Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  Suffice it to say that this city, Stumptown and Timbertown, Puddletown and the City of Roses, the city hatched by a coin flip and blessed by the rain, the city riven by waters and huddled by hills, the city with the greatest independent bookstore in the world, the city where a mayor exposed his woodpecker to a naked statue, the city where you can still to this day catch a salmon bigger than a child in the river that runs through it, the city that wasn’t supposed to be a great city because the great city was supposed to be miles upriver but it didn’t happen that way, well, suffice it to say that this city is a city stuffed with stories unending and wonderful, salty and moist, hilarious and haunting, and some of the greatest writers this country ever hatched have lived and worked here, spinning their tales and yarns, which makes me inordinately proud; I mean, really, in the end, what have we to exchange that matters, except stories of grace and courage, laughter and love?

  A Note on Seriesousness

  Just finished a headlong dash through the eleven novels of C.S. Forester’s legendary Horatio Hornblower series, and even as the addled mud of my mind swirls with cannon fire and sea mist and the epic clash of British ships against the brooding tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte (that cruel diminutive first draft of Hitler), I pause to contemplate the pleasures of reading series of books, the parades of linked stories that ultimately compose vast novels of thousands of pages.

  Because, really, are there not many subtle pleasures in serial books? The realization, at the end of Book One, that you have stumbled on a gripping tale, beautifully told, and there are many alluring islands ahead to be visited; the happy workmanlike feeling of being in the middle of the series, and having a firm grasp of the cast of characters, and knowing there are books enough waiting for you that the summer will whir past like a nighthawk; the dichotomous sense of hungrily wanting to know what’s going to happen while mourning quietly that there are only a few pages left in the whole saga; the sigh of satisfaction at the very end, not only that you have actually read eleven consecutive novels and savored every moment of the journey, but that you now have, let’s say, Captain Hornblower, or Legolas, or Lyra Belacqua, or V.I. Warshawski, or (god help us all) Sir Harry Flashman as a shadowy friend the rest of your life, as yet another example of the mysterious awkward grace of the human animal, because the best fictional characters are utterly true, isn’t that so?

  Braces of books like John Steinbeck’s undeservedly uncelebrated masterpieces Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday; trilogies like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, quartets like Paul Scott’s haunting account of the end of the British Raj in India or J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings (in which The Hobbit is really the opening book, yes?), sprints of seven like C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels or the tale of Mr. H. J. Potter of 4 Privet Drive, sprawling piles like the late George MacDonald Fraser’s twelve hilarious Flashman novels, or incredible mountains like the more than fifty Inspector Maigret novels by Georges Simenon — it’s a fascinating subgenre of fiction, the series. And while many series are carried along by a single (and singular) character, others have immense circles of casts, layers of voices, hints and intimations of endless more tales to be told; and perhaps this too is a secret of great literature, that the best novels are those that give a reader the sense of seeing and hearing only part of the world created within those covers; in a really fine book, say an enormous novel like Fraser’s collected Flashmania, you get a powerful sense of the tumultuous thrum of people beyond the margins of the page, characters walking away to live their lives unaccounted by the present author, a thousand stories beneath the one on the page…

  Another virtue of the series, it seems to me, is that very often this is where young readers enter the seething and delightful universe of books, in a way that sets them up for life as readers; the many wonderful books you read as a small child are not read with quite the same intent fervor that my teenage daughter, for example, has consumed a book a day when she is on a tear through one of the many series of teenage romance novels she reads — I am never quite sure of their titles and authors, as they come and go so fast that all I see clearly is their shocking pink and roaring yellow covers. All teenage romance novels have covers in lurid nuclear colors, why is that?

