“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I.
The Library Book,
Susan Orlean
October 19, 2019 4.5 stars
I’m in the bathtub reading when the idea for this post washes over me. It’s mid-afternoon on a rainy fall Saturday. The day had begun with an epic play session (“Mom, can we play with Duplos for as long as the movie Frozen?”). And while it was a sweet bonding time, full of laughter and wild imaginative riffs, the pace never let up.
By 3 pm, I tag in my partner. I fill the tub with hot water; add a generous pour of Epsom salts to soothe my back, stiff and hunched from playing on the floor.
Yes, I read a little: from Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, an oddly compelling account of the past and future of libraries, and of the 1986 L.A. Library fire in particular.
But as the water cools and my fingertips turn prune-y, I realize the book, and the backache, are a front. I am really hiding out.
…
Back in the 1980s, feminist literary scholar Janice Radway set about studying real-life readers of romance novels in a sleepy Midwestern town. She came into the study prepared to look closely at the works themselves, to wrestle with their textual details much as the novels’ protagonists wrestled steamily with each other.
Radway’s study participants quickly dashed her Ivory-Tower preconceptions. She found that these romance readers were not largely invested in a particular plot line or character type or writing style.
What mattered most to them was the act of reading itself.
Cover of Rosemary Rogers’ Dark Fires, 1975.
The resulting ethnography charts the many uses of books for this group of predominantly stay-at-home mothers with school-age children. To Radway’s interviewees, reading signaled “a declaration of independence”: it became “a way of temporarily refusing the demands associated with their social role as wives and mothers.” In other words, burying their noses in romance novels served as a polite, socially acceptable way to tell their families to bugger off.*
When I first encountered Reading the Romance early in graduate school, it opened up the black box of reading for me. Previously, I had given little thought to how books might fill complex social functions or meet deep-seated psychological needs. The work of Radway and others made me more aware of the values, and meanings, that we ascribe to reading.
It seems so obvious in retrospect. After all, there is nothing ‘natural’ about humans reading. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, child-development researcher Maryanne Wolf underscores the fact that our species did not evolve to read. Homo sapiens began reading only a few thousand years ago. We had to repurpose, hack, existing capacities in the brain to accommodate this upstart invention.
Books themselves are hardly an ancient technology, especially print books that are available—and affordable—to large audiences of readers. We’ve so naturalized reading, however, made literacy such an intimate part of our conception of what it means to be human, that it’s easy to forget that books are a technology.
…
That ‘aha moment’ in the bath concerned my utter lack of self-reflection about what reading means to me personally. Despite having been a lifelong reader, despite having pursued an advanced degree in literature(!), I had never seriously asked myself this simple question: why do I read? What is my reading for?
More specifically, I wanted to figure out what had shifted in my habits and tastes, as well as my attitudes toward reading, since becoming a parent. What purposes did reading now serve? What desires did it fulfill?
Yet, the otherwise vast academic literature on reader-response and reception history was strangely silent on the subject of maternal reading. I found entire volumes devoted to the contemporary readership of Jane Austin novels, academic essays on the reading habits of the U.S. prison population. But when it came to moms reading books, the studies I unearthed mainly focused on parents reading to their children.** A smaller subset tracked how having avid readers for parents shapes a child’s relationship to books.
So, I would have to be my own chronicler of the reading lives of parents. A Janice Radway of moms, reading.
Mary Cassatt, The Reading Lesson (1901).
II.
The Buried Giant,
Kazuo Ishiguro
June 4, 2015 5 stars
Thirty-six weeks pregnant, I wander into a local bookstore while on an errand at the tailor’s nearby. The day is glorious: a cloudless April afternoon. I nearly manage to make it out of the store empty-handed when a hardcover copy of The Buried Giant, its book jacket seductively adorned with metallic accents and an ornate typeface, calls to me from the new-releases section.
The Buried Giant never found its way into my hospital bag, which was hastily packed two nights later.
But once the grandparents have come and gone from their baby-seeking pilgrimage, and I am left home alone with a six-week-old, I open the novel’s pages. Coiled awkwardly around the slumbering infant, I read.
Ishiguro’s fantastical story, and his quiet pacing, suited that transitional time. In The Buried Giant, Ishiguro re-imagines the quest narrative. He traces the hero’s journey of two aging parents as they set out in search of their missing son. And while theirs is a very different sort of life transition, I felt a kinship with this story of ordinary people pushed to their limits—trekking through the wilderness, battling hidden monsters. Giving birth had left me especially open to Ishiguro’s alternative retelling of Arthurian myth, his surreal meditation on death, remembrance, and human connectedness.
I’ve never revisited the novel, unwilling to break its strange, romantic spell. The Buried Giant will always be wrapped up in my memory of that period of transformation, a mute witness to my own hero’s journey into motherhood.***
It would also be one of the only books I managed to finish in that first year of Isaac’s life.
