March 12-14, 2007
A Perfect Mess
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
My mother gave me this book for Christmas. I think in hope of communicating to me that she loves me in spite of my messy messy ways. I know she does, but it was still a nice gesture.
The premise of this book is that we, as a culture, have gone too far in our quest for organization, and that we now seek to be more organized simply for the sake of organization, rather than because we have a good idea of what the actual benefit of this organization might be. Basically, being organized has a cost in time and resources and such, but frequently people don't consider that, and instead just quest to keep everything NEAT without thinking if that time could have been used more productively for other things. (Anyone that has seen my bedroom or the back seat of my car knows that I suffer from no such illusion, and think that my time can be better used for just about anything rather than just making things neat.)
The authors are not advocating anarchy or complete and total sloppiness, but they argue that in each situation there is an optimal level of messiness that will result in a maximization of productivity/creativity etc. and that we should quest for that. They split the existence of messiness up into many levels and different types of messiness, and talk about how a slight mess can be an advantage in everything from our desks to our thinking.
The argument is a pretty common sense one once you think about it, but I did still find parts of the book enlightening, especially as I am one of those people constantly in a quest to go from chaos to totally perfect organization. I have, since reading this book tried to introduce a little of the productive kind of messiness into some areas of my life. (For example, my MCAT studying now includes more passages unrelated to the things that I have recently reviewed.) I'm pretty sure that I haven't yet found the optimal level of messiness (Read: agenda still compulsively color coded, floor of my bedroom, less easy to find.) But I hope that this thinking might help me get there.
It is a little redundant, and if you can accept the idea that neater is not ALWAYS better, than you can probably get by with only the first couple chapters, or reading the reviews, but if mess and organization is something that you struggle with (like me) than this might be a good one to get you to calm yourself down.
Maybe I should have bought it for my mother...
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist
Showing posts with label catch-all. Show all posts
Showing posts with label catch-all. Show all posts
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Friday, January 05, 2007
In Praise of Slowness
December 26, 2006-January 2, 2007
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
This book got read at the perfect time for me. I have owned this copy for well over a year, and had started reading it more than once in the past, but this time it stuck because the timing was right. It is a wonderful after vacation book, because the idea of the appeal of moving slower through life is clear when you have been doing just that, and it is a good New Years book because the idea of taking control of the way that you live your life is at the heart of pretty much all New Year's resolutions.
The basic idea of the book is that the human race has managed, with the help of technology, competition, and our own inner drives, to speed up our lives to pathological levels, and that we could all benefit from a bit of a slow down. Honore asserts in the introduction several times that he is not a Luddite, or really opposed to speed in all cases, but rather that he believes that unmitigated haste is not the right tempo for all of life's activities. That point is supported by some pretty sobering data and antidotes from modern living. The book then goes on to talk about ways that people are adding a little slowness to their lives in a number of different areas, from food and sex to exercise and the office. Honore is clearly attached to the idea that the desire to slow down, and the ways in which people do so, amounts to a global movement, and while I think that is perhaps taking it a bit too far, he makes a compelling case for moving through life a little more slowly and with a little more thought.
Now this is not the most well-written book that I have ever encountered. Honore is frequently repetitive, and relies far too heavily on the testimony of people converted in one way or another to the Slow (and yes, he uses the capital) way of living. After the general idea is introduced, we hear from people who started eating slower and now say their whole lives are better, then from people who started living in communities that allow for more walking and how their whole lives are better, then from people that exercise slowly and how their whole lives are better... and so on.
But for me, someone who recognizes, at least a little bit, the insanity of the frenzy that has crept into the way that I approach my life, the ideas, if not always the way that they were presented, were quite compelling. I saw so much of myself in the following quote from one of the introductory chapters that I was willing to hear some suggestions from the other end of the speed spectrum.
"In our hyped-up, faster-is-better culture, a turbocharged life is still the ultimate trophy on the mantelpiece. When people moan, 'Oh, I'm so busy, I'm run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven't got time for anything,' what they often mean is, 'Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.'"
Because I was coming off that cruise, and thinking about my upcoming New Year's resolutions, seeing so much of myself in that sentence was a little bit frightening, because I don't really believe that it is healthy for me to be that way. And when I really think about it, I know that I am not more energetic when I am pushed to the limits, and I am certainly not more exciting when my schedule is so rigid and packed that I don't have time for anything new or spontaneous.
So I was ready for some other ideas, and with that kind of open mind, it seemed as if many of the people that Honore meets with to write this book have the right idea. I do eat too fast, and it keeps me from getting the most enjoyment out of the food (while encouraging me to get the most calories.) I do drive in ways that are probably dangerous. I know from experience that a flexible work schedule can make life a thousand times more livable, and so on. This really allowed me to think about a bunch of areas that might provide room for a more regulated tempo in my life, and made me realize that I have, in some ways, managed to take even some of the things that he advocates as Slow leisure activities (knitting and pleasure reading) and turned them into a race.