  Anyway, I sing the pleasures of seriesousness, from modest twins (even if slightly forced into companionship, like Truman Capote’s terrific Thanksgiving and Christmas memories) all the way to the inexhaustible ocean of, say, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie, who sold more books than anyone in history except the anonymous geniuses who wrote the Bible and the retired actor from Stratford in Warwickshire. To dive into a series, and find yourself absorbed, and flip back to the frontispiece, where you discover there are eight more novels like this — that is yet another of the quiet but delicious delights of the world of books, a world that at its very best reveals the deepest bones and sweetest songs of this world, don’t you think?

  Booklessness

  Confession: I have loaned books I didn’t like to people knew would never return them in this lifetime, while making a point of how much I wanted to get the books back. I have accidentally on purpose left books at people’s houses and in pubs and in playgrounds and in the library. I once left a book (one of John Updike’s 900 novels about infidelity, did the man never write about anything but neurotic infidelity in autumn?) in a church. I have thrown a book (Jerzy Kosinski’s awful Blind Date) into a woodchipper. I once tried to feed a copy of the Good News Bible, in which all the glorious shouldery dense muscular prickly thorny edgy epic language of the King James Bible was beaten into happy fluff, to a small cow in Rochester, Minnesota, but the cow did not bite, perhaps for reasons of literary taste, and her owner was alarmed and suspicious, so we left, my friend and me, although we later left the book at a Dairy Queen.

  I once left a book by Bill McKibben (Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families) in a meeting room of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, just to see what would happen. (I found it neatly shelved the next day in proper alphabetical order, which seems sweet.) I once left Heidegger’s Being and Time in a kindergarten class, to see what would happen. (I found it a few days later helping to hold up a hamster cage, certainly the best work that old Nazi ever did.) I once left a Silver Surfer comic (one of the series where he is a melancholy wanderer through the cosmos, dreaming of his first love Shalla-Bal) in a university theology department office. I have done these things, and I am not proud of them.

  On the other side of the coin, I have scrounged desperately for books when I had no books, for example on trips where you have read too fast and are in the hotel with nothing whatsoever to read except the Gideon Bible. I once was trapped in a motel in Utah with nothing but the Book of Mormon, which was the closest experience I have had in this life to dropping acid, and which sent me, as soon as I made it home, to digging up Twain’s entertaining notes on the book: “…chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate…”

  I have been on a train without a book and read the train schedule so carefully that I can tell you exactly when the Coast Starlight is supposed to pull into Chemult, Oregon (4:32 p.m.). I have read those Jehovah’s Witnesses booklets carefully, having nothing else to read. I have read cereal boxes, marveling at the ingredients I never heard of and did not know existed. I have read and remembered far too many of the names and messages carved into school desks and scrawled on water-closet walls. (That LaQuesha is an adventuress.) I have read road signs with such hunger, sitting bookless in the back seat, that I still remember many of the exits off United States Highway 80 in Pennsylvania (Snydersville, Tannersville, Mifflinville, Danville, Reynoldsville, Strattanville, Shippenville, Clintonville, Barkleyville, help me Jesus). I have been on planes without books and so carefully examined the layout of the airports to which your carrier flies that I can find my way through even Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, if need be.

  I have occasionally thought that
perhaps it all evens out in the cosmic sense, and that every time I find myself bookless and avidly reading the tattered copy of The Life of L. Ron Hubbard someone using a lot of perfume left on the bus, I am paying for the time I left an Ayn Rand novel in a voting booth, and misadventures like that, of which I am not proud, and have endeavored to confess publicly here, catharsis being the first use of literature. The next step, I suspect, is to vow to change your behavior, so I hereby swear, on a stack of King James Bibles, that I will never leave fascist novels anywhere except where they belong.

  A Note on How We Slow Down Near the End of a Terrific Book, Reluctant to Leave That Wondrous World

  Which we all do, of course, I bet every reader has done it ten times at the very least, just off the top of my head I can remember doing it with Robertson Davies’ extraordinary Deptford Trilogy, and with most of J.K. Rowling’s books, and with Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece V., and…well, you know what I mean.

