What You Should Be Reading II

Ruled by a Bossy List

I’m making my way through my unread of the top 100 “Greatest Books of All Time.” The unread are like the undead in that they too want your brains. The list I’m using is a compilation of many lists. I’m listening to these books while reading them, a practice I mostly use for classics. I read a lot anyway, mostly just listening.

I’ve been a professor of history and of literature, so I’ve read a lot more of the list than average, and I usually know something about the books I haven’t read yet. I often listen when I couldn’t read anyway, as when I’m waiting to fall asleep, washing dishes, walking, or drawing— and note what zone-out zones these are. Many books can be experienced well this way, if not with the depth of regular reading.

For me, some books need to be listened to twice, either chapter by chapter or from beginning to end, before I feel I’ve read it. Like much of life the whole thing goes in fits and starts, often hearing first, then skimming the reading to catch up. I fall asleep listening and lose my place and an afternoon chore is to locate where I was the night before.

Then there are the books that insist I find a copy of the text. I usually like a paper version of a book, but with Infinite Jest (300 on the list), for example, I went with the Kindle. It was good to be able to search, to gather all my highlighting — and to not have to balance the tome on my sternum. Four years ago I read IJ, Ulysses (3), and Don Quixote (12) in one lockdown winter. It was a big year for reading but also for writing. The reading fed the writing. The result was The Wonder Paradox.

I already owned those books. I mention it because it feels wrong to buy two versions of a book new, but classics are around, cheap, free, or already on your shelf, in paper or online.

Don Quixote I loved. Its sprawling style and length made it a lovely and diverting slog sometimes, but then something riveting would happen again. Midway through I realized I am Don Quixote, always trying ridiculous things, a little further on I saw that I am Sancho Panza and my lunatic master is life. Or is Quixote still the influence of my father leading me through a world he half invented? What if all of our mothers are Don Quixote and we are all Sancho going pretty far to protect her version of the world, though we yell now and again, about “reality.”

Just listening to Ulysses — without reading — was impossible for plot or half the jokes, but I still spent a lot of time listening to it because I loved the way the Irish sea of it lapped around me. I’ve started this one several times since the first time at age twenty or less. This time I finally got to yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

With Ulysses and Infinite Jest I sometimes looked up a chapter summary before moving on from a chapter mostly listened to, and it was even money whether I’d caught the whole plot of what I had just passed through.

I already owned Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (29) which I just finished recently and which was a harrowing delight I will not soon forget. I’m still in his world a little, looking around and marveling. It’s the experience of a Black man in America (starts in the South, ends up in New York) just before the Civil Rights Movement, wherein life and meaning were understood in terms of class struggle and economic revolution. What makes him feel invisible isn’t what you think it’s going to be. Like all great classics The Invisible Man is weird and wild and utterly its own thing.

I’d several times begun two tiny books but never got them done, Animal Farm (74) and Brave New World (42). Something in me wouldn’t finish these two in the past and I didn’t want to read them now, either. But I pushed through! I listened to both, unaugmented. I preferred the latter, wasn’t in love with either.

By contrast two other smaller books, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (78) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (49), are both now among my favorites. Their Eyes had a benefit that only Lord of the Flies (56) shared, which is that I read along with my Jessie who was reading them in High School over the past few years. It was LotF, tenth grade, and Their Eyes, senior year. We parsed them like poems. With Their Eyes, this year, we drew circles and lines on my copy until some pages looked like a detective board, and with the same urgency. How cool is it that I can say to Jess, “Remember when we find out what the title means? That insane scene in the lake, with the rabid dog, on the night of the storm?” And Jess can say back to me, “Whoa, yeah. They should have stayed in the house.” I’m just waiting to forget it a bit more before I read it again.

I don’t know what books are anymore. It does seem like a lot of people just read the internet and it makes sense to me. The reason I listen to so many books is because when left alone my thoughts can go to bad places which is boring and tiresome and tiring. I listen to comedy or anything fun when I can find it and listen to the same ones over and over: Carrie Fisher, Nora Ephron, Maria Bamford. Not everything holds my attention. I listen to books on neurology, tons of memoir, some history, then random things I find diverting.

So when I set out to read the top 100 on that list, I was going to be reading anyway, it was just a matter of choosing something that, for whatever reason, seemed like work. Nearly all of them turned out to be pleasures but they did deserve full attention, with the book open. When I ran out of reading time I would be eager to know what happens next so would listen to the book in one of my zoning places and then later skim up to match it in the text. Again, like life, running ahead and backtracking to understand.

Any book read this way becomes a temporal puzzle box, but all these books are already puzzle boxes anyway. You enter Ellison’s Harlem or Village and the scene is kaleidoscopic. Ditto Plath’s Manhattan and, of course, Joyce’s Dublin. And from these questions of place and time come all others. We come from somewhere. Always responding to the stories of our parents and of our culture, sometimes clearly visible, sometimes like shadows on a screen.

It’s asking what makes you connected to the past and matter to the future, what makes you invisible or visible. It’s asking yourself if you’re Don Quixote or Sancho, and searching for signs. It’s clutching in the vise grip of your anxiety the as-yet unread unconscious of our times.

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And that’s a wrap for this Wednesday May 15. Why not tell me what you’re reading? Or thinking of reading? Just keep splashing. Stay alive, remember that we’re all on this crazy rock together, and I shall return to encourage you again on Sunday. Thanks for reading, I’m grateful for your company.

love, '

Jennifer