by Sara Nelson
So reading a book a week doesn’t scare me, exactly, though I do get kind of anxious when somebody asks the next question: “But how will you pick your books?” While I glibly, proudly, always respond, “The same way everybody else does,” the truth is, I’m not sure. Will I ask friends for recommendations? (As it turns out, yes. A lot.) Will I cruise bookstores? (Uh-huh.) Will I read reviews? (Less so. I was once a reviewer, so I know better.) I’ve already made a list of all the things I always meant to get to and never did, and a few titles I loved that I want to reread.1 It’s a pretty long list, and if I worry aloud about anything, it’s that there will be too many books to fill the year.
But here’s the question nobody asks me, the one I’ve been asking myself, privately, in the silence of my bed and head. What, exactly, am I doing this for? Why, exactly, do I read so much and what, exactly, do I expect to get out of chronicling my reading? I’m not planning to write fifty-two book reviews. I’m not trying to meet or set some standard of what it means to be well read. I couldn’t care less about telling you what to read. What I am doing, I think, is trying to get down on paper what I’ve been doing for years in my mind: matching up the reading experience with the personal one and watching where they intersect—or don’t. If a particular book I mention makes you want to head off to the nearest bookstore, great; if not, maybe what I say about it will spark a memory or suggest a topic that seems honest or interesting or true.
Years ago I interviewed the singer (and now author) Rosanne Cash about her career. We started talking about specific songs she’d written and performed, and I found myself saying to her that a certain ballad reminded me of my boyfriend from college or that another one took me right back to a guy I was dating at another time. After I’d made a couple such references, I apologized for all this personalizing; surely there was more to say about her music than how it interacted with my love life. But Cash—whom, I confess, I can only dream of being a little bit like—laughed. “That’s what I do, too,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. If a song gets to you personally, then it’s a really good song.”
Well, books get to me personally. They remind me of the person I was and the people I knew at the time I read them, the places I visited, the dreams I had as I lay on the couch or in bed or on the beach and read them. I can stand in front of my cherry shelves and point to an obscure title—let’s say that biography, Bottom Feeders—and tell you where I got it (from an Internet bookstore), why (because I saw a not completely favorable but definitely provocative review in the paper), and what I thought when I started reading it (that it reminded me of the semester I spent on leave from college living in what my mother insists was a San Francisco commune but was really just a house with roommates). I talk about my books as if they were people, and I choose them the way I choose my friends: because somebody nice introduced us, because I liked their looks, because the best of them turn out to be smart and funny and both surprising and inevitable at the same time.
Charley has just begun second grade, and Leo his twenty-seventh season of the show; I’ve just started a new part-time job at a magazine. My mother, God willing, will turn eighty-five before my year is done. Obviously, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the coming months, either on the global or personal level. But the one thing I do know is that no matter what does happen, I’ll be reading through it, as I always have. And if I know me, I’ll be connecting the dots as usual: trying to figure out why I read what I read when I read it, how one book leads to another, and, of course, what it all means about me, my life, and the nature of reading itself.
“I’ve given up reading books,” the American humorist Oscar Levant once wrote. “I find it takes my mind off myself.”
Poor Oscar. He missed the point.
January 6
Great Expectations
But enough about me. Let’s talk about my project.
I’m here trying to choose my first book of the year. I’ve spent a good couple of days thinking about what that book should be, which means I’ve been scanning these shelves as well as sifting through the piles near my bed, the ones mentally marked Must Read, Might Read, and Maybe Someday. (I’m intermittently ruthless about the assignment of these categories, banishing Richard Russo’s Empire Falls from Must Read to Maybe Someday after six failed attempts to get interested in it. On the other hand, I moved Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit from Might Read to Must Read after no fewer than six friends extolled its virtues.) I’ve already decided to take one biggish book instead of the usual three or four I often pack as insurance against being caught—can you imagine?—with nothing to read. I’ve already finished The Corrections—and besides, I have this idea that the New Year should begin with a New Book, preferably one that’s light and maybe even funny. The year 2001 was tough going for all of us, and I have this superstitious idea that if I start this year with something happy, it’ll be a happy year.
