Essays on books, ideas, and life

From a 'Good Enough' Reader

“The Ideal Reader is the translator, able to dissect the text, peel back the skin, slice down to the marrow, follow each artery and each vein, and then set on its feet a whole new sentient being.”
— Alberto Manguel, “Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader”

I once asked my mother how old I was when I learned to read, because I couldn’t remember. I have a vivid memory of being frustrated to tears at my kindergarten teacher for trying to force me to recite phonetic exercises with the alphabet, but I could already read. My frustration only increased the teacher’s anger at me. My mother has told me many times over the years that she used to read to me constantly when I was a child, and that’s how I learned to read. As a poor mother, she found the local public library, as well as borrowing books from friends and family, enabled this mother-son time. I have only the vaguest of impressionistic memories of reading with her, likely formed from my mother’s stories and not memories at all.

Books and an abiding book love—attested by my overflowing shelves both at home and in my campus office—inborn or taught by my mothers lap and voice with colorful children’s books—have been lifelong companions. When I moved from University of Kansas to San Francisco after my doctoral exams, I shipped over 20 boxes of books 4th Class, US Postal Service. That was after culling my collection by nearly ½ before the move. My collection has only grown more over the years. Sometimes I can’t tell if I love reading or just the books themselves.

From childhood until I started graduate school at 25, I was an avid reader of fiction, constantly with my nose in a book, either the literature I was reading in school (I had truly remarkable high school English teachers) and university or my (sometimes guilty) pleasure reading in Science Fiction and Fantasy fiction. I discovered the different pleasure of nonfiction reading as an undergraduate, in a course on “modern Africa,” where we read several histories and social science analyses of the history of colonial and what we might now call decoloniz(ing) sub-saharan Africa. These books broke through my rather flimsy stereotypical assumptions about Africa and connected with friends I’d made with refugees from Ghana, Nigeria, and Zaïre while living in France and Switzerland; this breakthrough reading was a new kind of experience, a kind of illumination of the world that eventually led me to graduate school.

Graduate school and my subsequent career as a professor nearly drowned my love for reading, in a haze of literature reviews, bibliographic essays, annotated bibliographies, and field surveys. I had to learn to read quickly for arguments and evidence and to evaluate the scholarship and research of numerous articles and books per day. In some ways, I lost the ability to sit quietly for hours with a book out of the love of reading. The internet, surfing, flicking, and skimming for pings of dopamine have only worsened the gap. Meanwhile, my intellectual interests and knowledge have grown continually over the years, expanding in many directions following my teaching and research in my day job.

And so I arrive at a moment of reading rebellion, or perhaps midlife longing and nostalgia, for analogue, slow, heart-gladdening reading. Time with words, characters, ideas, and authors. Moments of beauty in imagery and prosody, the rhythm and sound of language. Flashes of insight and clarity of ideas and thought. Reading as a way of life. But now in a world more atomized and alienated than ever, I want more than merely to be alone with my books and thoughts. Over the past 15 months or so, I’ve been part of a small group of gay men reading mostly queer literature and have rediscovered the fun and power of discussion and disagreement and the ways that the reading is deepened and weighted with the experiences and knowledge of others.

My hope for these essays is to use digital technology in some old ways. Long(er) thought pieces about what I’m reading for pleasure (in contrast to the kinds of writing I have to do for my job), imagining others who read for pleasure as my readers. Alberto Manguel’s short list of the characteristics of an ideal reader includes the insistence that the ideal reader is not a taxidermist, not a manipulator of corpses; but rather, one who pulls apart and examines and contemplates and then puts a text back together in order to create some new, living thing. I take this as an aspiration for what I will be working towards in this collection of reading essays.

A note on what you will find here. I do not intend to write “reviews,” which I find to be a tedious and tiresome genre usually. There are some exceptional expert reviewers — Roger Ebert comes to mind — who mix their critical-yet-loving eye for art with recommendations. But for the most part, I’m not looking for other people to tell me whether or not I should read a book; and so I don’t want to offer that kind of experience either. Instead, I’m looking to create meaning and experience from reading through my writing that I can share and discuss with others. Oscar Wilde, in what is likely his least quippy essay, observes that art criticism is an art form unto itself. If so, I am an apprentice at this art, and so can’t claim that you’ll have an “artistic” experience reading my pieces. But I do hope they will be perhaps a source of pleasure and the occasional nugget of insight or wisdom, such as I have to offer. Because I will be writing essays, not reviews, you should always expect spoilers.

My interests in reading range quite widely, but very generally, I’ll be writing about books in the following categories and subcategories, and I’ll mark them in titles and tags so you can find or avoid things that do or don’t interest you.

At the end of his short essay of ideal aphorisms, Manguel undercuts the entire list of ideals. “Literature depends, not on ideal readers, but merely on good enough readers.” Since I am in no way an ideal reader (and even less an ideal writer), these essays are from one good enough reader to another.

Notes & Bibliographic Do-dads

Alberto Manguel. “Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader” in A Reader on Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010): 151-4.

Oscar Wilde. “The Critic as Artist” [1891] reproduced in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008): 1009-59.

— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry

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