CONTENT #14
Reading is really a group activity.
I mean, it takes two, at least. Writer, reader.
That's not counting editor, publisher, blurber. Critics: BookToker, Times Literary Supplement contributor, Nobel Prize committee member.
When you think about it, there are an awful lot of fingers in the pie.
I like talking about books almost as much as I like reading them. More, depending on the book (and the company).
It's a rare kind of connection. When we read, our inner life is touched by someone else's. The writer's. The characters', maybe. Our imagination — most private of private places — is captured, influenced. When we talk about what we've read, we compare notes not only about the book, but about how the book sat in our brains.
Did you reject it like a bad organ? Did it convince you of something? Did it provoke love, or fear?
See what I mean? It's best played as a team sport.
One of my favorite teammates is my sister Hannah. I love reading what she reads.
Is it nature? We laugh at the same things, we like to ponder the same things. Nurture? We have the same memory bank, we make the same withdrawals: sub tuna fish on Saltines for the Proustian Madeleines.
Add up some of the former and lots of the latter to get our shared enthusiasm for Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.
Yes, we were fairy girls. We liked dinosaurs and Egypt too, of course. But the secret world of fairies was the one I most wanted to enter.
Fawcett gets it. The fairy world is entwined with and hidden within the natural world. If you clamber upon just enough rocks, if you climb just the right tree, maybe you, too, could meet a fairy. And when you do, what will you meet? A powerful creature bound by the human capacity for storytelling.
The cherry on top is the deliciously appealing love interest. Prissy and devoted, with a gift for needlework (like all men should be). We sigh: "Bambleby!"
In addition to several unofficial two-person book clubs, I am a member of an actual book club.
My local librarian assigns a book, and ten or so women (and one husband) spanning decades and continents tackle it.
This is where reading really begins to resemble a vigorous game of tennis. We dissect the book with rigor, pausing for hydration (tea) and fuel (biscuits).
Since our librarian assigns the book, there's none of this mushy bonding over liking the same things.
Which is good, Two people liking a book is not the same as ten people liking a book. Ten people with the same opinion would make for very boring conversation. I imagine, anyway — it hasn't happened yet.
A couple months ago, we read Olive Kitteridge: a collection of short stories all featuring, yes, Olive Kitteridge. She is a large and brash woman whose feelings sometimes overwhelm her. She lives in a small New England town and is loved but also widely disliked.
"She is very disagreeable."
"But she has a good heart."
"She stole her daughter-in-law's shoe!"
"I quite liked that part."
A perfect book club book — you can all gossip about your new fictional acquaintance.
At my first book club meeting, we were fixated on the biography of an author — how much of the book was true? (By this, we meant ripped from his diary.)
One member dissented. Why does it matter?
Well, maybe it doesn't. But I'm nosy.
That's why I like getting my book recommendations from In Our Time. I get all the dirt on the author, then I get to read their stuff with a gossip's primer.
Picture Stevie Smith, scribbling her poems and ignoring phone calls at her desk. Learn of her lion of an aunt, her depression, and whole-hearted half-believed Christianity. Then read the Collected Works. It hits different.
The Bereaved Swan
Wan
Swan
On the lake
Like a cake
Of soap
Why is the swan
Wan
On the lake?
He has abandoned hope.
Wan
Swan
On the lake afloat
Bows his head:
O would that I were dead
For her sake that lies
Wrapped from my eyes
In a mantle of death,
The swan saith.
If you get to know Emily Wilde or Olive Kitteridge or Stevie Smith, for that matter, drop me a line. Let me know if you got along.
C