque fishermen on Long Island sometime after WWII. And somehow I found myself questioning the story.  Isn’t finding a body in an opening scene a bit overly dramatic?  Of course, I’d already ‘read’ the cover, because we always judge a book by its cover, right?  Perhaps the name of the author was a bit too large, like Nora Roberts books sold by the grocery checkout that sell authors as a brand rather than a particular story.  And although the LA Times and Chicago Tribune both had blurbs on the back, the opening one from People noted, “An evocative tale of love and murder in America’s legendary summer playground.”   I guess that puts it in its place, right? No self-respecting literary book starts with a blurb from People magazine.  “Evocative” seems a suspect adjective somehow, like it’s trying too hard, while “love and murder” on the other hand just seem cheap here, shorthand for genre fiction of romance and mystery. Yet I enjoyed the story and the two main characters even as I continued questioning the division between literary and genre fiction.  

Genre fiction is a publishing trade term for books sold within predictable, comforting reader expectations.  Like most mass produced products, say a hamburger or a Hollywood action film, what’s being sold is less originality than predictability.  You know what to expect; there won’t be any big surprises.   And so, 75 pages in, the body of the pretty girl is identified, the underrated, loner local cop is pursuing leads, and one of the fishermen is acting somewhat suspiciously, although he’s clearly not the murderer.  And of course the family of the dead girl is rich and dysfunctional.  Despite these cliches, I found myself enjoying the images of the beach this landlocked midwestern August.  And the pleasures of following plot twists hooked me like the show Downton Abbey which is nothing more than a well costumed period romantic drama.  

Conversely, I read a book on trail in the BWCA (yeah, it rained some) called A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  The author plays with the term ‘field guide’ suggesting literal or physical displacement, but these mostly stand in for emotional and spiritual displacement.  Rebecca Solnit’s writing is definitely not mass market.  She writes history and natural history books, and this one included more personal history than others making it a form of memoir, although not one that would easily fit in that genre, either.  In this book she writes about the painter Yves Klein, the reasons the sky and ocean appear blue, and the disturbing drug overdose of a friend from high school.  And while her narrative voice and poetic writing engage the reader, there’s little thesis and no plot to hold these ideas together.  The title suggests a general theme, something about the natural world and the meaning of our wanderings within it.  And having read it, I’m still not sure how if it all comes together or if I’ve perhaps missed something.  Yet I want to read it again already as her writing is beautiful and the questions feel important.  

And here, perhaps is the point where these questions about reading come together.  What’s the difference between reading Amagansett and A Field Guide to Getting Lost?  Is one “better” than another?  More broadly, what’s the purpose of reading?  Why should we read novels?  Why do we require English classes?  Like many teacher questions and life questions, the answer is really both/and. Some reading is for comfort, for the familiar, for pleasure.  An immersion in a world of words as soothing as a hot bath.  We want to be entertained.  Some reading, however, challenges our expectations, our assumptions, seeks to shock or awaken us to a world we might never have considered. It asks powerful questions instead of offering familiar answers.  In this way, books are much like friends- we like it when they agree with us, but we need it when they don’t.  Or put in a slightly different way in a famous line about the purpose of journalism, perhaps books too “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and in both ways help us make our way in the world. 

The commonplace book

The Commonplace Book-

Everyone knows writing is hard. The ever quotable Dorothy Parker (famous for a line I’ve always hated- “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”) said, “I hate writing.  I love having written.”  Having ideas, articulating them clearly, and making them interesting is very difficult work. What sounds great in our heads often falls flat on the page as we all know too well.  Certainly, some people find writing a torture and journal writing regular reminder of that torture. 

But most of us also manage to find some power and even pleasure in writing.  Like many people, I kept journals for most of my 20’s, and when I was home with my daughter, and when I’ve lived abroad.  These journals were attempts to somehow capture and understand the emotions and insights of powerful experiences.  Some moments invite us to capture them in word.    

Beyond recording or clarifying our thinking, writing can also create it.  There’s an old rule of writing that says you need to put your seat in the chair.  Authors don’t wait for inspiration, they sit and make themselves write, often on a strict schedule.  Poet William Stafford went so far as to say, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”  Like most English teachers, I believe writing is a refined form of thinking, and one that’s easy to share with others. 

While school journals always walk an uneasy line between personal journal and essay, one historical model has gotten lots of attention recently.  In Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From he notes,

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book…. In its most customary form, ‘commonplacing,’ as It was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations (84).

But more than recording favorite ideas and language, keeping a commonplace book was a habit of educated men and women of the Enlightenment. In The Case for Books Harvard librarian and author Robert Darnton writes, 

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of narrative from beginning to end, renaissance Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.  They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. They they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts.  Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.  They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things for the world was full of signs if you could read your way through it, and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality (67).

Finally, this excellent article compares Tumblr and commonplace books.  As it notes, today's problem isn't too little access to information, but too much.  Recording and even memorizing ideas or speeches was important at the time.  Today's problem isn't too little access to information, but too much.  The word curating, organizing information effectively to access it later, has become a new reason to use an old approach. 

For the 16 weeks of this semester, I would like you to keep a commonplace blog that helps make sense of your reading, your world, and yourself.  I will provide prompts at times, but mostly, I hope you find a form of informal ‘writing to learn’ (as English teachers call it) that works for you.  I will also keep this one on the website as a model or as a place to go for ideas when you don’t know what to write about. I look forward all of us sharing discoveries, links and thoughts.