III.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
Kate Wiggin
May 14, 1989 4 stars
For over thirty years now, I’ve been keeping a physical record of the books I read. Initially, my diary included required reading. But I soon realized, way back in that summer before the 5th grade, that if I catalogued every school-mandated book, the task would become both unmanageable and unpleasant. So, I limited my catalogue to books I’d chosen for myself.
While the journal reflected my exuberant love of reading at that age, I now notice seeds of another, less admirable tendency: an impulse to collect books like trophies. Achievement stickers.
In middle and high school, reading took on a new intensity…as hobbies tend to do when you are a teenager. With the TV blaring in the den, I’d often retreat to our rarely used living room. A parent would occasionally check in to adjust the brightness of the reading lamp. Or, I’d manage to escape further, to the stiff-backed armchair in my upstairs bedroom (twenty years later, I’d nurse my baby in this very chair). I quickly discovered that books could be a barricade, an invisibility cloak, a way of being alone together.****
At the same that I sought privacy from my family, I also longed for friendship. Shy and socially isolated at school, I turned to books for their companionate quality. They became a stand in for, a simulacrum of, an actual teenage social life. Me and Dostoyevsky and Kerouac and Kingsolver, cracking wise and lighting up behind the high school gym.
The reading process thrives on this paradoxical quality: the push-pull between detachment and connection. According to sociologist and literary scholar Robert Escarpit, reading is “at once ‘social and asocial’ because it temporarily represses the individual’s relations with his universe to construct new ones with the universe of the work.”
Or, as his fellow Frenchman Marcel Proust put it far more poetically, reading is “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
IV.
How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain,
Leah Price
(currently skimming)
Did you ever stop and think about all of the things you can do with a book?
Did you ever stop and think about all the cool things you can do with a book?
You can tear it and wear it,
Gum it and strum it,
Lick it and kick it…
The lyrics came to me while observing my teething eleven-month-old gnaw on a copy of Sandra Boynton’s The Bedtime Book. They listed some of the many unconventional uses of books I’d witnessed of late. And they manifested my frustration with how little we were actually reading books at that particular developmental stage.
Book as hat/canopy: Isaac at 3 months.
My other source of inspiration for the song was a bit more…authoritative. I was riffing on the title of a recent academic study called How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain. I’d heard its author Leah Price, then at Harvard, interviewed on a podcast. In How To Do Things With Books, Price sets about cataloguing the many ways books are not only read but also handled: “bought, sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded—the transactions that enlist books stretch far beyond the literary or even the linguistic.” Proust’s exalted words about reading notwithstanding, books can serve far less romantic purposes in our day to day. And they can possess social and psychological value fully apart from the physical markings on their pages.
That goofy song I composed for my baby—one of many born out of the absurdity and boredom of those weekdays at home with a small child—did capture a truth about books. They are not just transparent vessels for delivering the printed word. They can also function, by turns, as status symbols, class markers, unwanted gifts, furniture, food wrappers:
As Price argues, books are not always—or at least not exclusively—meant to be read.
…
The writer Zibby Owens, a mother of four, hosts this podcast called Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. The name of the podcast is knowing, darkly humorous. It pokes fun at an implicit assumption that reading is superfluous to the incessant work of caring for others. A pastime that can easily be discarded, subsumed by the all-consuming business of childrearing—along with exercise, sex, conversations with friends, and so on.
I worried that my findings in this blog post would boil down to this: before kids, parents used to have time to read books. Now they don’t.
Thankfully, I discovered the opposite to be true: the mothers I interviewed found more urgency, intensity, and meaning in their reading lives as parents.***** And while the marks on the page clearly did matter to these avid readers, they also acknowledged the uses of books that went beyond “the literary or even the linguistic.”
Cassatt’s portrait of her mother reading the newspaper. Reading “Le Figaro” (1878).
Foremost among them was the theme of self-care. Reading can allow us to preserve some semblance of an independent self. Cara Ovanek, aka “bibliogirlxo” on Instagram, has prioritized reading even more since becoming a mother fifteen years ago: “reading is the one thing that I do for myself, so I make sure to make time for it every day.” Similarly, the name of Lee Laielli’s IG account – “books before dishes” – highlights the value of carving out such time within the relentless onslaught of domestic tasks. She explains,
At the end of the day I will leave the house a mess and the sink full of dishes, to read, because I know that feeding my mind and my sense of meaning and purpose as a human is essential to my own well-being and ability to be the best mother I can be.