Eventually, I find, high up on the shelves, where the newest books often go, a copy of Funnymen, a novel by Ted Heller, who wrote the delightful Slab Rat, which I loved, despite the terrible review it got in The New York Times Book Review. Heller—son of Joseph Catch-22 Heller—has a gift for black comedy (coincidence or genetics? You decide), and this new novel sounds intriguing: it’s an imagined oral history of a comedy team made up of a Jewish comedian and an Italian-American crooner in the post-vaudeville era. It’s a Martin-Lewis kind of thing, I gather from the jacket copy, and while I’ve never been a great fan of that particular couple, I find the phenomenon kind of interesting. And it weighs in at around 400 pages, so all my criteria are met. Funnymen it is, then, I think as I tuck it into my duffel bag.
I should probably stop right here and explain that this wasn’t the most ordinary of Vermont lodges we would be visiting. Our host, my friend Sabrina, is the widow of a stepson of the famous Russian writer and thinker Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As mother of the author’s first grandchild, Sabrina is still welcome at the compound in Cavendish, Vermont, where the Solzhenitsyns lived in exile for nearly twenty years. (They’re now back in Russia, and the Cavendish digs are used by Sabrina and the two S. sons who live in the States.) The idea of visiting a famous Nobel Prize-winning author’s home appeals to me, and besides, Sabrina has promised us skiing lessons and hot toddies and lots and lots of lazy hours to read by the fire.
When we get there, the family’s choice of exile venue begins to make sense: it’s beautiful land up here, but isolated, and very, very cold. The two houses the author had built for him—one for the family to live in and one for the writer to write in—are connected by a basement passageway. There’s something very Russian about the whole setup, and it even suggests a kind of architectural Stockholm syndrome: the expatriate author purposely building a home reminiscent of the Siberian prison in which he spent a couple of decades.
In other words, it’s the polar (pun intended) opposite of the warm, loquacious nightclub world Heller portrays in Funnymen.
Still, I’m looking forward to the visit and to reading Funnymen, and after a day on the slopes—or rather, a day in which Leo and I hovered as Charley took his first skiing lesson on the slopes—a hearty dinner, and a couple of drinks, I sit down on the simple sofa in front of the fire and open it. But suddenly, it’s not so Funny. In the book, Heller is describing the honky-tonk vaudevillian atmosphere of a Catskills nightclub; I look up for a moment and see hard ground and bare, frozen trees. One character refers to the “A-bomb” nature of the act because it “kills” so well, and I wander into the Russian Orthodox chapel the author built for himself in the basement. I’m sorting through characters named Heine and Ziggy and Snuffy and my eyes wander to the wall-to-wall bookshelves—more of them here but not nearly so nice as the ones Leo built—and wonder aloud at a big fat book whose title is spelled out in angry red Asian characters. What’s that? I ask Sabrina. Oh, she says, with the air of someone who’s had it explained to her before, that’s Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914: Red Wheel, but in Mala
ysian. I suddenly understand what’s wrong with this picture: I’m reading about the Borscht Belt in the middle of the Gulag. No wonder I can’t retain my focus.
Part of the appeal of books, of course, is that they’re the cheapest and easiest way to transport you from the world you know into one you don’t. That’s why people who’d never leave the house read travel tomes and why, on a swelteringly hot summer day, you can have fun with, say, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. A friend of mine tells me that he likes to listen to tapes of Trollope novels while negotiating New York City traffic because he likes the clash of his inner and outer worlds: “The lovely British voice on the tape is saying, ‘And the vicar went into the parish,’ just as I’m yelling in my best New Yorkese, ‘Hey, Buddy, up yours!’ to the cabdriver on my right.” Reading’s ability to beam you up to a different world is a good part of the reason people like me do it in the first place—because dollar for dollar, hour per hour, it’s the most expedient way to get from our proscribed little “here” to an imagined, intriguing “there.” Part time machine, part Concorde, part ejector seat, books are our salvation.