  What shall we call it, that unconscious slowing-down, which occurs at exactly the same time as you so eagerly want to find out what’s going to happen! that you take the book with you to the water closet, and on errands, and on lunch breaks, and to dental appointments, and to church, where you sit deep in a shadowy corner and pretend to mouth the responses but really knock off thirty pages while seeming to meditate deeply on matters holy and eternal?

  Prosepause, storyslowage, readingreluctability, talewaiting — that exquisite sense of deliberately delaying closure, of stretching out the moment, of sipping and savoring and swirling the characters and world and the ambience and milieu around in your heart before they become, inevitably, as they must, past tense, a book you just read; and while there is a great pleasure in rereading a fine book (after letting enough time pass that you half-forget half of it), it is never quite as salty and stunning a pleasure as the first encounter; and that’s another pleasure we should talk about over ale, the deep refreshing astonishment of discovering a riveting writer or book you never even heard of before — that sense of dawning pleasure as you get to page thirty or so and realize o my sainted mama, this is terrific!

  This just happened to me with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, of which I read the last (Flashman and the Tiger) by accident, was so delighted that I sought out other books by Fraser, discovered there were eleven more Flashman novels, and mooed happily at the prospect of a whole summer spent reading books that turned out to be as hilarious, lewd, informative, and masterfully made as the first. The only fly in the ointment, finally, was the discovery recently that Fraser died last winter, just as he was preparing to write a thirteenth Flashman epic, and it would be embarrassing to confess in public that my first thought was absolute annoyance that he was leaving me in the lurch Flashmanwise, rather than sadness at the passing of a fellow holy being, so let’s not mention it here.

  But we were talking about the way we all slow down at the end of a great book, reluctant to leave the world that was made in those pages, and it seems to me that this impulse is a great and subtle compliment to the writer, and a telling window on what great writers do, which is to create believable galaxies in which real beings grapple with real pain and wonder, miracle and murder; and isn’t is fascinating that one of the greatest human pleasures is to be plunged in a pool of prose that you know to be fictive, but holds you with tremendous energy and zest, really and truly rivets your attention, shivers your heart, opens your eyes, teaches you something true about yourself and your fellow holy beings?

  Isn’t that really, when you think about it, a most amazing thing, that someone like George MacDonald Fraser sits in his room on the Isle of Man, and spins a tale, and thousands of miles away you open the bright package in which his tale has been caught, and sprint through most of it, elevated and grinning, and then, some fifty pages from the end, find yourself reading more slowly, consciously enjoying the stagecraft and fireworks, itching to find out how Flashman is going to escape disaster this time, but a little sad too that when you come to that last page, and hear the final snick of the plot falling into place, and see that infinitesimal extra brightness of a printed page on which there is no type on the reverse, something that’s been so beautifully present is now memorably past? But onward we go into the ocean of stories, knowing full well that there are many thousands of great books we will never even hear of in this life…and shouldn’t there be a word for that?

  The Box Scores

  On the first day of October, in the year of Our Lord 2013, my city’s daily newspaper, the oldest continuously published newspaper on the West Coast of these United States, issued daily since 1850, before Oregon was even a state, ceased to be delivered daily to its subscribers, who now receive only four papers a week. This was a sensible, if difficult, business decision, having to do with advertising and resources and digital presence, but I am sure I was not the only citizen in Oregon that morning, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays since, to mourn my lost daily delivery of newsprint.

  The rattling truck of the deliveryman long before dawn; the way he deftly wrapped the paper in plastic on days of epic downpour; the careful parsing of the paper for various members of the family, sports here and comics there, news to one and business to another; the poor classifieds heading right to the parakeet’s cage, where perhaps he read them quietly; the bemused reading-aloud of horoscopes, and thorough reading of ships in port, and ships expected, and cargoes thereof, mostly grain leaving and cars arriving; the way the comics somehow always acquired a patina of jam, while butter illuminated the business section; the snap and flutter of the paper being folded just so, for easier digestion; and most of all, best of all, the box scores.