And while I don't think that all of this is cultural, or that I can trace my stress directly back to the invention of the sundial, I am convinced, quite thoroughly, that pacing is something that I need to pay more attention to, and that there are areas where I want to make changes.
This book is not for everyone. Some people might find it a little bit too much. But if you're feeling like life is a little (or a lot) more frantic than it probably should be, you might want to look into it. It provides a bunch of suggestions and a pretty comprehensive study of some of the details of where we are as a culture, how we've gotten this far, and some options for taking that back. Some of the ideas are appealing and can be tried out right away (walking more, yoga, simply taking a time out when you need it) while other sections of the text discuss larger scale, and I think very flawed efforts. (The entirety of France being limited to a state mandated 35-hour work week is insanity). Different areas may work for different people. For example the chapter on city development spoke to my interests less personally than the one on slow medicine, which had me thinking for quite a while about the way that I want to practice someday, but I can think of people for whom the exact opposite would be true. If you want to slow your life down, or just find more balance in your pacing, this book may help you find a way to do just that.
Of course it may also force you, as it forced me, to face some cruel realities about the way that speed has crept into your life, and the level of the challenge that you face in getting rid of it. For example, the chapter on raising children is largely devoted to the structure of education and the idea that a less hurried one is better. That's all well and good if less parental pressure would really leave a legion of carefree kiddies, or if less emphasis on testing would produce a world in which all children could learn in a pressure free environment. But I'm not convinced that's true. Thinking back on my education, I think that the source of the pressure that pushed me into the speed that still dominates some areas of my life was a little closer to home, and Honore doesn't seem to have too many ideas for dealing with those of us that are intrinsically driven by something in the personality that pushes to more more more without the need for crazy teachers and overbearing parents. (I had neither.)
But this is not a self-help book either, so that's not Honore's job. I suppose that I would classify it as a work of social observation and commentary, and it can serve that purpose without trying to conquer all of my speeding demons. Besides, the belief that Honore puts at the core of his movement is not that everything should be done slowly, but rather that everything should be done at an appropriate pace for the action, something that he describes with the musical term tempo giusto.
"The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. I means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up."
I think, at the most basic levels, that this message is a good one, and one that a lot of us can really stand to hear.
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out the 2007 Booklist
Want to read a little more about the process of this blog? Check out Bookworming in 2007
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
This book got read at the perfect time for me. I have owned this copy for well over a year, and had started reading it more than once in the past, but this time it stuck because the timing was right. It is a wonderful after vacation book, because the idea of the appeal of moving slower through life is clear when you have been doing just that, and it is a good New Years book because the idea of taking control of the way that you live your life is at the heart of pretty much all New Year's resolutions.
The basic idea of the book is that the human race has managed, with the help of technology, competition, and our own inner drives, to speed up our lives to pathological levels, and that we could all benefit from a bit of a slow down. Honore asserts in the introduction several times that he is not a Luddite, or really opposed to speed in all cases, but rather that he believes that unmitigated haste is not the right tempo for all of life's activities. That point is supported by some pretty sobering data and antidotes from modern living. The book then goes on to talk about ways that people are adding a little slowness to their lives in a number of different areas, from food and sex to exercise and the office. Honore is clearly attached to the idea that the desire to slow down, and the ways in which people do so, amounts to a global movement, and while I think that is perhaps taking it a bit too far, he makes a compelling case for moving through life a little more slowly and with a little more thought.
Now this is not the most well-written book that I have ever encountered. Honore is frequently repetitive, and relies far too heavily on the testimony of people converted in one way or another to the Slow (and yes, he uses the capital) way of living. After the general idea is introduced, we hear from people who started eating slower and now say their whole lives are better, then from people who started living in communities that allow for more walking and how their whole lives are better, then from people that exercise slowly and how their whole lives are better... and so on.
But for me, someone who recognizes, at least a little bit, the insanity of the frenzy that has crept into the way that I approach my life, the ideas, if not always the way that they were presented, were quite compelling. I saw so much of myself in the following quote from one of the introductory chapters that I was willing to hear some suggestions from the other end of the speed spectrum.
"In our hyped-up, faster-is-better culture, a turbocharged life is still the ultimate trophy on the mantelpiece. When people moan, 'Oh, I'm so busy, I'm run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven't got time for anything,' what they often mean is, 'Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.'"
