Anybody catch Tim Parks’ NYRB blog post last week Where I’m Reading From? In the essay he wonders about why people aren’t more interested in the anthropology of reading, who reads what and why. He thinks it would be good for there to be a public website or database or something where those who write about books professionally provide a brief account of “how we came to hold the views we do on books, or at least how we think we came to hold them” in order to throw some light on disagreements about books. Parks then goes on to write his personal contribution.
All this reminds me of W. H. Auden who created a long list of questions he thought critics should answer so that we readers would have some insight into how said critic might have come to have such an opinion. Auden’s questions aren’t all about books, which is good because our opinions about what we read are tied up with how we see, act and understand the world in other ways too. In fact, Auden wanted critics to write about what they thought Eden would be. I answered the questions in case you are curious. Parks is also aware that our judgments about books are built of many things, and while his piece focuses on how he came to read what he does, he looks at how his parents influence his reading choices, what kind of environment they created for him to grow up in, how they nurtured him or not. He even pulls his brother and sister into the mix.
Toward the end of the essay Parks provides a few examples of books he read and how his formative years influenced his response to, and opinion of, them. The point to all of it being, he finally decides, not just information for the reader to be able to judge his opinion, but also for himself. If you are aware of your habits you are better able to recognize your own bias and, if not correct it, at least own up to it.
Of course the Parks essay has gotten me thinking about why I read what I do. Why do I not really care for crime novels or mysteries but science fiction and fantasy are pretty darn awesome? Why do I tend to stay away from straight-up commercial fiction preferring literary fiction instead? Why do I get excited by books that challenge me in some way? And poetry, how the heck did I come to enjoy reading that so much? And what about the large chunk of my reading that is dedicated to nonfiction? What’s that all about? I don’t know how to answer those questions. I have suspicions of course. I’ll have to think about it a bit more and if I come up with anything satisfactory, I’ll share.
What about you? Do you know why you read what you read?
I read for truths, general and about myself and others. I read for beauty in writing, for the amusing and witty sentence. I read for pleasure, pleasure in the characters, the issues they confront and how they deal with them. I read for the sensibility of certain authors, who strike me as especially cultured, provocative, wise. And I read for questions, those that puzzle me and I want to know more about. Finally, I read about those issues that interest me, like the one the President has called the “defining challenge of our time.” So I read everything I can now on economic inequality, especially those few, if any who treat it from a moral point of view. Yes, not fiction, but one that unsettles me greatly.
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Richard, you definitely know what you like to read and that is good. We share some of the same reasons even. But the bigger question is, why are these your reasons for reading? What brought you to be interested in reading for questions, for example, instead of reading for escape? Reading to learn and understand instead of reading to forget?
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I was a philosophy major, Stefanie and the practice of asking questions is quite simply part of my heritage and has been so since I was a kid, if you know what I mean. I am sure there are reasons for my other preferences but that is yet another long story.
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Richard, it’s good to ask questions, I like asking them too and many times I have no answers so I understand! I also like long stories 🙂
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I read to nourish my brain, and sometimes to give it dessert, too.
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Jeanne, LOL, yes we must also have dessert with our nutritious meals! But the bigger question Parks is asking is, what brought you to those reasons? Why do you choose to nourish your brain instead of reading for escape or just to pass the time? What are behind our reasons?
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I don’t think any number of questions will explain why reading to escape–which I often do and greatly enjoy–has never been enough for me. I’ll try all the questions. This post–in combination with a conversation I had with Walker over lunch yesterday (it’s spring break at both Oberlin and Grinnell this week) has inspired me to dig up the long list of titles I read for my PhD “comprehensive” oral exam.
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Jeanne, you are right, sometimes we can ask all the questions we want to but still not arrive at a satisfying answer.
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Let’s say I do know the answers, and that they are totally uninteresting.
Believe me – totally uninteresting.
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Tom, totally uninteresting? I somehow find that hard to believe 🙂
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What an interesting idea- it IS sort of fascinating how people find books, and what makes a book great for one person and so-so or terrible for someone else. Maybe I should write a post about my Eden! I’ll think about that.
I do think that a lot of finding things is chance- but chance heavily weighted by the sorts of people we hang out with. This is one of the reasons I am so committed to diversifying my reading. I can’t just walk up to people and ask them to diversify my social circle… but I can just choose to download a different book.
