Reading: who has time anymore?

I’m of an age (say, “old”) to remember how thrilling it was to discover the powers that reading unlocked. As a good, squeaky-clean Catholic schoolboy, I was brought up not just on Dick and Jane, the heroes of our primers, but the missal for the mass (in Latin and English), various songbooks (including Gregorian chant), and of course the bible.

A young friend and I, along about fifth grade, would compete to see who could read the assigned textbooks first.

And we devoured the Hardy Boys thrillers along with the page-turning maritime tales of Howard Pease.

I remember, in fact, malingering a few days so I could stay home, curled up in the sack, and read these things. They were immense private pleasures, the kind commemorated in the lines of Longfellow inscribed above the lintel of a community library where I once lived in St. Paul, Minnesota:

These days, it seems, fewer of us have the leisure to take a book and retreat into a niche with it. (It’s a nice occupation, we might say.) Unless we’re on vacation, that is, or stealing a few free moments at lunch or on the bus.

Having moved recently from a private house to a rented condo, however, I find myself with more time on my hands and, like my wife, I am consumed by reading. I find myself, in fact, reading greedily, a habit that my younger sister, who also has a teacher’s background, calls “greading” (something she’s done both alone and with her daughter for many years).

I find myself recovering habits of mind, and body too (that fetus-like curling, that sighing, that clock oblivion), that a busy career in teaching and writing seemed to have obliterated.

I’m not claiming that I forgot how to read, as I taught or wrote for a living. Simply that as for the majority of us reading for pleasure seemed to fade away. It was generally reading for work, either teaching or business writing, that preoccupied me.

And that confirmed in me the habits of mind that a writer needs so badly and that distinguish him from most folks:

• A love of words for words’ sake (the pleasure of their sound, their tactility)
• An equal love of logic and clarity (those critical-learning gifts that a noisy commercial culture would banish)
• An ability to organize thoughts that, without being written out, would dissipate or never cohere

What I’m finding, in my latest greading phase, in short, is a recovered ability to enjoy our cultural heritage — the gifts that our elders have handed down for generations and that we continue, in our place, to hand down to youngsters. And to enjoy the sense that logic, clarity, and pleasure in words are things that matter above the trivial distractions that crowd our days.

What have I been reading? All sorts of stuff, really, though strangely not any fiction per se (my mainstay, for pleasure reading, during my working career). How about these titles:

• The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality (2010) by Jeff Pearlman. An easy read and no great shakes, really, but fun. Boo hoo, another star, another hero has fallen, Clemens, the thesis goes, cheated, and all red-blooded American baseball fans were cheated too of what we might have expected of a Hall of Fame type.
• Mozart: A Life (2006) by Peter Gay. Learned a few things about the genius Wolfgang that I didn’t know, including stuff about his relation with father and emperor. This short bio is one of the Penguin short life series.
• Truman by David McCullough (1992). This fat biography of our 33rd president is thick with fact and lived experience. From pioneer days in Independence, Missouri through Truman’s ride to the White House, McCullough presents the life in interesting, measured chapters. We learn a lot about where Truman came from both physically and psychologically. The unsatisfying thing about the book is that McCullough presents the facts but rarely interprets or analyzes them. What are we to think, in the end, for example, of Truman’s dependency on Pendergast, the Kansas City political boss, for every career move Truman made? Or for Truman’s ambivalent relation to FDR, the man who barely talked to him and yet elevated him to the top?
• De Kooning: An American Master (2006) by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. This bio is by far the best, an immensely readable saga of the life, art, and dementia of one of our foremost “abstract expressionists,” if you can call De Kooning that. Equal parts life and art, the analysis is exact and it never stoops to amateur psychologizing. It’s the kind of text, with illustrations, that makes you eager to read the next thing these fine writers might be turning their attention to.
  

  Willem De Kooning's Woman I: kinda scary, yes?

• Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2007) by Joe Bageant. I snatched this bad boy from my wife, who had ordered it from Amazon. And devoured it in pretty short order. Despite the charge of ranting that could easily be laid at Bageant’s doorstep, I found the book tremendously clarifying. It explains, in convincing detail, why America’s working class consistently votes (and thinks) against its own self-interest, identifying as Freud would say with the aggressors (the rich, the capitalists). The plain folk of Winchester, Virginia, Bageant’s townsmen and neighbors, are descendants of the Scots Irish that battled the English crown and each other — and came to America to escape taxes and government repression. As my 3 year old granddaughter is fond of singing, they too “won’t bow down to no man”!
• Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle (2011) by Thor Hanson. This work of natural history explains how bird feathers evolved, from dinosaur to bird, and details both form and function. Hanson deals with 19th through 21st century scientific controversies about this evolution and interlards the text with many easy-to-understand examples of his own field work, as when he dissects and examines the frozen carcass of a flicker in his “Raccoon Shack.”
• Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004) edited by Rosamund Barlett. These are wonderful, vivid letters by Chekhov, the Russian story teller and playwright who lived from 1860 to 1904. As one of the great modernist writers, Chekhov is both self-made and original. He didn’t accept the cant of the church or state, and had no use for lying by friend or family. Each letter, no matter how obscure the details, blows with the fresh breath of honesty and precocious wisdom.
• Building Strong Brands (1996) by David A. Aaker. This sequel to Managing Brand Equity defines, illustrates, and explains the process of, yes, building strong brands. Companies without strong brands, from bakeries to auto producers, risk forfeiting large market shares, indeed losing their entire market.

OK, OK, I have more time now than formerly. I’m not a home owner, I own a life. A life in letters, you might say, and reading.

And for a fee, a small fee all things considered, I can make it available to you. (I won’t write politics or literature for you, but what I write will be filtered through the great and the not so great things I’ve managed to read. And reading, as I intimate, in this time and place may not be so widespread as it once was. We’re too busy texting and surfing the Web. But more on these distractions later.)