Because I was coming off that cruise, and thinking about my upcoming New Year's resolutions, seeing so much of myself in that sentence was a little bit frightening, because I don't really believe that it is healthy for me to be that way. And when I really think about it, I know that I am not more energetic when I am pushed to the limits, and I am certainly not more exciting when my schedule is so rigid and packed that I don't have time for anything new or spontaneous.
So I was ready for some other ideas, and with that kind of open mind, it seemed as if many of the people that Honore meets with to write this book have the right idea. I do eat too fast, and it keeps me from getting the most enjoyment out of the food (while encouraging me to get the most calories.) I do drive in ways that are probably dangerous. I know from experience that a flexible work schedule can make life a thousand times more livable, and so on. This really allowed me to think about a bunch of areas that might provide room for a more regulated tempo in my life, and made me realize that I have, in some ways, managed to take even some of the things that he advocates as Slow leisure activities (knitting and pleasure reading) and turned them into a race.
And while I don't think that all of this is cultural, or that I can trace my stress directly back to the invention of the sundial, I am convinced, quite thoroughly, that pacing is something that I need to pay more attention to, and that there are areas where I want to make changes.
This book is not for everyone. Some people might find it a little bit too much. But if you're feeling like life is a little (or a lot) more frantic than it probably should be, you might want to look into it. It provides a bunch of suggestions and a pretty comprehensive study of some of the details of where we are as a culture, how we've gotten this far, and some options for taking that back. Some of the ideas are appealing and can be tried out right away (walking more, yoga, simply taking a time out when you need it) while other sections of the text discuss larger scale, and I think very flawed efforts. (The entirety of France being limited to a state mandated 35-hour work week is insanity). Different areas may work for different people. For example the chapter on city development spoke to my interests less personally than the one on slow medicine, which had me thinking for quite a while about the way that I want to practice someday, but I can think of people for whom the exact opposite would be true. If you want to slow your life down, or just find more balance in your pacing, this book may help you find a way to do just that.
Of course it may also force you, as it forced me, to face some cruel realities about the way that speed has crept into your life, and the level of the challenge that you face in getting rid of it. For example, the chapter on raising children is largely devoted to the structure of education and the idea that a less hurried one is better. That's all well and good if less parental pressure would really leave a legion of carefree kiddies, or if less emphasis on testing would produce a world in which all children could learn in a pressure free environment. But I'm not convinced that's true. Thinking back on my education, I think that the source of the pressure that pushed me into the speed that still dominates some areas of my life was a little closer to home, and Honore doesn't seem to have too many ideas for dealing with those of us that are intrinsically driven by something in the personality that pushes to more more more without the need for crazy teachers and overbearing parents. (I had neither.)
But this is not a self-help book either, so that's not Honore's job. I suppose that I would classify it as a work of social observation and commentary, and it can serve that purpose without trying to conquer all of my speeding demons. Besides, the belief that Honore puts at the core of his movement is not that everything should be done slowly, but rather that everything should be done at an appropriate pace for the action, something that he describes with the musical term tempo giusto.
"The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. I means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up."
I think, at the most basic levels, that this message is a good one, and one that a lot of us can really stand to hear.
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out the 2007 Booklist
Want to read a little more about the process of this blog? Check out Bookworming in 2007
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
by Chuck Klosterman
c. 2003
Scribner: New York
246 pages
Another Andrew contribution to Maggie's incessant reading. This is a book of essays written from the perspective of a pop culture buff and talking about everything from how Lloyd Dobler has left him unable to ever satisfy a woman to how the Lakers vs. Celtics rivalry in the 80's represents not just the racial tension in America, but everything.
Important note: Andrew bought me this book, but he also had the audio book, and we listened to the first few essays in the car driving around this past weekend. I highly recommend listening to at least part of the audio book for this particular selection, and I am usually not an advocate of audio books. Klosterman reads the book himself, and clearly many of these essays were written with that 'read aloud' mentality. (I would bet that he edits by reading aloud almost performance style to make sure that things flow.) His voice and his delivery really drive home his points, and are rather funny. Even if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing (I didn't.) Listening to the first two will give you a good idea of the way in which the others are meant to be read. This really increased my enjoyment of this book, which is already really entertaining.
As I said before, this is a series of essays. All are amusing and entertaining as is, although I feel like I would have found them even more so if I was five or six years older. Klosterman is writing from the perspective of someone who watched his two straight hours of Saved By The Bell every afternoon (USA and TBS) in his college dorm room, and while I pretty devotedly watched that same programming, it was sitting in my kitchen afternoons after elementary and middle school. As he says "temporality is part of the truth," and our different perspectives made that experience very different in some ways.