But here I am in rural, outer Vermont, having traveled this time by train, not page. And suddenly, Funnymen—a book that back in New York might well have transported me happily to the Catskills—seems superfluous. I was already in a new world. Besides, reading a novel about comedians here seemed somehow inappropriate, sort of like giggling over Bridget Jones’s Diary at a divorce proceeding. There was no way I was going to get through it.
So I started prowling Solzhenitsyn’s shelves. “Why not try something by the great man himself?” my exasperated husband suggests. But by now my college-major Spanish is so rusty I can barely understand what my building superintendent says, let alone the thoughts of the great writer. And I don’t read Russian—or Croat or Chinese or Malaysian for that matter—so my options are limited. In fact, in both of these houses, except for a dog-eared copy of Gulliver’s Travels I find in one of the sons’ bedrooms upstairs, there’s almost nothing that’s both (a) in English and (b) not about or by Solzhenitsyn himself. For a brief moment, I consider One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I remember vaguely from a college world history course, but then I remember the only reason I read it then: some Russian novel was required, and Ivan Denisovich was the shortest one on the list. Eventually, I uncover a copy of a book in English called Solzhenitsyn: Soul in Exile, which I gather is one of the few biographies sanctioned by the Solzhenitsyn family, as there is a boxful of them standing by the door. It’s a book I never, ever would have read under any other circumstances, but I’m in Russia now, I tell myself. I need to do as the Russians do. What’s more: I’m grateful to have a window on the world I’ve just entered.
Remember how I said I expected to learn some lessons about reading? Well, I just never thought they’d be so prosaic—or would come so soon. But by the time Leo and Charley and I were settled back onto the train to New York, I’d figured out a few things. To wit: (1) Choosing a book is not all that different from choosing a house. There are really only three rules: location, location, and location. And (2) In reading, as in life, even if you know what you’re doing, you really kind of don’t. To paraphrase the old saw: If you want to make the book god laugh, show him your reading list.
“How do you choose your books?” my friends had asked. Less than a week into my project, I can now tell them the beginning of the truth. I don’t always choose the books, I’ll say. Sometimes the books choose me.
January 20
A Word About Leo
Here’s a snapshot of Leo’s and my bedroom. On my side, the right side, of the bed, is a table heaped with books and magazines and stray papers and catalogues and old bank receipts and who knows what else. On Leo’s side, on an identical table, are: two neatly lined-up copies of food magazines, a couple of cookbooks, and a hardcover copy of Caleb Carr’s Killing Time that has been sitting there, unopened, for about a year. You could be in the first week of Psychology 101 to figure out what this means: I’m a compulsive slob while Leo’s a compulsive neat-nik; Leo wouldn’t shop by catalogue if his life depended on it, and his idea of aspirational literature almost always involves food.
To me, it shows simply that I am a card-carrying member of the compulsive readers’ society. He, on the other hand, is not.
It’s a truism of conventional therapeutic thinking that when choosing a mate, most people try to re-create or react against a relationship they had in childhood. Most often, it seems women set out to marry men like their fathers or precisely the opposite of their fathers, men look for or run from their mothers, and so on and so on.
In my case, I married my brother.
Like Leo, my younger brother Jon is now in the design business: he is a licensed architect and for several years designed furniture. As a kid, he was a whiz at mechanics and spatial relations. If I was a dutiful good student, Jon cared less about school than about going around the neighborhood and getting old ladies to give him their broken toasters so that he could charge them a dollar to fix them. Why bother with other people’s worlds made of words? was his philosophy. He’d always rather build another Go-Kart.
