Seneca on reading

Notes on the art of reading books.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column.

Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”:

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.

While I am a great proponent of reading more than one book at a time and letting books talk to each other, I also believe that when you find a writer who unlocks something in you, you should spend as much time with them as you can, read and re-read everything they wrote, and then “swim upstream” and try to read what they read.

This need not happen all at once. I like to think of these writers as old friends that I can rely on. No matter where we are, we can pick up where we left off.

Right now I’m reading Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South for the third time. (I’ve read all his novels twice.) And the normal things are happening that happen during a re-read — I’m noticing new things I never noticed before, re-underlining passages that I’ve already underlined — but I’m also starting to feel like I’m really understanding what’s going on in his sentences.

I re-read Donna Tartt’s remembrance of him and laughed out loud when she recalls their first phone conversation:

“Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller… I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

This exchange reads almost exactly like something out of his novels. My reaction is the kind you would have upon hearing from somebody something your friend had said to them. “Yeah, that sounds just like Charlie.”

Reading about animals

Thursday, March 2, 2023

I finished Temple Grandin’s Visual Thinking and in the chapter on animal consciousness she mentions Michel de Montaigne’s great line from his An Apology for Raymond Sebond, “When I play with my cat who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”

Serendipity: The next day, in preparation for my celebration of Montaigne’s birthday with Sam Anderson, I read his essay about animal voyages: “To return home from an animal voyage is to become, yourself, a new animal living in your old habitat.”

Sam’s piece led me to John Berger’s wonderful essay, Why Look at Animals? (“The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected.”)

Now I’ve picked Ed Yong’s An Immense World back up and I am enjoying it immensely.

Books as toys

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Arthur Greaves, 1932, describing the pleasure of a particular kind of marginalia, or reading with a pencil:

To enjoy a book like [Froissart’s Chronicles] thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder — considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrapbooks — why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

Emphasis mine.

Alan Jacobs brought this to my attention, and we texted a bit about it. He pointed out that little kids have a tendency to ignore purpose-built toys in favor things they can turn into toys, like cardboard boxes, sticks, dirt, etc. (See: “Throw out the instructions.” As Alan put it, if you only follow the instructions for a toy — or a book — you get what you expect, no more, no less.)

It makes me wonder if irreverence towards an object is the first step towards turning it into a toy, a plaything.

One of my favorite designers, Bruno Munari, did a series of “libri illeggibili” (“unreadable books”) which seem to start with this irreverent spirit and resemble toys — objects you play with:

One thing these books do is highlight how interactive a paper book is, no matter the content — you turn the pages, you take them in. It’s your energy that unlocks whatever is on the page.

But the minute you become a little irreverent towards a book — underlining, dog-earing, scribbling arguments with the author — that’s the minute things really get cooking and reading becomes the act of making that C.S. Lewis was talking about.

When I was thinking about books as toys, chapter 88 of Grant Petersen’s Just Ride popped in my head: “Your bike is a toy. Have fun with it.”

IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT something, there’s a tendency to talk about the equipment for it as tools as opposed to toys. Tools are for work, for being productive and efficient; toys are for play. Tools cost more than toys, so there’s that, too. A wealthy amateur photographer with a Leica M9 wouldn’t call it a toy, nor would the shop that sold it. It’s “a tool for self-expression, a tool for communication, a tool for social change.” Calling it a toy will get you kicked out of the camera shop.

No matter how much your bike costs, unless you use it to make a living, it is a toy, and it should be fun. Whatever benefits accrue from riding won’t stop accruing just because you’re having fun. In fact, the more fun you have on it, the more you’ll ride it.

Montessori said play is the work of the child. Play is also the work of the artist. Can we get closer to play if we re-label our tools as toys?

Reading recklessly

Monday, January 30, 2023

Adam Sternbergh has started a newsletter, and his first dispatches concern his “Year of Reading Recklessly,” brought about by a sense of dissatisfaction looking at his year-end list.

“My reading life had become a grim slog,” he writes. “My TBR pile — ever higher, ever teetering, ever chastising — had become my enemy and jailer, not my conspirator and friend.”

(Unfortunately, I can relate!)

To spice things up, Adam set himself new goals: “Browse more. Purchase impulsively. Let books surprise me. Give myself a chance to stumble on something revelatory.”

He sprinkled some tips amongst his list of recent shelf discoveries:

Lesson 1: A.B.B. Always. Be. Browsing.

Lesson 2: Books make the best souvenirs.

Lesson 3: When critical consensus and your personal proclivities align, act.

Lesson 4, 5, 6: Very short books are a great way to leaven your reading routine and let you take risks you might not otherwise take. Also, trust staff picks. Also, if you set a reading goal, cheat with abandon.

You can read more over at Substack.

I love this idea of reading recklessly. I can point to two things have helped me: Kindle sample chapters and weekly visits to the library.

Letting books talk to each other

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite ways [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.”

Someone recently asked me what it looks like in practice. I am loathe to muddy it any further with explanation, but here goes.

A mundane and far-from-perfect example: I was reading Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes and she mentioned the brain’s “default mode network,” something I don’t know anything about. I may or may not have paid much attention to it, but I had just finished John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World and remembered that he wrote about it, too.

Now, if I’d just read about default network mode in either of those books, solo, I might’ve just ignored it and moved on with my life, but the fact that two books in succession mentioned it made me think I needed to investigate it further.

Lo and behold, Steven Johnson wrote about it for the NYTimes several years ago and also in his book Farsighted. Now I have another book to dip into, and three books on different subjects talking about the same thing. That’s enough for a blog post, at the very least.

In this case, it was chance and happenstance, but you can sort of tweak your reading life in such a way that these sort of things happen more often. If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worth going into, but I realize it might not be so obvious to others.

Reading this way is a form of “input as collage,” and of course, you can take a multi-media approach to it: I remember last year I watched Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing while I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and I can’t identify exactly how, but they spoke to each other in some way that glued them together in my mind. (Later, I found out that Murdoch was a big Shakespeare freak.)

Another example: Yesterday’s blog post on Simic and Steinberg exists simply because Charles Simic died and I was going around the house trying to find all the books in the house of his I could find.

On the back cover of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks I noticed that Simic’s portrait was drawn by Saul Steinberg. A quick google of “Charles Simic” and “Saul Steinberg” made me remember that I have a catalog of Steinberg’s with an intro by Simic. So I pull that book out and read the intro and find out they were friends. A few more googles and I have everything Simic wrote about his friend (I think) at my fingertips.

As I read those pieces, they started talking to each other, and suddenly I had something to write about.