I can’t let that last paragraph go. I’ve been thinking about it constantly ever since I first read it a couple of weeks ago. Here it is again:
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again — the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.
Everyone in my book group agreed: she’s absolutely right. The experience of reading was different when we were kids. It’s exactly as she says: it was at once more banal and more essential. Books had an impact on our souls in a way that they rarely, if ever, do any more.
The question is, why? What changed? Is it just that we’re too busy now? Exhausted, we fall into bed at 11 o’clock with our minds spinning with the events of the day, what our kids did, what happened at work, what’s coming up tomorrow — and we’re lucky if we can stay awake long enough to read two pages. No wonder books don’t ravish us the way they used to.
Certainly, that’s part of it. Once you become a mother you can never completely forget yourself. There’s a small part of you that has to stay on guard, always. But I don’t think that’s all of it. I would be very surprised if childless bookworms (Aunt Sara?) don’t feel the exact same loss. And let’s not forget Margaret Lea, the character in the book that I quoted above. She is not only childless and unmarried, but she makes a point of going to bed every night at 8:00. She makes herself a cup of cocoa, casts her cares aside, and reads for three hours before turning off the light. Exhaustion and banal worries don’t seem to be a problem for her.
I think it must have something to do with simply being a child. Maybe when we lose our childhood innocence — when the world is no longer new and wonderful — maybe that’s when we lose “the virginal qualities of the novice reader.”
I miss it.
* * *
Two questions for you:
1. Why do you think your experience of reading has changed (if it has)?
2. Have you read anything recently that ravished you the way Miss Winter’s book ravished Margaret?
12 Comments
Age jades us, I suppose. The newness of the characters and events in a book no longer strike us; we have read too many. Now I am much more concerned with how well the author strings words together, how well she conveys those characters and events. Reading so many books over a lifetime has made me a critic, and less of a lover.
A book that ravished me in my adult life? Maybe Tennyson’s Idylls, or Walter Wangerin’s Book of the Dun Cow. But the one book that I read only as an adult that I keep reading again and again is Robin McKinley’s Sunshine. It is pulpy, and not exactly high literature, but somehow it satisfies me deeply every time. Those tantalizing loose ends that she left that annoyed me so much on the first reading seem still thrilling on a re-read. I have read it six times, and I still find myself unable to put it down during the suspenseful parts. And I can’t really explain why, and I don’t reasonably expect anyone else to share my enthusiasm for the book. It’s just that strange book kismet where a book and a reader perfectly well-suited to each other meet.
I’m not sure reading experience has to change — though I suppose just the simple fact of experiencing more life makes you relate to books differently. A week or so ago, Roger Sutton (the editor of Horn Book) put out that adults who read YA fiction for pleasure are, well, immature. That stung… It got me thinking, though. And I’ve found that what I’m looking to get out of a good book, what really makes a good book for me, is an engaging, well-told story. (Preferably with a happy ending.) I think it’s because my life is mostly chaos, and I have very little control, ultimately, over what my husband and children do in the course of a day. Life is daily, open-ended, challenging. Whereas, a book is predictable, something that can be finished, and therefore ultimately satisfying in it’s predictability. At least for me. That’s changed from when I was a child — I read stories to go places, to have adventures, to be people I couldn’t be. (Though, I suppose, there is an element to that in my reading still…)
Most of the books I read and reread are YA books. The best book I’ve read this month was one I just finished — The Winter Queen. Engaging, entertaining, suspenseful, with a wonderful cliff-hanger of an ending. Well worth my time.
1. It has changed, markedly. I don’t find myself excited or blown away by books much anymore. (Of course, that’s true of things in general). I think we get jaded as we age, and it’s hard to keep things fresh and exciting. Honestly, the last time I was engrossed in a book was HP7, and it wasn’t engrossed like a life-changing thing. But it was great to feel that excitement of reading.