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Tungsten Hippo, yes, not just how people find books but how they come to find the books that they do. And why, for instance, you strive for diversity in your reading instead of staying with the known and comfortable. Parks wants anthropology but he also wants psychology too I think.
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I had not read the Parks piece, and I wondered if you were unfair to him. If he had wanted psychology he would have said psychology, not anthropology, yes? But – now I have read it – you are right, except it seems that all he wants is psychology. Does he just use the word “anthropology” because it sounds fancier? Anthropologists study other people, not themselves. Of course so do good psychologists.
I fear I need to acclimatize myself to this brave new world where literary criticism is just a form of memoir.
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Tom, we’ve agreed to differ about this before, so here I’ll say that I think part of your point is that “literary criticism as memoir” is different from “literary memoir.” As someone who would more happily read an author’s laundry list than I imagine you would, I say bring on the critics’ laundry lists.
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“Anyone turning to my piece on Peter Matthiessen in the present edition of The New York Review will now understand both my attraction to his recent novel and my reservations.”
Shouldn’t I be able to understand this from the piece itself? Why do I have to know about Parks’s childhood reading first? (My bet: I am and I don’t; this is bluster).
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Tom, I think at first he does mean anthropology in a broad sense as a study of culture and beliefs, but then when he gets into his own background it turns into psychology. It is quite a shock isn’t it, how much memoir is part of criticism. Definitely a fairly recent change in the history of criticism where it seems like there are no more grand ideas about what literature should do and be, just opinions about particular books. I suspect the 1980s/literary theory is to blame.
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Reblogged this on Anakalian Whims and commented:
This deserves a complete post in response. Expect and Anthropology of Reading post from me soon…
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Anakalian Whims, looking forward to it!
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I think I select what I read from lists of “good reading”. I’m curious
to know why those books have survived over the years—and I
get great satisfaction from joining the other readers over time who
have read them. Then, I love to check them off the list!
PS. I like your answers to the Auden quiz . . .
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booksandbuttons, glad you enjoyed my Auden quiz answers. The bigger question Parks is asking I think is why, for instance, are you curious to know about those books on the lists? Where does the curiosity come from? And why do you get satisfaction from it? Not easy questions to answer!
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This is very thought provoking…I think I know what I read and why do I read it – love history and love literature so good historical fictions are my first love; but I do think if i delve into this a little more, I think Auden’s questions may kick in – for instance, my love of history has its roots in the early stories my father used to tell me when he would take me to some historical site; the fact that I was born into a country with more than 5000 years of history helped. Somewhere I think I shunned popular fiction was because i was sick of people who read very little or knew very little (I have nothing against non readers – to each to his own, but I do have an axe to grin with preteneous readers) about literatureand often would read/skim through these books and then vomit it all over with little or no tastes or understanding. Besides reading is very personal and unless you can relate to a particular writer/genre I do not think you become a reader in earnest and this relation is surely shaped by who you are/where do you come from etc. I think I have blabbed enough; but must think on this more; maybe write something like a sequel to this post!! 🙂
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cirtnecce, oh, interesting! It seems like you have thought about this before. Wonderful story about your father. I agree our relationship with books is shaped by who were are and where we come from. I believe that is what Parks is trying to get at though I think he leans too much into psychology.
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I just came across this essay–the NYRB email landed in my email inbox this afternoon and I saw the link–now will have to make a point of reading it later(or…adding it to the list anyway….). I’d have to think about my answers, too, though I wonder if I can pinpoint the ‘whys’–sort of like why I like dark chocolate and not milk or cringe at the thought of mayo–not sure why, just do or don’t like them. It will be interesting to see what he has to say, though!
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Danielle, I think it is not completely possible to determine how we develop our tastes and beliefs about books or anything else for that matter, but it is fun to try 🙂
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An interesting piece Stefanie, with thoughtful comments to mull over. Off the top of my head I’ll answer that I read in an attempt to correct deficiencies in myself and because I feel as if I’m safely having a conversation with the author via reading his or her words.
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Vanessa, thanks! I have been enjoying the comments immensely. So you know why you read, but how did those whys come about? That’s the harder question! 🙂
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Hmm, Tom’s lament about criticism as memoir is an interesting one. Coming from an era when the great white male critic was just about toppled off his plinth, and being very interested myself in the feminist criticism of the 80s and 90s, I can see how we started down this route through a need for the critic to be up front about his/her own perspective. To obscure it is in some way to make a bid for objectivity in criticism, and that won’t cut the mustard. How we read is always a reflection of our own minds chasing their own desires. It may seem more honest to admit upfront to what motivates the hot pursuit.
