'Like Coming Home After a Long Absence'

Thirty-five years ago I was reading eight newspapers a day, sometimes more. I worked for the Hearst Corp. in a city, Albany, N.Y., with an a.m. paper, the Times Union, and a p.m., the Knickerbocker News. In 1988, Hearst killed the latter, where I worked, and the editorial staffs merged. That’s two. Add the Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Newsday (mostly for Murray Kempton’s column), New York Post, the Daily News and the Boston Globe (mostly for Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip), and you have eight. Occasionally I dabbled in such area papers as the Daily Gazette in Schenectady (where I later worked), the Record in Troy and the Post-Star in Glens Falls.

I have little interest in news and have always ignored sports. I read newspapers the way reporters often read them – quickly and cursorily, looking for items that attracted me, usually of non-professional interest. That could mean anything from an account of a juicy multiple murder to a rare thoughtful op-ed piece on a subject I cared about. An editor once told me that if you buy a newspaper and find in it one story that intrigues, amuses or informs you, one that you read to the final word, you got your money’s worth. I never cared to be "well-informed," never followed politics and can’t remember ever getting angry about a story I had read. Today, I read two newspapers – our neighborhood weekly and the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, mostly for the book reviews. I’ve never read a newspaper – that is, from page one to the classified ads --  online.

I’ve just read “Reading That Isn’t Reading,” a brief essay by David Heddendorf in the Spring 2015 issue of The Sewanee Review. Heddendorf wanted to find occurrences of the phrase “as all the world knows” in the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse. Five pages into The Code of the Woosters he finds it and continues his search in other Plum titles but finds no more. I like Heddendorf’s attitude:

“At this point an obvious question arises. Why didn’t I use Google or some other digital means of ransacking Wodehouse’s works? A few keystrokes would have swiftly and accurately completed a search that my skimming performed with plodding imprecision. Well, I had the books at hand. I felt reasonably sure of my memory. And I didn’t think the search would take very long. To tell the truth, though, the real reason I didn’t reach for some digital device is that the idea didn’t cross my mind until later. That’s just the sort of person I am.”

Heddendorf’s mode of enlightened skimming is familiar to me. That’s usually how I read newspapers, though I’m certain I have never read a paper looking for a specific word or phrase. “Racing through a book,” Heddendorf writes, “in search of a particular phrase was diametrically opposed to what reading ought to be. In fact it wasn’t reading at all.” Perhaps. But who reads a news story the way we read Henry James? Only the severely misguided. Now Heddendorf gets to his real concern, which is that not only can most of us read, but we have learned to read in different ways:

“Reading that isn’t reading has been around for at least a century or two. Who actually reads a newspaper? It’s more nearly as if we mine it, extracting information and amusement as they happen to catch our eye. That’s what headlines, captions, and subtitles are for—to guide our selective scanning. We don’t read a newspaper, we look at it. More recently this mode of looking has expanded into our other dealings with words, thanks to the Internet and the tools with which we search its contents. Rarely do we read an article, blog entry, or post without some search or link having instantly taken us there, assuring us the piece is worth our time. Even then we read restlessly, provisionally, ready to bail out when we become bored, irritated, or tired.”

Right on the money. But not all reading is a matter of focused distraction. The best reading, of course, is still found in books. As some of us age, we choose to linger while reading, not only slowing down but pausing, pondering, rereading. Most recently, that’s how I read Gary Saul Morson’s  Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter – a book I regretted having finished. Heddendorf writes:

“Reading has become a marginal distracted activity, wedged into our sparest time, diluted to the thinnest concentration. When we do happen to read some story or book closely and in its entirety, the feeling is like coming home after a long absence. The shock might even call up our earliest, most formative times with books, those turning points that stand out like conversion experiences.”