Blog 38 Reading Choices

 

I’d like to return to a theme of a previous blog in which I examined reading choices, book readiness, as a factor of the age of the reader. While I cannot, at eighty, ignore the impact of age in selecting a book, that is not my purpose in traveling this path once more. My thinking is more upon the appeal of a book as a function of what a reader is seeking at a given moment across the span of their lifetime.

Once more, I recall Isaac Bashevis Singer’s dictum that fiction is to educate and entertain. In my twenties and thirties, I read a ton of what is still considered classic literature. As I recall, I was seeking an education, rather than entertainment, in reading “great” works. I was going on faith. In retrospect, it’s good that I wasn’t seeking entertainment for I rarely found it. As for the education I sought in literature, did I find it? I don’t know. I do know much of the reading was a slog.

Though I still reach to further educate myself through reading, to challenge my knowledge base, I seek it primarily through non-fiction. The authors state their intentions and hopefully live up to them.

In fiction, the weight now in reading selection is more upon enjoyment, that book I cannot put down. If the author’s intention is to explore a topic within a fictional plot, the message must arrive in a satisfying story. I’ve been disappointed too many times by a critically heralded novel in which the joy I seek is muted by a message.

All that said, I still believe fiction offers something nonfiction cannot deliver as well. Nonfiction most always produces what it promises, as it should, establishing parameters and then, hopefully living up to them. Unpinned by declared parameters from the outset, fiction gives freedom to imagine. When the imagination is set free to take flight in a good story -- reading nirvana.

            Most recently, I unexpectedly experienced this in Robert Galbraith’s (JK Rowling) 927-page Troubled Blood. I was stunned at the enormity of her talent, beyond Dickensian, to weave a tapestry of fully developed characters into an involute plot that led to a long, satisfying reading journey. In the end, for me, it was the story, always the story. Which way do the scales tip for you?