The Reading

Drew has a nice post about what and why he reads.

I read very little fiction. In fact, the fiction I read is limited to a six book rotation before bed. Five of the novels are from my childhood. Four of these five are written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Complaints from students sound much less serious when I'm reading about a seven-month stretch of blizzards punctuated by the occasional threat of starvation.

For awhile, this was bothering me because I have long associated being intelligent and intellectually engaged with reading fiction. This connection was initially cemented in the early moments of AV and my relationship - he actually got me to read Infinite Jest (three bookmarks, people - one for the text, one for that long section on Madame Psychosis I skipped, one for the footnotes). From there I was digesting the enfants terrible of the postmodern fiction world (DFW, Eggers, DeLillo). My engagement with fiction ceased soon after that, a halt I attribute to entering graduate school. I recently talked with some of my colleagues about this fiction-less or fiction-limited life that I live, and was shocked to find that my friends - brilliant, funny, thoughtful fellows - only read mass market-type mystery novels. One said that a professor of his at U of Iowa stopped reading fiction because he was reading philosophy for a living. Tricky how that works.

This explains why Cormac McCarthy - another of AV's categorical favorites - proved so tricky for me. It's just so hard that I can't drum up the intellectual attention and respect it deserves. If anything, the fiction available that seems worth the effort is too sophisticated (here I'm not discriminating. I can get at The Road about the same as I can get at Middlemarch). Fiction paralysis probably results from my ability to digest it the way it ought to be digested.

If I'm reading anything for fun lately, it seems to be nonfiction. Favorites include Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (which I read and marked like crazy), Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. I have read a few essays from DFW's Consider the Lobster, which have been satisfying. More satisfying was his piece in the New York Times last year about Roger Federer. The man can write about tennis and the mind-body problem in the New York Times ("Federer as Religious Experience," August 20, 2006). I never questioned his genius again after that. I'm planning to start Lakoff & Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh, but that probably qualifies better as work-related reading than reading for fun. It's my equivalent of AV's hauling Pynchon to the beach (have you seen the size of Against the Day? sheesh!).