That has
been my M.O. since early adolescence, when I read and collected Edgar Rice
Burroughs and the Doc Savage novels. This wasn’t strategy or academic dedication;
merely greed. Whenever I have found a writer I liked, I have tried to read as much of
him as I can get my hands on. Call it bibliogluttony. I am still pleasure-driven
as a reader. After leaving childish things behind I did this with Kafka, Joyce
and Faulkner, and mostly got them out of my system, but I’ve also done it with
Melville, James and Nabokov, writers I continue to love and read again. The author of the
statement quoted at the top is Paul Theroux in an essay titled “My Life as a
Reader” (Figures in a Landscape,
2018). I’ve skimmed through one of Theroux’s books, the trendily titled The Tao of Travel (2010), but I’ve read
none of his novels, travel books or even his memoir of V.S. Naipaul. But I enjoy
heterogeneous collections of a writers’ work, gatherings of reviews, essays and introductions. For the writer, they pay the bills; for readers, they
occasionally contain small serendipitous rewards. In the same essay, Theroux
writes:
“I blame
English teachers, who make a virtue of skimming from one author to another,
believing this to be the best initiation in the humanities. It is actually an
error in judgment and a sort of dilettantism. My method of reading is the
opposite. When I find a writer I enjoy, I make his or her writing a personal project.”
Theroux
mentions a few of the writers he has consumed whole, most of whom are obvious:
James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Trollope and Turgenev. But he has done the
same with another group he calls “outside the canon”: Ford Madox Ford,
Nathanael West, Anthony Burgess, Djuna, Nadine Gordimer, Elias Canetti, Borges
and Jean Rhys. My immediate readerly reaction is: Ford? Borges? Great choices. Djuna
Barnes? Nadine Gordimer? You’re kidding, right? One more confirmation that tastes
in reading are predictably idiosyncratic. Theroux says he once mentioned his
approach to reading to the head of a university English department:
“He said, ‘That’s
all right for you, but we don’t have as much free time as you civilians.’ Tact
prevented me from telling him he had a salary, which I lacked, and that he was
a lazy and philistine fathead.”
2 comments:
Reminds me of these:
I read them all, sometimes with shivers of puzzlement and
sometimes with delight, but always calling for more. I began to
inhabit a world that was two-thirds letterpress and only one-third
trees, fields, streets and people. I acquired round shoulders,
spindly shanks, and a despondent view of humanity. I read everything
that I could find in English, taking in some of it but boggling the
rest.
--H. L. Mencken
A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything
that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more
from pleasure--the thought that other books were waiting for him tore
at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails
from a book as from a fowl.
--Thomas Wolfe, _Of Time And The River_
There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for
rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you
reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings
of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
--Cynthia Ozick
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than
being absorbed.
--Anthony Burgess
Theroux wrote a book about a journey round the coast of Britain which, although dated, is often perceptive and usually enjoyable. I would recommend it, if the subject interests you, although he is sometimes a bit silly, particularly when it comes to the names he gives to people he talks to along the way - at least, I assume he is inventing the names; possibly not, in which case truth is sillier than fiction.
Post a Comment