I never leave home without my Kindle, but funnily enough I’ll never read a “book” on it that is available to me in its physical, deadwood version. I am also, I now find, not able to reread with an e-book. Pottering around endlessly this week for a copy of Carol Shields’s Unless , a reread essential to making my summer complete, I thought about just opting for the e-book, but worried that somehow the book would thereafter not be special ever again. What is about our favourite copies of favourite books that gives the narrative a unique texture? Why is it that having been riveted by Javier Marias’s Thus Bad Begins , a complex novel set in immediately post-Franco Madrid, I could not settle down to his earlier books on my Kindle? Lest these questions sound overly self-indulgent, even flaky, I returned to a trusted guide on reading.
I speed-read Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books the first time around, and have subsequently gone back to it every so often to recover my reading equilibrium and my attention span. This is the golden age of the reader’s memoir, and Lesser’s 2014 book is among the best around. Together with writers like Anne Fadiman and Clive James, Lesser drives home an obvious, but often missed, message: “Reading remains a highly individual act. No one will do it precisely the way you do.” In its most physical aspect, she compares her reading habits with her husband’s — their home is spilling over with books, but when she hands him a book she recommends, he will order it on his Kindle or iPad. She’s a “fetishist”, she’ll crack open the spine (or so I imagine) of a book and “sniff the pages” before she begins reading. He won’t read a book if the e-book is not available.
Not for sharing Lesser says, however, that she reads mysteries mostly in digital form, and the passage sets up a fascinating juxtaposition familiar to all of us who strive for a workable e-book/physical book balance. These mysteries are “disposable”, so presumably acceptable as e-books that reside in the cloud and don’t take precious shelf space. (“I don’t plan on rereading these novels anytime soon, so it was with no compunction that I edited them off my screen once I was done.”) But e-books are impossible to “lend out”, so there is no longer that old sharing when romances, mysteries would be read and immediately passed on, putting pulp fiction in perpetual motion to the next reader, as if it deserved no lasting space in anybody’s library.
That distinction between the books that need shelf space and those that don’t is at the heart of Lesser’s larger inquiry. Because, she writes, “when I ask myself why I read literature, I am not really asking about motivation. I am asking what I get from it: what delights I have received over the years, what rewards I can expect to glean.” And in proceeding to share the pleasures reading has afforded her, she makes clear that there is only one requirement for a book to be eligible, that it “be well-written enough to last through multiple readings”.
After her essays on plot, character, translation, and so on, Lesser makes a list of 100 books to be read for “pleasure” (one book per author is the only rule). To emphasise how excruciating that exercise is, how heartbreaking to leave out Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for Crime and Punishment , and to omit John le Carre and Zadie Smith altogether, she leaves white space at the end for the reader to fill in with her own additions to the list. Now try filling that out on an e-book. But wherever you write up your own list of recommendations, it will become amply clear that the very exercise of putting it together is to reread the books in varying degrees.
Different pleasures In another recent book, The Pleasures of Reading , Antonia Fraser gets 43 writers to, as the subtitle puts it, talk about “the discovery of reading and the books that inspired them”. The contributions have obviously been collected over time, and writers include Doris Lessing, Jan Morris, Kamila Shamsie and Michael Foot. But in her introduction, Fraser points to a different issue with Kindles. While herself considering it “an essential weapon of travel”, for people like her who are always curious to check out what the next person on the train is reading, these gadgets are depressing. “Frustratedly” at a hotel pool one day, she asked all present what they were reading. “All answered politely and nearly all answered: ‘John Grisham.’”
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
