Reading and Not

When I was just a baby my mother (so I’m told) would hold me in her arms, rocking me while reading aloud from whatever book she had at the time. She was a voracious reader who read at lightning speed. Even well into old age she read nearly as fast as she could turn the pages. Trips to the local library (we lived in the East End of Cincinnati) are among my earliest memories. We would walk the six or so blocks from our apartment every couple of days, and she would carry home the maximum number of books allowed. Of course, there were books for me too. At first, there were books that she and dad read to me. Then, when I had learned to read there were books I read myself. 

The Library in Cincinnati's East End as it looks today

Why do I feel that reading is so important? It is summed up nicely in the below quote of Robert Hughes’: New York Review of Books (2/16/95)

“Reading is a collaborative act, in which your imagination goes halfway to meet the author’s; you visualize the book as you read it, you participate in making up the characters and rounding them out -- Captain Hook, Mowgli, Alice, and the rest.  The effort of bringing something vivid out of the neutral array of black print is quite different, and in my experience far better for the imagination, than passive submission to the bright icons of television, which come complete and overwhelming, and tend to burn out the tender wiring of a child’s imagination because they allow no reworking.”

I write this because I cannot recall a time, from little on, that books have not been a huge part of my life: Until now.

There are multiple reasons for this. First, my eyes simply don’t work so well as before. Eye surgeries and age have made reading books more of a job than a pleasure. I can no longer sit and read for hours at a time; it is just minutes nowadays before my eyes tire and refuse to focus.

Then there is the computer. There I can enlarge the font until I can more easily see. As a result I spend hours in front of the computer screen that I once spent reading books, magazines and newspapers. Years ago I read the quote below in a wonderful collection, Dumbing Down, Essays on the Strip-mining of American Culture, never imagining it might one day apply in part to me.

“I have this vision of today’s citizen trapped between a television screen and a computer screen.  He or she is sitting on a revolving stool, and can move only from facing the one to facing the other.  The screens are really reflecting mirrors in which the luckless citizen can watch him or herself recede and diminish into infinity.  The infinity of stupidity, of course.”

              John Simon, in the introduction to the Education section of Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-mining of American Culture. (1997)

When I first read it eighteen years ago I could imagine this happening to some unfortunate folks, but never to me. Now in 2015 I get so much information online (Yahoo, Google, Facebook) and from cable news, that in some ways, I have become the fellow Simon describes.

Note: Amazon lists used hardcover copies of this book for as little as one cent and new copies for $2.71 plus $3.99 shipping. I heartily recommend buying a copy. At those prices you can hardly lose.

The third reason I read less is that, at my age, I am less ready to tackle difficult books—which for years made up much of my reading hours. I am simply not ready to work my way through a difficult challenge. A few years ago I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which, in my opinion is one of the most powerful and worthwhile books I have ever read. At one time I would have torn through it, perhaps more than once. Instead I found my mind wandering when it should be focusing and had to return to reread passage after passage. It was a humbling and distressing feeling.

Note: Amazon’s prices for used hardcovers of this book begin at $2.68—another wise investment.

The upshot of all this is that after years of reading (on average) at least three books per week, I now hack my way through one, perhaps two at the most, and I can feel the greatest gift my parents ever gave me aside from their unconditional love—my love of reading—to be slipping away. I mourn this loss in ways I could never before imagine.

But books have brought many bright and wonderful hours into my life, and in the next post I’ll begin to speak more of them.