Reading with Hope

For if this particular book is not giving me pleasure now, it may give me pleasure later, if I allow it to do so. Maybe it's just starting slowly but will pick up speed; maybe I haven't fully grasped the idiom it's working in but eventually will figure it out; maybe the problem is not with the book but with my own powers of cocentration because I slept fitfully last night. Or maybe, for some reason I don't understand, today is not one of the High Holidays of my spirit.

- Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 42.

Tsundoku

The Japanese have a word for this affliction: tsundoku. It means those piles of books that you buy, but haven’t yet found time to read; those books that you know you simply can’t live without, which then just stack up, month after month.

-Huw Lewis-Jones, “Mapping Memories” from The Writer’s Map

Three Sorts of People

Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people--those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food.

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse, 7.

Unruly Things

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. That is why we much close them up in thick, solid books so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

-Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, 36.

Recent (Good) Reads

Seventy-Seven Clocks, Christopher Fowler (British mystery) The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Maryrose Wood (kid lit) Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, N. D. Wilson (theological musings) Ten Second Staircase, Christopher Fowler (British mystery) Keeper, Kathi Appelt (kid lit) The Chestnut King, N. D. Wilson (fantasy)

Anthologies

And so of the making of books there is no end, and of the making of anthologies there seems particularly to be no end because we are all anthologists. The collection and hoarding of bits and pieces is basic to all animals, from the squirrel with his nuts...to the anthologist with his oddments stored up in his memory...Anthology-making is therefore essentially selfish, like self-preservation...with the advantage of literature over nuts that it can be shared without personal loss to the hoarder.

-Elizabeth Goudge, preface to A Book of Comfort, quoted by Leland Ryken in his preface to The Christian Imagination

Rereading

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: But what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? Yet I think the test has a special application to the matter in hand. For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened...

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain ideal surprisingness...We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the “surprise” of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia...

-C. S. Lewis, “On Stories,” quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 454-455.

Paradise

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

-Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 232.

Review: The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken

I stumbled across this book last weekend, as I perused Wheaton's card catalog in search of lesser-known essays by some of my favorite authors (Buechner, Chesterton, O'Connor, etc...). This is a marvelous book, exploring literature as an art-form from a Christian perspective. I'm sorry I didn't have time to read it more thoroughly (alas, 500 pages or so), but I had a lovely browse, and copied out as many quotes as I could - many from Lewis, but a few from other sources too. Some are posted below, and there will be more over the next few days...

Lit Crit

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment...is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 137.

Books as Doors

Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to...

Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding –ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 147.

Books as Windows

What then is the good of—what is even the defense for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist...? The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself...We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own...We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors...

Literary experience heals the wounds, without undermining the privilege, of individuality...In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 51, 52.

Created in the Author's Image

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that should whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them...[Hence] as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

- John Milton, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 12.

Childish Things

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," 34.

Highs

Beachreading:
1. The Face of the Stranger, Anne Perry
2. The Children of Green Knowe, L.M. Boston
3. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
4. Inkheart, Cornelia Funke

Post-beachreading (books that accompanied me to the Cape, but didn't get read...yet):
5. The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, Stanley L. Jaki
6. Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
7. Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Highs

Books I'm taking with me on vacation:
1. The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
2. An Assembly Such as This (A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman), Pamela Aidan
3. Eggs, Jerry Spinelli
4. The Chosen, Chaim Potok

And, too bulky for vacation, but waiting when I return:
5. Inkheart, Cornelia Funke

The Truly Wide Taste...

The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there". Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 37.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”—
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in a copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

-Billy Collins

Carnal and Courtly Love

Just think what courtly lovers [of books] miss by believing the only thing they are permitted to do with books is read them! What do they use for shims, doorstops, glueing weights, and rug-flatteners? When my friend the art historian was a teenager, his cherished copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths served as a drum pad on which he practiced percussion riffs from Led Zeppelin. A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on a great thinker. Menelik II, the emperor of Ethiopia at the turn of the century, liked to chew pages from his Bible. Unfortunately, he died after consuming the complete Book of Kings. I do not consider Menelik's fate an argument for keeping our hands and teeth off our books; the lesson to be drawn, clearly, is that he, too, should have laminated the pages in plastic.

-Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris, 41-42.

Childish Things

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, quoted by Alan Jacobs, The Narnian, xxii.