All the Books You Haven't Read

Two things have been on my mind this week. One is that Friday, July 10th is Proust’s birthday. The other is that Newsweek published a Top 100 Books list.

Neither of these things is particularly urgent. It’s 131 years since Marcel Proust was born—not exactly a milestone anniversary. Likewise, the Newsweek list doesn’t represent any particular breakthrough in scholarship or pop culture; it’s a “meta-list”—compiled from ten already existing best-books lists—and in fact when you read the methodology, it seems a little random. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time) shows up on Newsweek’s list at #65, but that's not why I've put these two things together. I've put them together because they both seem to be part of the conversation that I have with myself all the time about reading—about what I have read, what I’m reading now and most importantly, and most confusingly of all, what I should read next, out of all the books I haven't read.

I teach in a creative writing program, which means I put reading lists together for my students. I’m expected to know a lot about literature. I’m expected to read widely. Last year, I read 47 books. (Yes, I keep count.) Some of these were books I read for the first time. Many were books I re-read because I put them on a syllabus and needed to re-familiarize myself. A few of them of them were book-length manuscripts written by students or by friends that I’d been asked to read, to give advice, to give a blurb. Some of them I read purely for pleasure—these were the ones on my nightstand, the ones I read before I fell asleep every night. Some of these were pretty light or pretty thin. It worked out to almost one book a week. That seems like a lot to me; at any rate, it was what my brain could absorb.

And yet it always seems like I haven’t read enough. When I went through Newsweek’s 100 books, I saw that I'd read fewer than a third of them. It actually makes me nervous to admit this. In the world of writers and professors that I spend a lot of time in, admitting that you haven't read something you're supposed to have read is one of the great unspeakables.

Of course, you can’t read everything. No one can. But there’s this attitude that gets passed around, where if you admit, “I haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]” you may hear your words repeated back to you incredulously, “You haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]??” I think writers take pleasure in shaming each other on this subject, and so  we sometimes lie about what we’ve read—or if not out and out lie, at least perform a vague nodding of the head, in reference to whatever book is being discussed at the moment, as a way of not admitting that you haven’t read it. I know I've done that in the past.

So I'm going to come clean here, at least a little. War and Peace, ranked number one on Newsweek's meta-list: never read it. Ulysses, ranked number three: read parts of it, but never got through the whole thing. Number 8 is both The Iliad and The Odyssey: I remember reading some piece of that in high school, but it’s a fuzzy memory at best. Number 9, Pride and Prejudice—nope, and I've lied about that one in the past. Number 10, The Divine Comedy: nope, though I admitted that to my students last year. Add to that Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, most of Faulkner, all of Pynchon. That's just a few of them.

Which brings me back to Proust. A few years ago, my colleague Aaron Shurin told me, "Once you read In Search of Lost Time, your life will become divided into before-you-read-Proust and after-you-read-Proust." That was a grand enough statement to get me interested. Then this year I taught a gay literature class, and I wanted to fill in a few gaps in the gay-lit canon. On top of that, I had a trip to Paris planned, and I wanted to get ready for the trip by reading a French novel. And so, I started to read Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis, the first volume of the seven volumes that make up Proust's masterwork.

I’d tried to read it before and had put it down after a dozen or so pages. His sentences are long and multi-clausal and often without helpful commas where you want them—you can literally lose track of what the sentence is about before you get to the end of it. You can’t skim; if your mind wanders, you have to start over. But something happened this time around. I think the moment I knew I’d stick with it came after I read, appropriately enough, the passage when the young narrator talks about the joys of reading. Specifically, about the power of a novelist’s “creatures” to take hold of a reader’s soul:

… we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all the possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them… (p. 87)

And I thought, after I re-read it a couple of times, that’s exactly right. It’s an elaborate but nonetheless accurate way of talking about the power of a novel over a reader, and also demonstrating that power in the sentences themselves. It’s mesmerizing, if you surrender to it. I surrendered to it. It took me three months, but I finished Swann's Way. I'm not sure it changed my life, but then there are still six more volumes to go...

I wish I could read more. I wish everyone did. Which is why when I finally get around to reading something I’ve wanted to read for a long time, there’s a very sweet satisfaction involved. It’s the pleasure of feeling like you’re conquering that big mountain of knowledge and experience one volume at a time. But more importantly, it's the pleasure of the book itself, which casts us inside its dream, "a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer."

Bon Anniversaire, Monsieur Proust. Thanks for the pleasure.

Comments

[Joe Clarke]

Great post, Karl. I feel the same way. Some day I'll tackle Proust!

[K.M. Soehnlein]

Thanks, Joe. It's always good to know who's reading this.

[Joel Perez]

Actually, your life is divided into 3 parts, pre-proust, post-proust, and the time it takes you to actually read proust. i reckon that for me it'll take a full third of my life, perhaps more, and that i might even have to content myself with dying trying.