'Read Well, Read Little'

A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief and not terribly helpful: Vanity Fair. It’s the only book by Thackery I have read, and that was a long time ago. I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Barry Lyndon in 1975. Thackeray remains a hole in my reading life, one I’m unlikely ever to fill. Among his contemporaries, I’ve read all of Dickens and Eliot, some of their titles several times, but only four by the relentlessly prolific Anthony Trollope and nothing by Wilkie Collins. Every reading life is idiosyncratic, alternating between heavy devotedness and shameful ignorance. 

Jules Janin (1804-74), the French novelist, critic and feuilletoniste, gives readers like me an attractive excuse: “A gourmet is not a glutton.” It’s a truth too often disregarded in matters of food and books. A look at Nadar’s photo of Janin suggests he was by nature a gourmand. The Canadian translator Andrew Rickard has rendered into English a passage from L’Amour des livres (1844):   

 

“In your reading become attached to this philosopher, to that poet; grow fond of both of them, and when you place them triumphantly on your bookshelf, bound in fragrant Russian leather, make sure that you can say: ‘Until next time. I know you well now, and I share the opinion of those great souls to whom you were a role model and a source of counsel!’”

 

My cop-out is “next time.” Most of my reading has become rereading, especially in fiction. The phenomenon is not unusual among people my age, and I can identify several reasons. Books that have already proved their worth are always attractive. Reading them means encountering our younger selves, lending the text a pleasurable subtext. It also means encountering the generations of readers who preceded us. In addition, we have entered one of those periodic literary dry spells. Little being published today looks interesting, and fiction seems nearly dead. This contrasts with my younger years when Nabokov, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Maxwell and Cheever were at work.     

 

Janin writes, “Read well, read little,” the mirror image of Yvor Winters’ “Write little; do it well.” As I get older, I find it easier to value quality over quantity, in books and other things, as did Janin who writes in early middle age:

  

“If someone is obliged to read everything he has bought in its entirety, he thinks twice before making a purchase; he is a little more wary of things that are rare and strange and sticks to the masterpieces that mankind holds in high regard. And so you will begin by acquiring — not haggling for — good and beautiful copies of those few, essential books that one reads and rereads again and again.”