“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
The most ebullient and unpretentious book about
the reading life I know is Clive James’ Latest Readings, published four
years before his death in 2019. James had already been diagnosed with B-cell
chronic lymphocytic leukemia and other ailments and the book is laced with
references to his failing health and imminent mortality but remains largely free of
self-pity. It sometimes feels as though reading is keeping James alive, the way
the narrator of Tristram Shandy (and, perhaps, its author) convinces himself
that writing will forestall his death.
The sentence above is quoted from the
introduction. In my own life the incidence of doctor visits and various medical tests has
accelerated in recent months, and I’m facing three or four surgeries but
nothing so dire as cancer. A reader asks an always-pertinent question: “What
are you reading now?” Along with rereading Latest Readings:
A manuscript by R.L. Barth tentatively titled War
Seems Sweet: Selected & Recent Vietnam War Poems
A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the
Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul (2026) by Caroline Moorehead
Fall issue of The Jewish Review of Books
Captain Beefheart: The Biography (2002) by Mike Barnes
Browsing in an old favorite, Selections from
the Writing of Walter Savage Landor (ed. Sidney Colvin, 1882)
Elsewhere in his introduction, James writes: “Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick the book up.”
3 comments:
A while back I came across a wonderful quote from the late, great Warren Zevon: "We buy books because we believe that we're buying the time to read them."
“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
That sentence hits the nail on the head with surgical precision, especially when one is within shouting distance of a return to dust.
My wife and I were at Visible Voice books in Cleveland recently, talking to the owner. They had a used copy of a book about Captain Beefheart displayed behind the counter. "I don't know whose gonna buy that thing," the owner said, looking at the Beefheart book, which had been there for weeks. My wife pointed at me and said, "He would". And I would have, but did not, so not as to appear predictable.
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