How Reading Changed My Life Read Free

lamented in 1923. “The novel can’t compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor,” the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline said in 1960.
    There was certainly no talk of comfort and joy, of the lively subculture of those of us who forever fell asleep with a book open on our bedside tables,whether bought or borrowed. Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens’s latest novel and who kept battered copies of
Catcher in the Rye
in our back pockets and our backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that
Pride and Prejudice
never went out of print.
    But there was little public talk of us, except in memoirs like Ms. Kincaid’s. Nothing had changed since I was a solitary child being given embossed leather bookmarks by relatives for Christmas. It was still in the equivalent of the club chairs that we found one another: at the counters in bookstores with our arms full, at the front desks in libraries, at school, where teachers introduced us to one another—and, of course, in books, where book-lovers make up a lively subculture of characters. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing,” says Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.
    Reading is like so much else in our culture, in all cultures: the truth of it is found in its people and notin its pundits and its professionals. If I believed what I read about reading I would despair. But instead there are letters from readers to attend to, like the one from a girl who had been given one of my books by her mother and began her letter, “I guess I am what some people would call a bookworm.”
    “So am I,” I wrote back.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself
.
    —WALT WHITMAN
    I T STILL SEEMS infinitely mysterious to me that there are some of us who have built not a life but a self, based largely on our hunger for what are a series of scratches on a piece of paper. There remain in the world, six millennia after a list of livestock on a clay tablet created reading, cultures in which the written word is a mystery, a luxury, even a redundancy. Stories are still told beside fires and streams by people bent almost double from working in the fields, told as richly as the ones my father and his brothers tell when they have a meal together and set to work embroidering the ever-changing tapestry of their past. There is something both magical and natural aboutthe told story, the wise man spinning a tale at a table in medieval Europe giving way to the mother talking about family history in the kitchen with her children in a small apartment in Chicago. That power of the spoken word was even given a new kind of life at the tail end of the twentieth century, when publishing houses began as a matter of course to do what beforehand only libraries for the blind had done: to release audio versions of books, although audio books sometimes seem to me to have more to do with saving time and alleviating the tedium of travel by car than they do with the need to hear the syllables of a sentence caressed by the human voice.
    But the act of reading, the act of seeing a story on the page as opposed to hearing it told—of translating story into specific and immutable language, putting that language down in concrete form with the aid of the arbitrary handful of characters our language offers, of then handing the story on to others in a transactional relationship—that is