Jon was something of an oddity in our family, where “Look it up” was the answer to most questions and where, for a period of a few years while I was in elementary school, my mother regularly brought the dictionary to the dinner table. But weird as he was in our particular household constellation, he was my little brother, and he was familiar. We made plenty of fun of him, that’s for sure, but ultimately he provided me a great service. Because of Jon, I grew up knowing that nonreaders could be people, too.
So when I met Leo, the fact that he had almost never read a book for pleasure didn’t strike me as all that important. First of all, we had many other surface differences to contend with: He’s one of eleven children born to Japanese-American parents in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; I’m the privileged daughter of East Coast professionals. He grew up Catholic (thanks to his parents’ conversion in the detention camps during WWII); I’m a secularized Jew. He’s quiet; I can’t shut up. That we had different interests—his spatial, mine verbal—was the least of it.
Which is not to say that it’s easy living with someone who has no feeling at all about the very things about which I am so passionate: books, the people who write them, and those who read them. (Relationship fact #1: The very thing that attracted you to your partner will become the thing that drives you nuts.) It’s true that I often become frustrated when he doesn’t get my references. And I’m sure it’s no picnic for him to have a wife who not only floods his bedroom with paper but regularly spends hours on the phone dissecting the novel of the moment and then begs off going to the movies or out to dinner so she can “get some reading done.” But to his credit—and in defiance of relationship fact #2: Despite what you say, you’re always trying to change your partner—he doesn’t gripe much about it. In fact, he views my reading habit as an acceptable, if not completely interesting, quirk. I recently overheard him telling a friend, almost pridefully, that his wife has read “every book in the universe.”
I, on the other hand, fully subscribe to relationship fact #2, and am constantly trying to interest him in this or that book I’ve discovered. Here, for example, is a partial list of the books (other than the aforementioned Caleb Carr title) I’ve left on his pillow over the years:
James Ellroy’s My Dark Places (because he asked for it)
Henry Dunow’s The Way Home (because it’s about baseball and baseball is a sport, I think, and Leo likes sports)
Lee Hill’s A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern (because Leo knew the gonzo writer through SNL and when we happened to meet him one night at a reunion party, even Leo, who is famously blasé, became visibly excited)
Several books by Patrick O’Brian (because Leo has developed a magnificent midlife obsession with sailing)
Mario Puzo’s Omerta (because somebody gave it to me. Who knows why?)
> As far as I know, he hasn’t read any of them.
It’s annoying to have your recommendations ignored, but the minor pique I feel most of the time is exacerbated mightily by his refusal to read any of the books I’ve shelved in the library under an invisible but still very real category. These are the novels and stories and nonfiction accounts of Asian-American experience, of “mixed” marriage, of biracial children, books like Don Lee’s Yellow, David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming, Shawn Wong’s American Knees. Again, despite my urging, Leo hasn’t read any of them. But I have read them all.
I worry sometimes that it’s shallow to want to read about your own life and your own world all the time, but there’s always something pleasing and comforting about coming across a character or a situation you think you already know; it’s a validation of your own experience. That I should feel some draw, even now, to a book like Marjorie Morningstar isn’t surprising. But had I not married Leo and had Charley, I doubt I would have developed such an interest in reading about what the Japanese-American internment camps were like, or how complicated it is, even now in multi-culti America, to not be white. Like every wife or husband, but especially one who sees her partner’s backstory as more important to preserve than her own, I find his topics have become mine.
My first introduction to this literary subcategory took place about ten years ago, soon after Leo and I were married. An editor from a weekly consumer magazine invited me up to his offices to paw through stacks of proofs and choose some books for review. This came after months of my begging him for work, and a hazing period during which he assigned me reviews of self-help titles and exercise books—and I was clearly thrilled. I remember going into the book room at the magazine—a room at least twice the size of my library today—and feeling less overwhelmed than exhilarated by all the possibilities there. “Take two to start,” he told me. Only two? I emerged, an hour later, with these galleys: The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf, and something I’d never heard of, but whose title intrigued me for obvious reasons: a memoir called Turning Japanese, by a writer named David Mura.
