Top of the mind: While You Were Reading

But here’s the point — and you may have a different take on this — for me, to mark my place in the book detracts from my reading experience. I find I don’t really enjoy, if that’s the word, a book if I pick it up exactly where I had left off. I need a few minutes of catching up, wondering if I had read this passage before or not, often startling myself that just minutes or hours later the reread offered by this flipping back and forth somehow alters my take on the text from how I’d left it, basically to slow the process of immersing myself in the book again. And a bookmark, sitting determinedly to point me back to the text, militates against that. Perhaps that is why an e-book, with its facility to reopen at exactly the point where it was put aside and without the replicable opportunity to flip back and forth, doesn’t substitute for its old-fashioned, deadwood counterparts.

Maybe none of this (possibly pointless) speculation answers the question Wendy Lesser, an American literary critic, poses in the title of her magical new book — Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. But the book does offer a hint of validation. Amid a survey of a canon updated in a capacious and largehearted manner, listing the tools of literary inquiry with such a light touch that you are left wondering at the encyclopaedic expanse of a breezy read, she keeps winking towards the pleasure of comparative inquiries into how we read. To this deep reading of favourite books, she also links the physicality of reading preferences. She puts her preference for the printed page, for, among other things, being “someone who remembers specific passages in the spatial way”.

“Reading remains a highly individual act,” Lesser writes. “No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.” But the way each of us does read will be ever more rich for being informed by another’s reading. And not just in the obviously collaborative inquiries into a book’s merit (reviews basically) and the analytical methods Lesser lists to make even the most utilitarian reader reach for an armful of novels (some already read and some not) along subheads reminiscent of those used in high school literature assignments: character and plot, the space between, novelty, authority, etc. Lesser succeeds in reminding us that reading also connects us to ourselves across time and circumstances. How you engage with and react to a book at a specific time “depends on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it. This effort will be particular to each person, and it will change over time, just as the person changes over time — and the richer and more complicated a book is, the more this will be true.”

In an intriguing exercise, Lesser examines the mediating role played by a translator. How is it, she inquires, that, say, a particular person’s translation of two different novels conveys two different voices, and that two different translators’ renditions of the same writer too sound different? She looks at multiple translations of Haruki Murakami’s writing, even locating an earlier translation of Norwegian Wood by his one-time translator Alfred Birnbaum into English that he had not “authorized”, which she eventually finds to be better.

You are left wondering whether this is about the translators. Or about the original text. Or about the reader. How boring life would be if these questions had clear-cut answers. The point really is about the necessity of sufficiently “rich” and “complicated” books to acquaint us with ourselves.