  All sports have their inky spoor and gnomic codes, after the event, and perhaps all sports reward poring over their exquisite numbers, for the stories hidden therein; but above all sports for box scores I rank baseball and basketball, and the very thought of not running a forefinger daily down the boxes, summer and winter, is saddening to me. Baseball’s stolen bases, hit-by-pitches, batting averages computed to the infinitesimal thousandth; the innings pitched, pinch-hitters, attendance; the minutes played in basketball, the shooting percentages, the assist totals, the technical fouls; how many hundreds of times did I tell my small sons a game could be understood full well just by reading the minutes-played column, and noting the rebounding and assist totals, far more important than profligate points?

  Many times, boys, many times.

  And then, when the paterfamilias has read the boxes with care, and marked the most notable numbers in yellow highlighter, and left the paper folded open to the annotated box scores for his sons to find, he would rise from the table, happy in some small huge odd sweet mysterious way, and gird for work, pleased somehow that Jason Kidd had once again posted a classic Jason Kidd 11-11-11 box score, or that Steve Nash had again approached a perfect shooting game from the floor and the free-throw line while stacking up a dozen assists, or that LeBron James once again had come tantalizingly close to the rare glorious quadruple double, or Kobe Bryant had again somehow played a game in which he never once passed to a teammate for a basket, despite 40 minutes on the floor; and then on the way to work, pondering the glory of box scores, I am reminded of the classic Dennis Rodman box score, which would be something like zero points on zero shots, but 25 rebounds and 5 blocked shots and 4 steals and 2 technical fouls and 1 intergalactic press conference afterwards; but then I remember that the box score, that lovely tiny poem in the daily paper, is no more, at least in Oregon; but then I remember that at least my sons spent their childhoods with inky fingers, and knew how to read that sweet subtle story, and many times called out the most amazing ones to me, from the table where they sprawled, as I was in the other room donning corporate armor; and perhaps it is this last thing I will miss the most; not so much the box scores, but the way they could be an arithmetic of affection, a code for love.

  A Note on Ceasing to Read

  Another thing we don’t talk about much when it comes to b
ooks and reading is how almost all readers finally arrive at one crucial and telling moment, one that changes their reading styles forever after — that instant when you realize you aren’t going to finish the book you are diligently plowing through, and you don’t have to finish it, and you can fling it off the porch with a sigh of relief, and such flingitude does not mean you are an ignoramus, and in fact a book’s unfinishability reflects less on the reader than on the writer, even on such otherwise excellent writers as, for example, James Joyce, whose Dubliners is taut and perfect and whose Finnegan’s Wake is, let us admit cheerfully here in public, unreadable muck.

  Almost every reader achieves this moment of maturity, it seems to me, and it is a remarkably freeing line to step over — to finally give up on reading all of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and realize happily that now you have years more to live, or to finally, after a volume and a half of Marcel Proust, to say politely, “Marcel, you are a wheezing neurotic nut, and I wish you the best, but I’d like to read books where things actually happen,” or even to say to the genius Henry James, “Hank, old pup, your infinitesimal gradations of social manners are incredibly boring, and reading your denser novels is like being drilled by a very slow dentist,” isn’t that a refreshing feeling?

  There are, of course, many books in which slogging pays off wonderfully — Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, say, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, both of which demand maybe a hundred pages of patient muddling before they explode into such vast tremendous stories that you are, at the end, loath to leave their extraordinary worlds; and there are many books, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Melville’s Moby-Dick, that are so huge and sprawling and labyrinthine that you are as pleasantly addled at the end as you were at the beginning, which is perhaps why you reread them with joy every few summers; and there are books that are hard to read but riveting and unforgettable, and it would have been a real shame not to have played in their intense game, books like Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, or Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, or the greatest Oregon novel there ever was, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.