“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me…” – Jorge Luis Borges
This is not a year-end list, though it’s the time for it. Still, I’ll keep it brief, as I imagine everyone’s busy. And maybe you need something quick to read while you’re hiding from some sort of responsibility.
(Note: you can also listen to November’s episode of The Line Break, released yesterday. Apple | Spotify | Soundcloud)
This blog is going on around two years of reading around a book a week. I think there’s some correlation between that and this being generally one of the happiest time periods of my life. Lately (often?), I find myself thinking about what I want out of reading. Learning, sure, a window into others’ experiences, yes. Entertainment, maybe most of all—though I’m one of those weirdos who isn’t entertained unless I feel like I’m learning.
Reading unfamiliars your world—it shows you the world is bigger than you can imagine and yet connects you to every person who’s ever lived (as we’ve seen Baldwin say). A bit of something strange or even something simply different—a beach read in winter, a novel from a place I have never been and am realistically likely to never go—it feels so vital to me. Yes, I fully get that in the age of video games and streaming TV and all sorts of brightly-colored cartoon drugs that live in your phone, there are plenty of options for escape, imaginative experience, and entertainment that aren’t reading. No, I don’t begrudge people taking those options. A movie a night doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, and video games are fun. But I think books can offer something those things can’t. Books, frankly, can get weirder, wilder, more creatively unbound.
Sometimes, this means books deal with tragedy and human awfulness in a more visceral way than movies or video games. “We read to steel ourselves,” I said Friday, and yeah, sometimes, I do think it’s important to read stuff that discomfits and upsets and depresses. It’s a tough world out there. But I recognize this is difficult, and I recognize it’s a big ask to be like, “hey, this thing you want to do for fun? Make it more like taking medicine.” This’ll result in me reading a book about a big, real problem, and thinking, “oh my god, everyone needs to read this book, but definitely not enough people will.” That sounds smug, and I don’t mean it to be—in my late 30s, being a parent, I’ve finally understood what it means to really not have enough hours in the day.
So yeah—there is a certain hopelessness I walk around with because of my reading. The things I believe need to happen for us to live in a just and fair society won’t happen in my lifetime. People are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. It’s tough to know what to do with knowledge like that.
When that line of thinking gets too heavy, I come back to books as entertainment. Then I think more about how books, not having to play the same game of capitalism as movies or video games, are in a pretty powerful position, from a storyteller’s perspective. So I keep reading, and keep blogging, because it’s fun. But everything I read keeps making me feel like there’s something powerful in there. Maybe that’s magical thinking.
But, looking around? Let me know if you got any better ideas than “reading a lot” and “magical thinking.”
(uh, certain individuals enjoying McDonald’s in Altoona need not reply)
Sorry you got an email,
Chris