But that doesn’t mean it has to be – and isn’t – the only kind of literary criticism out there by a long shot. It’s just a little offshoot from a huge, sprawling tree.
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Litlove, I agree, I don’t think we want to stall out in a bid for objectivity, an objectivity that never truly was objective in the first place. And I am sure there is plenty of academic criticism that includes no memoir. But in terms of public, popular critics like Parks, more and more memoir does seem to be creeping in. Sometimes it is interesting when it is well done but just knowing a critic’s background like Parks provides in his essay doesn’t especially help me understand the literature he discusses any better. Discussions of how we develop taste are interesting to me as a reader, and I agree with Parks that one should know oneself well enough to know where one’s biases lie with the goal to correct for them or admit to them. But I think it really would be a shame if criticism as memoir as Tom names it turns into being the default method of talking about literature.
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Yes–and also, Parks is trying to do the memoir in one big dump, like we should be interested in him for himself. I’m more interested in little pieces of background (some of it anthropology, maybe, other bits more psychology) that come as a person discusses the ideas brought up in literature.
Also, we haven’t much touched on the issue of why Parks should get paid for this kind of thing. When I clicked on his link to the Matthiessen review, I hit a pay wall at the bottom of the first page. Why should I care so much about what this one guy thinks that I would pay for it?
Criticism as memoir for free is one thing; perhaps Tom is right and it’s like “kleenex poetry”–the kind you write and then should throw away. But criticism as memoir that other people should pay for? That’s pretty much where I draw the line.
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Jeanne, you are right, bits of memoir within a review are fine as long as they are relevant to the work under discussion and not the focus of the piece. And good point about wondering why Parks should get paid for that kind of thing. It’s a good question that moves us toward the messy questions of paid professional book reviews and unpaid “amateur” book bloggers.
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Is this a good path to follow, honesty and motive? Virginia Woolf’s anonymous reviews were less honest than those published under her name, which in turn were less honest than if she had appended a note about her upbringing? I assume that all of her reviews, like mine, are equally dishonest.
I can think of some notes that would be useful. “I can’t get my own novels published, so I am resentful of the contemporary novels I review.” That would be a good one. But mostly the note, the upfront admission, would say “I love this kind of literature and enjoy writing about it.”
Stefanie is pushing the idea a bit farther – why literature and not music or dance or model trains? But given that the answer is literature, and I am reading literary criticism, I am pretty well set up for the task at hand without knowing the exact degree to which the author loves Middlemarch. A wide range of love can lead to good writing and good insights.
My observation is that the memoiristic offshoot is growing rapidly. Some of it is really excellent (see Rohan Maitzen on Gone with the Wind).
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Tom, I am currently reading a book on the history of criticism from Johnson to James Woods and it is quite an eyeopener especially coming across the Parks essay while I am in the middle of the book. I have found myself with a sudden interest in Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold, what an antidote to the likes of Parks they are even if I don’t agree with them they have some interesting things to say it seems. Have you read their criticism? I suspect you have at least dipped in a toe or two and I have probably read blog posts of yours in which you mention them but the memory escapes me. I might need to do some further investigating into them once I am done reading about them.
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Arnold I have just begun to read with any seriousness. I hope to write a bit about him soon.
Hazlitt is wonderful. I think you would like him a lot, at his best at least. He was a truly fine prose writer, full of personality, a pioneer in journalism, criticism, and radical politics, although I find his writing on the latter kind of hard going – specialized. He is not the deepest critic, but is good at pointing at things – isn’t this great? and look at this! Which of course is mostly what I do.
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Project Gutenberg is nice enough to have a selection of Hazlitt to start exploring. I look forward to your thoughts on Arnold when you get to them!
