Anna Quindlen’s (Every Last One) essay How Reading Changed My Life is an essay every book lover will enjoy. I call it an essay because it’s just 70 pages long, but maybe reading memoir is more appropriate. Quindlen recounts her early days as a reader, the value books have had in her life, and (given that this was published in 1998) a look at the future of books in the digital age.
Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort – God, sex, food, family, friends – reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room.
Quindlen’s essay sings the praises of being a book drunkard and is critical of the notion that we should be reading solely as “a tool for advancement.” Of course I read to learn things, but I am mostly a pleasure reader, a ludic reader. I have piles of books everywhere and hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves because I will get to them some day. I swear.
Quindlen, too, reads for pleasure. She shares her memories of the first book that “seized [her] completely by the throat”, so much so that she read it and reread it, believing that it was “the best book ever written.” Of course, now she admits it’s probably – critically speaking, at least – not very good, but still finds it “a good read, but no longer a masterwork.” All readers have a book like this in their personal canon. Mine is probably Velocity. I mean, that book probably isn’t high art, but I’ve read it more than any other book and it still guts me. Quindlen allows for reading that is personal; there is no room for snobbery, and I appreciate that.
…if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lesson human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?
Preach!
How Reading Changed My Life tackles censorship (“It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books.”), assigned reading (“In fact, one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general.”) and books in the digital age (“It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so.”)
This book is a delight. Highly recommended.
The Ludic Reader 