I believe that I read a spin off of this first essay, which in the book is titled "This is Emo." (If other people read the Lloyd Dobler article, I think that it was in a newspaper, and it definitely had a large picture of the boom box moment that we all know and love, I would be very happy to find it because I want to know if it really is the same author.) The essay here discusses the fact that the musical and cinematic representation of love is fake and too perfect, and that the tendency of people in our culture to embrace that and allow it to shape how they imagine love to be has left us unable to be satisfied with real relationships.
The essay that I read before was focused on the Lloyd Dobler complex. This is the point that every woman (Klosterman says born between '65 and '78, but here I think that he is not giving us youngings credit) is in love with John Cusack. Of course, not really him, the character he played in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler. And it's funny, and vaguely true. (Although I saw the intrinsic fabulousness of Johnny before I saw Say Anything, I still have to admit that some idea of this fabulousness comes from the fact that he comes off like the kind of person that Lloyd Dobler seems to be in that movie.) Klosterman's point in this essay is that we all aspire to something that's not real, and so we'll never be happy.
The essay that I read before was focused on the Lloyd Dobler complex. This is the point that every woman (Klosterman says born between '65 and '78, but here I think that he is not giving us youngings credit) is in love with John Cusack. Of course, not really him, the character he played in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler. And it's funny, and vaguely true. (Although I saw the intrinsic fabulousness of Johnny before I saw Say Anything, I still have to admit that some idea of this fabulousness comes from the fact that he comes off like the kind of person that Lloyd Dobler seems to be in that movie.) Klosterman's point in this essay is that we all aspire to something that's not real, and so we'll never be happy.
I don't see it quite as hopelessly as that, but then again, I have a happy, though long distance, relationship with someone who keeps buying me good books. But I can see his point, most particularly when he talks about silences. It seems that we as people feel that silence has two forms: profound and awkward. And while I think that there is a place somewhere in there for the idea of "comfortable silence" in the "I like having you here and don't really feel like I need to fill every one of these moments with worthless drivel" sort of way, I do find myself sometimes wondering if I should SAY SOMETHING whenever things get quiet on a long car ride with Andrew. Reading the essay kind of made me see how freaking silly that is, as Klosterman puts it,
"There's not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we've been convinced not to think like that." page 7
Good news Chuck, I think that you might have just convinced me to think exactly like that sometimes. Good work.
Some of the other essays didn't ring as true for me. I still don't feel like I understand cover bands or internet porn, but maybe I never will, but I still enjoyed his essays about them. And in spite of his assertions, I do still believe that the probability of events is frequently something other that 50/50.
But other essays had shining moments of "oh how true!" His comparison of Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe to America was interestingly reminiscent of the passage that I talked about in my entry about A Prayer For Own Meaney. And his commentary on how it became cool to be depressed sometime in the 80s seemed to connect to my thesis (but I'm obsessed, so those connections happen a lot.) I enjoyed his analysis of why country music is so damn catchy, and I found his explanation of the Tori paradox from the final season of Saved By The Bell outright enlightening ("So THAT'S where she came from!")
But other essays had shining moments of "oh how true!" His comparison of Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe to America was interestingly reminiscent of the passage that I talked about in my entry about A Prayer For Own Meaney. And his commentary on how it became cool to be depressed sometime in the 80s seemed to connect to my thesis (but I'm obsessed, so those connections happen a lot.) I enjoyed his analysis of why country music is so damn catchy, and I found his explanation of the Tori paradox from the final season of Saved By The Bell outright enlightening ("So THAT'S where she came from!")
And I would be interested to hear what other people came up with as answers to "The 23 questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can ever really love them" on pages 126-134. (Andrew and I have decided that we can make it, even thought I think that Einstein is interesting...)
I'll close with the quote that popped up in Jack's facebook profile, thus further proving that he and I will, at least sometimes, focus in on the same exact sets of 15 or so words out of all the words in a 200 page book. This one pretty much sums up the point that seems central to Klosterman, everything is connected, even the most random things, the trivialities of pop culture, are really examples of more complex ideas.
"In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever really 'in and of itself.'"
Friday, June 02, 2006
Walking a Literary Labyrinth
Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages
This is another bargain book buy. I found this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble shortly after I got the Barnes and Noble membership card: a little plastic enabler that lives in my wallet, crying out with an innocent sounding voice, "If you don't spend at least $250 dollars at Barnes and Noble this year, you got ripped off!" (Is there anyone out there worried about my ability to spend $250 at Barnes and Noble?)
Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.
As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.
The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.
Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.
It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.
Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.
"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)
I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)
One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)
And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.
Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.
"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)
It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.
And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.
"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)
Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.
As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.
The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.
Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.
It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.
Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.
"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)
I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)
One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)
And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.
Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.
"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)
It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.
And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.
"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)
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