2. I haven’t read anything that has ravished me lately. Of course, mostly I read stuff that is fun and light lately. It’s hard to bend my mind around intelligent fiction when I’ve spent the past however many hours parsing sometimes painfully bad legal writing.
So glad you’re posting again!!
Hey! Oh, the questions are interesting; I was just mid-comment when I had to go do a few things and never got back to it. ;) And I just find what you’re discussing even more interesting. Ok, so. . .
1. I don’t really think my experience of reading has really changed since childhood.
2. I’d have to say that the book(s) I’ve read that really enchanted me were probably The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel and Robert Charles Wilson’s Hominids series.
Sigh… I feel so old and jaded.
Alyssa made two interesting suggestions on her post. She said 1) school spoils reading for pleasure and 2) there’s something wrong with the way we choose books (e.g. we make choices based on Oprah or the bestseller list or what we think we “ought” to read).
Ugh, and I commented while running out the door and so left the wrong author’s name. Sorry! That would be Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids series (though I find Wilson’s books interesting as well).
I think my enjoyment of reading has changed with the training of my brain to be analytical. It’s hard to get absolutely lost in a story if you’re picking apart the author’s skill and finding mistakes.
“It’s hard to get absolutely lost in a story if you’re picking apart the author’s skill and finding mistakes.”
Or if you’re planning to blog about it. :)
I don’t think that I’m jaded. But I carry more with me now when I enter a book which somehow means entering it less fully. I don’t become wholly a part of the world of the book the way I did when I read as kid. Like Adrienne, I read more analytically, but I think that I also more often choose books that demand to be read more analytically. And that’s not so much amatter of losing the pleasure of reading as having discovered a different kind of pleasure–at least when my analytic “reading like a writer” brain is picking apart the book to figure out what the writer did so well rather than so badly! When I do manage to recapture that lost-in-a-book pleasure of childhood though, it’s usually by reading very good children’s or YA books.
Kate — thank you for giving me a different perspective! You are absolutely right. Just because the experience of reading changes over time that doesn’t necessarily make it worse.
Thought provoking thread. I don’t think the problem is jadedness, but more what you seemed to be getting at when you described “minds spinning with the events of the day.”
Any teacher will tell you that it’s the kids who are raised with love and stimulation and who are taken care of who tend to love reading. Someone has taken the time to introduce them to the magic of stories, and they have the time and safe cocoon in which to lose themselves in books.
Maybe we lose the reading magic when childhood ends and we have to earn a paycheck and pay bills and buy groceries and the other daily things. “In headache and in worry vaguely life leaks away,” Auden wrote.
If that were true, however, then happy rich people would continue to be ravished by books throughout their lives, wouldn’t they.
Maybe reading magic has to do with the growth of the human brain as reading skills are developed and then as the adolescent brain thickens. There may be some reading endorphins that taper off when the neural development plateaus.
Luckily, we can recapture some of the thrill by watching our nieces and nephews and students enjoy books! It didn’t quite ravish me, but I’d say that reading _Holes_, by Louis Sachar, with my students was a great literary thrill. They loved it and I got to explore brainstorms with them as we went along (Why an onion? Oh! Because is has layers, like life! And like stories!) Seeing Lena pick up the YA book I had been reading at Christmastime and begin to laugh out loud and read excerpts to Joey was also pretty fun. (And I guess she liked having that book passed along as a birthday present from Aunt Sara.)
I wonder whether you need to expand this topic to include discussion of movies and/or music. When I was young, there were songs that resonated with my soul and I could play them over and over without getting tired of them. Been awhile since I’ve had a song strike a chord in that way.
Sigh.
Interesting, Sara. I don’t think my response to movies & music has changed at all. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a movie, so no change there, and there are still albums that I can play over & over again — not just old stuff but new discoveries.
Lena wept at the ending of a book yesterday; I believe that was a first for her. The book was Afternoon of the Elves — certainly the most thematically “mature” book she’s ever read. She got over it though, by reading The Light Princess in a single sitting. Yes, it is a thrill to watch the little bookworm evolve…