Pottering through the End of Summer
How to segue from summer to autumn? In the summer, reading is like the season itself, slow and leisurely--you and your books piled into the hammock with a tall pitcher of lemon-ade (or Pims—let’s be British about it, after all) by your side. In the fall, discipline and order resume as school schedules rule the day. Reading becomes, ostensibly, serious and laden with meaning and import.
I am a self-proclaimed student and lover of literature. When you hesitantly tell people you studied English in graduate school, a subtle but undisguised veil protectively glazes their eyes, as they think, "Oh, what a dullard. She actually likes those novels we were forced to read in high school." Well, let me confess, although I feel sacrilegious doing so. I never liked Moby Dick. I REALLY want to like James Joyce, and sometimes I do until I get to the likes of Ulysses. I admire Hemingway, but I don’t much enjoy reading about hunting and fishing and under appreciated women. I have a love/hate relationship with John Updike’s work. I can say the same for the work of E. Annie Proulx (who, by the way, published her first short story in the 1960’s in Gourmet magazine. Check out the current September issue in which it’s reprinted). I love the Brontës. I tolerate Austen. Nonetheless, any free time I scrounge, I spend with a book or a magazine. What is it about reading that readers enjoy? In a witty article musing about his own love of reading, Michael Dirda captures the nuances of the reading obsession better than I could:
"Shocking as it may seem, my real "love" isn't so much for reading as for pleasure -- it merely happens that learning new things delights me, as do fast-paced stories, imaginative wordplay, distinctive prose styles. Should I be congratulated for being a self-indulgent hedonist? I certainly wouldn't read books if they were boring, irrelevant and soporific -- which is how most high-school kids regard the classics of world literature. No, I read for excitement. Everything else is secondary."
Do you remember that flutter of excitement upon discovering for the first time, most likely as a child, a book you absolutely loved? I felt that way with Nancy Drew mysteries and later with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I’ve felt that reading flutter umpteen times since childhood, but there’s something defining and special about those childhood discoveries of the infinite potential reading offered for traveling beyond the back yard or the classroom. An engrossing story convinced you that given the right circumstances, you, too, could speed along in a dark blue Roadster, with your red lacquered nails gripping the steering wheel as you track villains, or you could race through time, solve a scientific conundrum or two, and rescue your father from the evil fate awaiting him.
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