These contemporary Instagrammers’ observations echoed the experiences of Radway’s 1980s romance readers, many of whom found in the act of reading permission to take care of themselves.****** Or even to be selves in the first place:
Of course, the extractive language here—being “mined” for support and care—acknowledges “the personal costs hidden within the social role of wife and mother.” Radway’s ethnography examines the lack of reciprocity inherent in traditional patriarchal attitudes. She calls out the expectation that the mother would ceaselessly nurture her family members without considering who would provide for her “emotional replenishment.”
At the same time that escape from household obligations, or at least an assertion of independence, figured into their reading lives, both Ovanek and Laielli talked about the relationship between their adult reading and their children’s appreciation for books. They saw themselves as role models, with their own literacy practice forming a part of their parenting identity. Ovanek believes that “my children seeing their mom read sets a good example for them. They are being raised as readers, with a house filled with books, with time spent reading multiple times throughout the day.” Laielli agreed: “Our house is full of books and my children see me reading often, I do hope my habits influence their own.”*******
Laielli connected her reading life and her experience of motherhood in a second, more elemental sense. Raising kids has intensified her search for meaning, values, a coherent worldview:
Impending motherhood stirred up a kind of search for meaning.… I felt that I wanted to give them a kind of jump start on getting it right, on how to find meaning and purpose in life, how to live a good life and be a good human. That sense of urgency has yet to settle down. When my children were babies I would pace the living room with them strapped to my chest, bouncing them to sleep with a book in my hand, or sit trapped on the couch as they slept on my chest, reading. Now at five and six years old they are raising even more questions about life and what it is to be a person, their curiosity and wonder drives my own.
Laielli has turned to literary writings about motherhood as well as popular nonfiction about physics, cognitive science, and neuroscience to take stock of these philosophical and moral questions. Reading also helps her to account the more expansive sense of self that she has experienced in motherhood.********
Like Laielli, I too find that reading these days offers much-needed space for deep thought. When so much of the day-to-day of parenthood is about the immediate, the present, it can be a practically ecstatic experience to leave that mundane sphere and explore more abstract and far-reaching questions. Books compel me to wrestle with big ideas; they invite me into the company of other adults.
In Proust and the Squid, Wolf asserts that, at its most powerful and transformative, reading is about thinking. She acknowledges that “we often stray when we read.” But Wolf sees this tendency toward digression, toward mental perambulation, as reading’s greatest strength: “Far from being negative, this associative dimension is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading.”
What’s most valuable about reading is not necessarily the words on the page, or even our unique interpretations of specific texts. Instead, the gaps in attention, the daydreams, the free associations that occur while we read are what drive our growth as thinkers, family members, and social beings. In this way, reading allows us to write our own story.
VI.
The Midnight Disease,
Alice Flaherty
February 13, 2019 4 stars
At book club, we were discussing Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease. The author, a neuroscientist and writer, looks at the drives behind the writing process from both a clinical and literary perspective. Flaherty had herself experienced two intense postpartum bouts of hypergraphia, or a compulsion to write. Book-club regular Anne, who works in healthcare, observed that while she doesn’t write, she has experienced similar periods of voracious reading.
I find myself in such a moment.
Of course, I’m nowhere near as prolific as I was in my youthful heyday; at best, I’m averaging about two books a month. And while it still matters what I’m reading, it matters more that I’m reading. Like the romance readers of Janice Radway’s study, I find the act of reading itself to be paramount.
Even though I’ve just written about how reading these days enables a return to the grown-up world, to the sphere of complex thoughts, I’ve also ben transported back to a childlike pleasure in reading. Nothing to prove; just pure delight, comfort.
Somewhere in my late teens, books became badges, hipster markers of taste. Lacking confidence, I relied on my bookshelf to buttress a flimsy, protean sense of identity. Now, I don’t care who knows that I’ve found as much enjoyment in physicist Carlo Rovelli’s epistemological queries as in Deanna Raybourn’s steampunk-romance series about a sexually liberated Victorian lepidopterist!
Maybe the way to reconcile these two ideas is to say that reading before bed has become like sipping a glass of scotch in the evening—a grown-up comfort, but a self-soothing ritual nonetheless.
Tommy Orange’s There There, a novel which, despite the title, was hardly comforting. Still, there was comfort in the pleasure of reading it, and in the thrill of discovery.
The solace comes in part from the fact that my sense of self, for better or worse, has been called into being by books. I can’t pretend that there’s something especially virtuous about my compulsion to read. It’s simply that whenever I rediscover the habit of reading for pleasure – even when the books I choose are formally difficult or emotionally demanding – I feel the most at home.
…
That’s not the full story, though. There’s now an added dimension to my reading life. Reading as a parent has taken me outward, widened my social context. Through the science and nature book club I facilitate or the writings that fuel my climate activism, books these days are also devices for relationship building. They bring me not only into a rich interior world but into the world beyond, a sharp contrast to the relative isolation of my teenage bedroom or the graduate-school classroom.
If reading lately has felt like a homecoming, I also find myself somewhere utterly new.
