What I am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part I

An illustration of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

(the story is about an infinite library)

Everybody has one: it sits on your shelf or in your amazon.com shopping cart, it stares you down, it is the the Book You Always Avoid Starting. Perhaps you pick it up each time you visit a bookstore and roll it over in your hands. You calibrate its thickness with your fingers, and try to reassure yourself by saying, “Well, a lot of this is probably the index...”.

Most of the time we don’t read the Book We Always Avoid Starting until it becomes so overwhelmingly embarrassing that we haven’t read it that we are forced to ingest it like an antibiotic. Otherwise, maybe we will read it when it becomes especially obvious that we can impress a few important people by having read it. This often happens when we have been pretending we had read it and are worried our disguise is wearing thin.

Here are two reasons why I will not be reading the Book I Always Avoid Starting this summer:

1. Good readers aren’t bluebook skimmers, they are project-focused. I have two major projects this summer: reading all of Kierkegaard, and reading all of Shakespeare. Confession: the main Book I Always Avoid Starting is Moby Dick. (Stop snickering, please; yes, I am an English major who has never read Moby Dick.) Is it cooler or more “important” to read Kierkegaard’s unpublished drafts for newspaper articles than  it is to read Moby Dick? No, definitely not. You get more canonicity points for Moby Dick, that is for sure, but ultimately I am going for depth and not breadth. I have found a few writers who are really speaking to me, who are changing who I am. My worry in attempting merely to “have read” some sort of Imagined Totality of Important Works (what I am equating here with an anthology) is that it would be like plastering over walls that were never built well in the first place.
2. A related reason: There is always another Book You Always Avoid Starting. After Moby Dick there would be Gulliver’s Travels, then Bleak House, then Anna Karenina, then Vanity Fair, then...and the list goes on. If I paid careful attention to lists and rating and that kind of thing, maybe by the time I die I could read something like the 1,000 Most Important Books according to most people. But then I would just be attempting to satisfy someone else’s list which was probably only created to impress someone else. On some level, I find the admission unavoidable that I can no more say that my favorite book is “the best book” than I can say that my foot is the best foot. It is what it is to me because it is a part of me, and I can’t remove it from that context just as I cannot remove my foot and take it around to compare with others’ feet.

In our culture and academic climate there is something scandalously subversive about clinging to one author or book to the exclusion of other perfectly good ones, but I believe that this is precisely what we must do. In an information-saturated world, we need to practice attention and love rather than intellectual consumership. We each have a finite capacity to love well. I am reminded of a question Jacques Derrida poses in The Gift of Death: how could I ever justify feeding only my cat while all other hungry cats are left to starve? I imagine all the Books I Always Avoid Starting as hungry cats pawing at my windows, meowing desperately at my front door. I could--maybe--manage to provide the paltriest possible level of nutrition for all of these cats, but none would flourish.

In part, I want to identify this realization as one that informs what we are doing on this blog: conversing. If we knew everything we wouldn’t realize that we need friends. Also, it is the experience of having friends that reminds us what we don’t (and will never) know. It reminds us that the idea of a totality of knowledge is bogus. We--and our minds--aren’t containers to fill, but dynamic actors that learn by riffing and recontextualization, as well as some good-natured sparring now and then. So hopefully we interact toward the utilization of the depths and particularities of one another’s knowledge, not in some feeble attempt to fill in the supposed “gaps” in what we know. Hopefully we will remind ourselves that our differently-depthed-ness (I just made that word up) is what makes learning powerful.


By the way, if you want to confess the Book You Always Avoid Starting please feel free to do so below. This is a safe environment.