Since I'm, uh, bookish and all, I've been mulling over Cristina Nehring's ill-tempered essay, "Books Make You a Boring Person," from last week's New York Times Book Review (registration required; at the time of posting, this link hadn't yet turned into a pay-to-read pumpkin). She's bound and determined to pick a fight with anyone who would call himself a lover of books: "There's a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book lovers"; "[B]ookworms have developed a semi-mystical complacency about the moral and mental benefits of reading." These and other words and phrases freighted with religious connotations recur throughout the essay ("Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them"; "We do better to wrestle with our writers as Jacob with the angel than to worship them as saviors"), all the more jarring given the unholy contempt the writer displays for the objects of her withering judgment: the omnivorous, undiscriminating reader ("We all know people who use a text the way others use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds."); the filmmaker Mark Moskowitz and his "diminutive documentary, 'Stone Reader'", who in Nehring's view has only an overindulgent and misguided (book-loving) public to thank for his film having "provoked the hosannas it has, much less [having] made it into the aisles of Blockbuster"; and a young man at a book festival, with a chirpy greeting and a button in a primary color bearing a slogan punctuated with an exclamation point and a question mark:
"I'm a reader!'' announced the yellow button. ''How about you?'' I looked at its bearer, a strapping young guy stalking my town's Festival of Books. ''I'll bet you're a reader!'' he volunteered, as though we were two geniuses well met.
The essay is less reasoned argument than a collection of irritable reactions and questionable assertions as counterintuitive as they are counterfactual. (An example is the notion that if you're a book fan, you love books indiscriminately, since, after all, "Even a hint of idolatry disables the mind." Yes, it's quite silly that I am so irrationally attached to my copy of The Good Soldier, whose insufficiently alkaline binding has long become separated from its pages, that I won't replace it, but I'm also quite sure that the highest and best use for my copy of The DaVinci Code is to shred its pages and have the earthworms in my worm bin perform their digestive alchemy on them.) The piece closes with an exhortation of sorts to be a fighter, not a lover, when it comes to reading, although I think that's more an incident of the essay's choleric disposition than anything else. I agree that it's a virtue to engage with the text that you read, although I don't see that it should always be a wrestling match: sometimes it's a stroll, sometimes it's the Lindy hop, and sometimes it's an awful blind date that ends in a hurry and with relief. But I don't agree that the ideal reader is only someone who can somehow always summon the ability to be The Good Reader of every text encountered. Sometimes I'm a good reader, and sometimes I'm a bad reader (and sometimes each of those things in the course of reading a text). But the most meaningful moments of my reading experience have been when, like the prodigal son, I've returned to a text long after having read it, badly, and (whether it's because life's knocked a bit more sense into me in the intervening time or otherwise) then being able to read it, at last, and give it its due, appreciating it for what it is, appreciating what I missed the first time around, and appreciating the good fortune of having been given enough time, in the finite span of this one life, to get to do both those things.
So—I'm proud to say that I love books. I believe that books can keep kids off drugs, keep gang members out of prison, keep terrorists away from the gates, and, indeed, save a life. Perhaps I'll have some buttons made up, in bright yellow. One will read "Kiss me; I'm bookish!", and the other, "Have you hugged your bookworm today?".
Let me know if you want one.
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