…
Several weeks after that Fateful Bath with The Library Book, Susan Orlean came to my hometown for a reading. In the Q&A afterwards, she spoke about the two kinds of stories that intrigued her, that sent her down paths of obsessive, book-length research. She was drawn to stories about a topic or phenomenon that she didn’t even know existed in the first place and to ones about a seemingly familiar subject that, upon closer inspection, she didn’t know anything about. Her deep dive into libraries fell into the latter camp. She had grown up in libraries yet knew nothing about how they worked.
Orlean’s talk reminded me that the familiar, the habitual, can surprise us if we look at it with curiosity and close attention. If parenthood has defamiliarized the familiar – forcing me to question what I thought I knew about mortality, morality, gender, power – the same has also been true for my relationship with books. Like the character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, I found that it took a deficit of reading, or the threat of one, to examine why I read. To appreciate an act that had felt as natural as breathing.
In The Library Book, Orlean includes a quote from Barbara Davis, a shipping clerk who works at the Los Angeles Central Library. Despite her daily contact with books as she packages and sends them out to the branch libraries, Davis does not read much herself. By way of explanation, she offers this challenge: “You read and read and read and read, and then what?”
Her question haunted me a bit.
Having journeyed through this post and listened in on other parents’ reflections about their reading lives, I finally have an answer for her:
I am a mom who makes time for reading books in order to think deeply and without interruption. I read to feel like a kid again. I read to feel like a self. I read to be alone together. And, more and more these days, I read to be in community.
NOTES
*When Radway does get into discussing the texts of the romances, she finds that readers are often drawn to the ‘maternal care’ of the hero. Despite depicting heterosexual romantic relationships, the novels also offer a tantalizing role reversal in the ways that the hero often supports, ministers to, the female protagonist. At the same time that such depictions might be cathartic for readers, or even help them to question the status quo in their own domestic lives, they don’t substantively change the readers’ situations. At best, they work as a temporary balm to compensate for the care missing in their own family relationships.
**That’s not to suggest that parental reading to children isn’t a fascinating terrain in its own right. Poet and writer Jessica Murray sees the ritual of reading to her four year old as an extension of her parenting:
Since becoming a mother, reading has become a kind of mothering. The way we hope our children will observe and absorb what we think are our best qualities. Reading with my kiddo, even if it's only really tolerated as a bedtime activity, is one of the deep pleasures of parenting. For its intimacy and the way stories are a mechanism for revealing our children to us. How they think, what makes them laugh. Where they are an uncertainty or unknowable quantity, and probably in like ways, us to them.
And I was moved by this personal essay in Literary Mama, which chronicled the bittersweet conclusion of a parent and child’s decade of reading together.
***Cara Ovanek, whom I interviewed for this post, was not so lucky in her choice of postpartum book with her first child. She recalls,
The one book that will always be wrapped up in memories of my daughter being born is My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult- probably the worst possible book one could read write after giving birth haha. For some reason, that's the book I picked up as soon as I brought my now 15-year-old daughter home from the hospital, and I can very clearly remember sobbing through the entire thing, to the point where my husband asked me if I had post-partum depression. I didn't, but that book was definitely too full of emotion and difficult choices to be reading in such a hormonal state!
****Of course, this account leaves out the role of parents and grandparents in my early development as a reader, particularly my mom and paternal grandmother. I recently watched the 2018 Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and I loved the clip in which Rogers explained to children that “you were talked into talking,” “loved into loving,” etc. I was similarly read into reading.
*****Admittedly, this proves nothing as I invited two mothers with book-centric Instagram accounts to contribute their thoughts about reading!
******In Radway’s book, Dot, the ringleader of the group, had an interesting genesis story as a reader. Her physician had advised her to find something, a hobby for herself, because she was taking care of three kids and ceaselessly doing for others! She would end up becoming the center of this circle of romance readers in her community, a trusted guide.
*******Confession: while my home is full of books, and reading picture-books together is a treasured nightly ritual, I rarely read my own books in front of my 4 year old. I get annoyed that he doesn’t respect the ‘rules’ of being alone together; the interruptions take away some of the pleasure of ‘losing myself in a book.’
********In her interview responses, Laielli explored yet another factor animating her reading life. As a stay-at-home parent married to a Ph.D. candidate, Laielli finds her own dreams of graduate school deferred:
Since my first child was born I have stayed home. His sister came sixteen months later, it’s been six years now, my son is in the first grade, but my daughter is still at home with me full time. I have always intended to go to grad school and start a career at some point, and that point keeps drifting farther and farther into the future…. being a stay-at-home mother has always caused me a bit of an identity crisis, and left me feeling a bit restless. Reading and writing have been the way I fill that hole, that need for intellectual stimulation, that sense of purpose outside of domestic life.