Why is reading a book only once the norm?

I used to think it was lazy of me to re-read. There’s definitely a certain kind of energy that is not required upon a second or third read.

But that energy doesn’t mean the first read is superior to subsequent reads. Making a particular cake for the first time takes more energy than subsequent bakes, and it is not generally considered a lazy waste of time to make the same cake a second, even a third time. People are celebrated for perfecting particular cakes, even.

After all, the first bake is high risk. Are all of the ingredients included in the ingredient list? No. You have to carefully read through extensive discussion about how beaten a moderately well beaten egg should be to discover that you need vanilla—and, oh, approximately 2 tablespoons of boiling water in which to dissolve the espresso powder that you have discovered is fused into a hockey puck. There you are, mid-egg-beating, attacking the hockey puck with an ice pick while boiling water and trying to get the vanilla lid unstuck.

Such are the perils of following a recipe for the first time. You learn a lot and with luck the result is enjoyable. But clearly baking that cake next time will go more smoothly, unless you wait so long you forget everything you learned the first time.

Reading a book for the first time is, likewise, fraught with peril. Some may spend their energy distracted by worries about a character they like who seems determined to make bad choices. I’m talking to you, Anita Brookner heroines. Others may read a book about family and love and despair stubbornly focused on global warming because that’s the significant lens for them at that time. I’m talking to you, theoretically-minded readers. Perhaps the likeliest distraction is simply ploughing through to the end to “find out what happens.”

Clearly a second or third read presents an opportunity for a new experience, and who is to say that it’s the first read that matters most? If re-reading is lazy, surely it is a laziness to embrace.

Books: Interest rates and death

Recently, I realized that I am tired of books about death, and returned to Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs the World. This book is funny, evocative, pointed. It’s not angry in a warping way. But it’s angry enough to be fun to read.

It is the perfect antidote to the poetic deaths of small fish and beloved pets in Mary Oliver’s poetry. It’s a kind of response to the murders, both nonfictional (the bombing of a murder victim in a barn in 1970s central Kentucky) and fictional (there’s generally a body in the violent Oxford of Inspector Morse). It has become my essential reading in the face of an entire book journeying back and forth through time but always both towards and away from suicide; a book opening with a drowning and haunted by the specter of SIDS; and a children’s book that is filled with the deaths of animals in a way that seems not to bother children.

When I couldn’t stand one more dead creature, frozen in a particularly hard winter, when even the death of a named goose was too much for me, I knew I needed a new book. So, I returned to a novel that I haven’t read in months. I needed to escape to a different world, and a benefit of reading many books at once is that I knew exactly where to turn: The Wangs Vs the World! I left them eating hotdogs in the kitchen of a desert trailer…no, I left them just as they headed onward:

”Even in failure, Charles Wang was a success. Looked at from one level up, from a perspective devoid of good or bad, where action trumped stasis, this was a perfect failure. Swift and complete…Charles had somehow tricked himself into erecting a needless deck of financial cards that went up only to be toppled by a historically anomalous financial tornado.”

My rich reward for returning to the cross-country road trip of a family ruined by the grand failure of a make-up company —and widespread financial disaster —by the third mention of interest rates in as many days! Interest rates in The Wangs Vs. the World! Interest rates in Lake Life by David James Poissant! Interest rates in Gary P. West’s Murder on Youngers Creek Road! Interest rates high, interest rates changing, interesting rates shaping our lives in mysterious ways.

Perhaps unfortunately for myself, I’m not excited about reading books about interest rates per se, and if I were, such a mention would be no more than expected. But getting three mentions in three books not about interest rates is one of the little joys of reading many books at a time.

Is it possible to read “too many” books at once?

Before I went everywhere with a loaded digital book device, I would always choose the wrong book. I would go to the airport with one book and before my flight left, I would know it was the wrong book, and I would buy something different. I once did this and then foolishly lent my new purchase to a fellow traveler with nothing to read at all. I then spent the rest of the flight—a decently long one—struggling and failing to read the book I originally selected for the trip.

I read a lot, but I do other very time consuming things too, like cook, draw, teach, and amuse my kids. The question of whether it’s possible to be reading “too many” books at once is not a question about spending more or less time reading.

