'I Should Have Read Nothing But Good Books'

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give free reign to my curiosity? Why did I allow myself to engage in those wild sprees of desultory and promiscuous reading? Why did I not limit myself strictly to good books?” 

I’ve asked myself similar questions. I am the least systematic of readers. The only writers I have ever read sequentially, first work to last, in order, are Shakespeare and Melville. I’m no scholar. I haven’t even read all of Henry James.

 

The passage at the top is from the essay “On Reading Books: A Barbarian's Cogitations” by Alexander Gerschenkron, published in the Summer 1978 issue of The American Scholar. Gerschenkron (1904-78) was an American economic historian born in Odesa, Ukraine. He kept a reading list, logging all the titles he read, something I have never done. On his website, Art Garfunkel keeps a list of every book he has read since 1968, a practice that never tempted me. Much of what he read was rubbish. After admitting much of his reading was strictly professional, including books for review, Gerschenkron writes:

 

“But surely, when it comes to the vast area of literary art, there at least I should have read nothing but good books -- provided, of course, that I knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meal from the bran. I suppose I should have known. I certainly do now. I have reliable yardsticks that I daresay will not satisfy the literary expert who looks for fine and subtle distinctions. But an economist, a barbarian by definition, an average reader of belles lettres, can do with three simple criteria: A good book must be (1) interesting, (2) memorable, and (3) rereadable.”

 

Excellent criteria, recalling Nabokov's. Most of the lousy books I read came in my younger years. My tastes were still amorphous, my critical faculties weak or nonexistent. Also, if I started reading a book, I had to finish it – a practice I now see as masochistic. I would never recommend a book to someone because I thought it would be “good for him,” like broccoli. Gerschenkron is good on memorability:  

 

“By and large, memory can be relied upon to retain what is worth retaining. A book that evaporates without leaving a trace may be safely considered poor, even though it may have engaged one's interest as long as one kept turning its pages.”

 

There’s an interesting metaphysical category: the books we have read, perhaps devoting days to the task, which leave not a trace in our consciousness. They probably number in the hundreds, but we’ll never know. I admire Gerschenkron and sense in him a kindred spirit:

 

“Well-remembered books are also eminently rereadable. I have read War and Peace at least fifteen times, and it is still as rereadable as ever. I do not think it contains a paragraph that appears unfamiliar to me as I come across it. Yet on every perusal I never fail to discover something new in this inexhaustible store of observations, insights, ideas, and images that the previous readings have failed to reveal -- to say nothing of the infinite pleasure of drifting again along the stream of that language, so simple and so beautiful, so true to the Horatian ideal of simplex munditiis. A book like this is rereadable senz altro, and at least twice I began rereading War and Peace at once, starting again after having read the last page.”