This winter, wallow in the joy of reading — and the guilt that you’re not reading better books
Titles about Kansas and U.S. history crowd opinion editor Clay Wirestone's bookshelves, along with a random batch of other titles. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
One recent weekend, when I was feeling ill, I read a book in an evening and morning.
Titled “There Is No Antimemetics Division,” by an author with the eye-catching pen name of QNTM, the novel picked me up by the scruff of the neck and wouldn’t let go. In racing through its pages, I was reminded of the incredible joy that reading for pleasure can bring. As I coughed and downed handfuls of Tylenol and ibuprofen, the book whisked me along its science fiction-horror-metafictional journey.
One drawback of working in the word business is that reading becomes just another part of the job. If you spend eight hours a day reading other people‘s writing, editing other people’s writing, or creating and editing your own writing, you might find it difficult to rouse yourself for other types of literature. Maybe you just want to watch “The Golden Girls.”
In essence, I read news and commentary pieces seven days a week, 365 days a year. Some of that writing amuses and diverts me. Some of it enrages me. A relatively small amount carries lasting aesthetic qualities.
I want to read other things. Yet even a nonfiction book can look like a daunting obstacle when the onrush of daily content piles up outside your door, a snowdrift of content that you then have to dig out with your eyes.
The struggle continues.
When I lived in New Hampshire, I was part of a book club that read an array of interesting modern fiction and nonfiction. We worked through “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami, “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl, “Dune” by Frank Herbert and many others.
More recently, my work on a volume for the University Press of Kansas about historic opinion writers has required leafing through dozens of old volumes. However, most of the time I use indexes and skimming to find useful nuggets.
After I finished writing the book, more or less, in September, I turned once again to reading fiction. I’ve stocked up on books I want to read but haven’t managed yet — “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith.
Sure, I own the books now. But am I reading them?
Partially! My challenge can be illustrated by an even earlier weekend when I began with the best of intentions to read Faulkner — but ended up tearing through Ramin Setoodeh’s gossipy “Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of “The View.”
I mean, you can read the work of a Nobel Prize winner in literature, or you can read about how Barbara Walters battled Rosie O’Donnell.
That’s the joy and terror of reading, when separated from work. So many books tower on all sides of us, important, silly, smart, ludicrous and just plain incomprehensible. Picking one means ignoring all those others, at least for the time being. We only enjoy so much time, and only so much of that time can be spent tracing our eyes through the letters and sentences and paragraphs that adorn a page.
We can never read all the books, despite our hopes to the contrary. So we pick up one volume after another, reading into the future.
Or we consume another think piece about Bari Weiss and “60 Minutes.”
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.