Some people, including readers more avid than I, read one or two books at a time. Intellectually, I have always known this to be true. I have not always been fully aware of this on an emotional level.

“I’m going to try not to read so many books at a time,” a colleague confessed, as we chatted about changes we might make after a workshop on mindfulness and academic life. I was intrigued by this resolution, as it was frankly not one that had occurred to me over the course of the workshop.

“How many do you normally read at once?” I asked innocently.

I am not sure what number she admitted to—maybe three or four. Maybe five or seven. She wanted to pare that down!?!

I read so, so many more books at a time.

Part of the difference is semantic: if I start a book a few times before committing or rejecting it, it’s on my list. If I’m re-reading two or three or four books, maybe just late at night or before my morning coffee, maybe just on the weekend, that counts. If I’m re-reading part of a text that I’m studying or reading a batch of books for an upcoming course, that counts too. To say that I’m reading these books, even if someone else wouldn’t “count” them, is not the result of a desire to inflate my “current reading” count.

This isn’t a matter of virtue or commitment.

If not that, then what? To be currently reading a book is to hold that book in mind, the shape of it, my sense of it, my expectations of it, my perhaps faulty memories of past reading experiences, my anticipation of a range of interpretations or receptions the book might have gotten or might get… or these overlapping ideas and feelings hover in reserve at the edge of my mind. If this all sounds awful, my colleague’s goal of reducing the list of books in the current reading stack is an excellent resolution.

But for me, being limited to a few books would prevent me from reading. My book would always be the wrong book for the moment. When I’m reading many books, I don’t have this problem. One of them is ready for me, or I am ready for one of them. Or I just start another book.

Catching up on what is good

A reflection on blogging, success, failure, and clarity

When I started this blog with a daily challenge, I thought it would be somewhat difficult to keep up with. My life felt very full and hectic and busy. I was starting another semester with my eighty-whatever new best friends, and I have young kids. I always had more than enough to be behind on already. I decided to try the whole daily blog idea in part because I thought it might help me be less of a perfectionist.

Every idea doesn’t have to be amazing. Every word doesn’t have to be ideal. I would write and I would let it go. In my more pessimistic moments, I thought it could be something else to be perpetually failing to do as well as I felt I should.

As it happened, I found daily blogging to be easier and more invigorating than I expected it to be. I liked having a small challenge, an achievable task. Other areas of endeavor that I find myself engaged in simply don’t provide much of an opportunity for completion, let alone success. Teaching, academia, parenting—these are long-haul projects full of endless effort, complexity, and balancing. By giving myself a context in which done was good enough, I was able to taste completion and success regularly. Salutary.

After a brief hiccup of pandemic productivity, I hit a wall and let myself stop. That was the only thing to do, even if it may not have been the right thing.

It was certainly contrary to the spirit of the daily post idea but aligned with me personal reasons for undertaking such a project.

I’ve definitely learned something even if it’s not always clear what.

I’m going to keep at it, in a haphazard way, consistently inconsistent, and I’ll see what happens.

The Annoyance of Wasted Effort

Lost Effort

I have wasted writing effort in many ways. I nominate as the most annoying way to waste one’s time writing the experience of completing a document, saving it multiple times along the way in a trusted way, and then having it mysteriously frozen, unable to open, from thenceforth, into perpetuity. I realize that this is far from the most disheartening writerly experience, but for a frustrating pesky irksome tiresome and pointless kind of waste, it is unparalleled. 

That’s why this post is not about what it is like to read too many books at a time.

Clothes and Character

Part 1: Books

In books that bother to describe their characters’ clothing, readers are generally assumed to be learning from the fact of the fine silk, smooth and deep red, or from the well cut suit that has been worn heavily, or from the pink crop top. Words ostensibly can’t be wasted on such details as the color of the ribbon on the sun hat or the cashmere blend of the baby’s hand-knitted blanket in shades of forest green. No, if we know that the elderly gentleman in the front row has just divested himself of an ill-fitting black raincoat in the cloakroom, it’s either a plot point or a judgment on his character or his finances. When we’re learning that the young woman is, say, dressed appropriately for the weather, it is something far more significant than dressing for the weather is in typical life conditions. If she is, that is probably a good sign. Your character is paying attention to the right things or is perhaps meant to be read as prudent, practical, smart. Or just lucky, though in my unscientific observation, this is not likely.

