On Reading Etc

How do you navigate the landscape of reading?

I see two types of posts on reading on the internet: 

How one completed a reading challenge and read 20/40/60/80 books in a year/month/week/day. 

How reading helps one become an exceptional/extraordinary/ writer-- a creator par excellence. 

I have absolutely no patience with the first kind of posts. There are many fallacies in the second type as well, but these have mostly their heart in place, so I make an intention to be kind towards what they have to say. But what gets my goat absolutely is the thing that gets passed as "reading" on the internet.  

1. Reading a forwarded meme and forwarding it to your 1000 contracts is not reading. 

2. Reading a 3-minute listicle on "How to sleep/eat/cook/write better" is not reading. 

3. Reading a book summary is not reading (so many of those apps out there in the Internet jungle) 

Reading is 

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. 

. 

the combining of many, many things. For example, this morning I came across these lines, "Take responsibility for your lives and your minds and ask that others respect your integrity." Thankfully those two lines did not come to me as a WA forward, although I am hardly active on most apps these days and wouldn't be surprised to find the above lines with "#motivational quote" forwarded to me out of the blue.  

Well, the above lines belong to the book, "This is the Story of Happy Marriage", a collection of short essays by Ann Patchett and the above lines are from, "The Right to Read" which is not an essay per se but an address to the Clemson Freshman Convocation in the year 2006.  The talk happened in circumstances that were not so ordinary, and Ann Patchett was talking about another book of hers, "Truth and Beauty".  

To bring in more context (I had to sniff and dig through a couple of journals for this).  It seems every year, the Clemson Freshmen are assigned one book which everyone is required to read and as a final treat, the author is invited to speak to the students.  That year, it was the turn of "Truth and Beauty".  

Moving deeper into the reading woods.  

"Truth and Beauty" is a memoir about Ann Patchett's friendship with the celebrated poet-- Lucy Grealy who had lost her jaw to a rare form of cancer in her early childhood called Ewing's Sarcoma. I have the book on my shelf, I have yet to begin reading it.  Both the books of Ann Patchett that I have read, ("These Precious Days" and "This is the Story of a Happy Marriage") have references to Lucy. Ann Patchett talks about Lucy with love and affection as only a best friend can.  

When I was contemplating buying "Truth and Beauty", I discovered that Lucy Grealy had also written a memoir titled, "Autobiography of a Face". While Amazon had glowing reviews about the book, I was fascinated by how someone in a lengthy (and a surprisingly detailed) review had labelled Lucy Grealy as "Self-absorbed" which matched perfectly with what Ann had been saying about her friend but the tonality of Ann's "self-absorbed" was very different from this reviewer's "self-absorbed".  

Anyway, coming back to Ann Patchett, that day when she stood in front of the Clemson crowd, a minority of the crowd wanted her book to be banned, a leading reviewer had openly shamed her, calling her a sewer and there was open hostility in the crowd.  

See, how those lines which I shared earlier gather...more "story" now?  And when I say story, I don't mean either the story of Ann Patchett or Lucy Grealy or their friendship but the "story" of a culture that is quick to shame someone who openly talks about sex, sexualization, fetishization etc. Not only that but in another one of her essays Ann also describes a lengthy debate which she had with her father who criticized certain aspects of, "Truth and Beauty" because in the book, Ann mentioned how she was discomfited by certain aspects of Lucy's life and according to Ann's father, Lucy was not there to defend herself.  

I don't know if the Clemson address happened before or after her father expired but the grief from one space might have seeped into the other.  

Last month, when I began to read Ann Patchett, I thought she was a brilliant essayist. But among many things, now I know she is also a handler of grief. But she is not the only one who is that. Lucy Grealy too is. And so is her sister, Suellen Grealy who wrote this poignant piece (where she expressed her deep hurt at Ann's book while also appreciating the latter and also honoring the fact that Ann had been a better sister to Lucy than she Suellen had ever been).  When I read each of their pieces, their grief touched mine. 

Whenever, I enter the landscape of a book or an author, there is often an element of surprise; however, this surprise does not come to me in the way of the usual plot twist but rather when I discover that there is a larger (and a more fluid) story holding the one that the writer has been telling us.  

What surprised me about "The Right to Read" and "Truth and Beauty" was how an intensely personal act such as memoir writing can quickly escalate into something deeply political and polarizing. And how such acts of polarizing and shaming remain same across cultures. 

What surprised (and moved me deeply also) was how folks in Lucy's intimate circle could hold space for the mess, love and complexity that grieving entails.  

I can go on, but dear one, I am curious.  

Tell me about the book/s that you have been reading lately. 

If you were to describe the reading process and all that the process unraveled for you (and others around you) with a metaphor, what would it be?  

Warmly,

S