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Gosh, so many nature and nurture points to consider! I can’t even begin to explain why I’ve come to the road I am on (with regards to reading, of course). I know a lot of people who read commercial fiction because those were the only books they’ve ever been exposed to and got used to. My case has been different, as after I’ve finished reading all the Nancy Drew books I could get my hands on, my elder sister wouldn’t let me read her teen romances (Sweet Dreams, Silhouette, Sweet Valley) because I wasn’t 11 yet (as it said so on the books: “For 11 and up”). I moped about it and so our dad bought me a bunch of commercial books to read, books for adults, like Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, etc, books inappropriate for little children, ha ha, but I read them all and I never ever got the taste for romance novels after that (which both my sisters read because they read teen romance which I didn’t). Sister eventually let me read the teen romances, by the way, when I was a teenager, but I tried a few and balked because by then I was already reading John Irving and Stephen King and Tolkien so they couldn’t compare. Also I shared classics with my sisters. We all shared Little Women and Pride and Prejudice and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and all that. Eventually, I came to my choices by trial and error and process of elimination. Once I discovered John Irving, I noticed how so much superior the writing was compared to Sidney Sheldon’s so I trashed the latter in favour of the former. I don’t read romances but am romantic at heart so I thrived in deep musings and poetic literature and then I started reading book reviews in newspapers because I realised there were so many more writers I hadn’t discovered yet that didn’t write just boring commercialism. So I pursued these authors. I began to haunt newspapers for these tidbits and I would try all the authors I could get my hands on (not a lot, as the town I lived in only had a couple of bookstores which carried mostly school supplies and commercial books and a few classics, maybe one or 2 contemporary lit at a time). I asked people flying to the big city to get titles for me, etc. It was really trial and error for me. I tried and tried and tried until I found books that fit me, books that pleased and satisfied and thrilled me. As for how I acquired the taste for those certain books, I can only say they might have stemmed out of my love for poetry and finding beauty and depth and meaning in language. Found these in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, for example. Also, I tend to favour complex writers like Calvino and Eco and Kundera. I could probably attribute that to my love of mathematics. Also I’ve rambled on too long so I’ll stop here. Thanks to a very thought-provoking post!
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kissacloud, thanks for your ramble! I love your story about your sister not letting you read her Sweet Valley books! I had a lot of trial and error too finding what I liked to read best. When I read about people who had mentors when they were young who gave them always the perfect book and shaped their reading I am envious. But there is also something to be said for figuring it out on your own too — persistence and curiosity are great drivers 🙂
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Very true! And in hindsight, the books I really desire to read are those which make me ponder about life. I tend to dwell on things, and so I guess it’s mostly character that makes us choose what we read?
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I enjoy those sorts of books most too. Those and ones with beautiful use of language and/or structural or verbal pyrotechnics so to speak. I suspect much is character but that it is also combined with upbringing/class/culture.
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This is such a good topic and I have wondered about my reading choices at times. I can pinpoint what has led me to some and others I haven’t thought about so much. It’s funny because I know when I’m going through particularly stressful times I feel like I tend pick up mysteries even more and I think it’s because I’m going back to characters I know, so that makes it easier to get into the story thread and I think most mysteries are resolved so everything turns out ok. Anyway, so interesting to read everyone’s thoughts on this too!
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Iliana, we all have our comfort reads, don’t we? I tend toward a gentle comedy of manners or a fantasy adventure novel where good triumphs over evil and everything turns out ok in the end! 🙂
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Very good questions, and they’ve rather stumped me. I thought I knew – things like I want to understand more about how the world works, I want to be confronted with new ideas, I want to be moved by beautiful, different ways of describing the world etc – but then I realised that I don’t really know WHY these things are WHY I read! I suspect that in some ways there isn’t an answer, any more that the person who MUST climb mountains really knows why s/he must. They know what it means to them, what feelings they get from doing it, etc, but WHY are they like that and I’m not? I think realising this – this fundamental difference between us – should make us more tolerant. The person who amazes me because they like crime or chicklit? Well, I probably amaze them because I have no desire to run a marathon (or whatever it is that is their passion).
Hmmm … I think I’m rambling.
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whisperinggums, I suspect we have all thought about why we read and the things we like to read but I have never thought beyond that. We might be able to discover hints, clues, but I don’t think we can ever really point to anything specific. Which begs a question to Parks about why he thinks trying to puzzle it out would make a difference beyond, as you say, perhaps making us more tolerant of other people’s reading choices. You weren’t rambling at all, the topic is something that invites going on a bit so thanks for you lovely comment! 🙂
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Yes, good question re why … I guess another reason why is just because, because we like to inquire and understand?
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Wow, what an interesting post, both yours and Parks. I have to say that my immediate family does not read much more than the newspaper and generally gets its information from tv news and newspapers, rather than books. I’ve always loved learning, and poetry in particular. Why? That’s a good question, but I know my early memories of books with my nana — her buying them, reading them, and allowing me to get what I wanted at the store (1 book per trip which wasn’t every day). But once I was hooked, I was voracious — the library card had smoke and left skid marks.
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