Perhaps your character is a beautiful young woman, which is unfortunate for her because beauty is as beauty does. Perhaps, your character is like the most beautiful but rather boring oldest Bennet sister Jane in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen lets her be beautiful because she is not as interesting, not as clever, and not as central to the story as Elizabeth.

One of my favorite literary characters in terms of clothing as a means of characterization is Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (or a free PDF). “In vivid green and gold negligee and glistening brocaded mules,” Helga is beautiful and loves beauty. She is more interested in aesthetics than those around her in the earnest yet vicious and prescriptive Naxos and it damns her, first simply to banishment from that particular place and movement. Eventually, as the aptly named and therefore inevitably downward and smothering tale progresses, of course, that aesthetic sense is lost. As the bitter end of the novel approaches, “Herself, Helga had come to look upon as a finicky, showy thing of unnecessary prejudices and fripperies.” So which is it? Is Helga damned because she cares too much about beauty or damned when she abandons this essential part of her being?

Of course, in Quicksand, it’s both: Helga is the quintessential damned if you do and damned if you don’t character. That’s because this is a book that is most obviously about race and class and gender. And beauty is as beauty does, or something not quite like that. Beauty at least means way too much, whether the character’s beauty or that of her negligee.

In part two, I’ll consider what quarantine clothes say about us. If you’re not seeing anyone, or rather no one is going to see you, what do you wear and how does it matter?

What Day is this?

I know I’m not alone in finding my relationship to time altered in recent days. Or weeks. Or is it months?

This week, I’m trying a new way to mark the days of the week: each day, I’m reading a poem related to that day of the week.

On Sunday, I read Sunday Morning by Bonnie St. Andrews.

That got the song Sunday Morning (Nico with the Velvet Underground) in my head. For the entire day. Which meant that I definitely knew it was Sunday. The problem is that the song is still in my head, and it’s Monday. I’m more or less back where I started.

Writing as Frustrating and Satisfying

Having said I was back to daily posts, I immediately failed to post daily. The reason for that is more interesting than the usual business.

Here is what happened: I wrote, in an unpostable way, in a notebook. Because I had written, and felt that I had written, I failed to notice that I hadn’t posted until it was too late.

There is a sense of frustration and satisfaction that comes from writing, and my day felt complete yesterday, with my daily measure of frustration: as I have been known to say to my students in writing classes, to write is to try. An essay is what you’re writing and it is an attempt. See—words are fun.

A bit of daily writing is like a daily walk or jog. You try it, and in the trying, you do it.

Weekly posts: a Productivity Pause

As my almost non-existent audience may have noticed, I’ve paused my daily blog project. Here are some possible reasons: Most aspects of my life have become exponentially more difficult, even though my immediate family is well, for the most part still employed in not-front-line occupations. First, remote work is, for me as a teaching-focused faculty member at a suddenly fully remote institution, very difficult. I’m not just doing my regular job: I’m doing a much more frustrating, more exhausting, and less satisfying job. Next, our regular childcare situation is of course not functioning. It is literally impossible to do the full time childcare and child rearing while doing the full time other job.

But the more important reason that I’ve paused my daily blogging is that I am in a processing phase. Posts I’ve written or started feel irrelevant in this moment, and it’s hard to know what feels relevant.

I’m processing a new reality, and I’m deliberately removing the daily post project from my to-do-list. I don’t want this project to be just one more thing I need to do. So I’ll be posting, but probably weekly. Maybe when I’m not trying to do too many things at once I’ll be able to do that more effectively and efficiently.

Because an unexpectedly high percentage of my posts have been about tulips, I’ll wrap this up with this: after a hard frost last night, the tulips were frozen and drooping. They thawed. The perked back up. They look a bit wilder, a bit burnt around the edges, a few petal bent back prematurely, but not less spectacular.