The Literate Masochist
There are so many choices to make when it comes to reading. All right, yes, moving your eyes back and forth across the page does seem to be the most popular method for the sighted population (and if my description sounds too much like something that would happen in a Stephen King novel, you try writing this, Mr. or Ms. Ohsowitty). But I'm talking about the mind behind the eyes here. I'm talking about picking one book out of the eighty zillion other titles available in my apartment alone, which is currently threatening to secede and become its own little woodpulp nation, with me and my nearest and dearest allowed to stay on as the token human residents provided we agree to dust. And purchase more books, of course.
When I'm doing research, my reading life is simple. I gather
appropriate volumes on the subject at hand, stack them all neatly next to my
bed, and carefully set my drink on them while I peruse the latest Calvin and
Hobbes
There are other books I read that fall midway between pleasure and duty. They're the kind of books no one really enjoys, but that one nevertheless has to have read in order to be able to hold one's head up in certain circles and catch key cultural references. I chew through one of these whenever I'm in a mood to drop quotes and then sneer at people who don't pick up my references right away, or when I just got sneered at for not remembering, say, what that guy was supposed to be catching and why the hell he'd want to hang out in a bunch of rye anyway. Or what's going to happen to me if I covet my neighbor's graven image. I'm actually pretty good at making myself sit down and read alleged classics, especially in lieu of doing something useful, like the dishes. My husband isn't good at this at all, which is why he hates me, which is a much more benign reason for hating a spouse than because she steals the last piece of clean underwear or apple pie, which is why we're still married after all these years. That and the fact that neither of us wants to be left alone in sole custody of all these damned books.
Moving from pain to pleasure, there are the books that I
pick up even when nobody's telling me to read them. There should be no need to
explain books one reads for fun, but just try really really
not caring about the latest Danielle Steele in a room full of people who think
that those bestseller lists they print in the Sunday book review are shopping
lists rather than serving suggestions, and see how long you're allowed to stay
silent when word gets out that you prefer something a little meatier. Like The
Moon and Sixpence
As long as we're on that subject -- if you ever want
to get a good loud conversation going, say just after the bedtime of your
neighbor's adorable little changeling (oh, come on, he didn't mean to
squeeze his juice box as hard as he could just as you were walking by, and I'm
sure he was thinking of something else when he started laughing hysterically at
the apple-pear cider dripping from your favorite sunglasses), mention in
passing that you absolutely detest, say, Steinbeck. Or
Mailer. Someone who has either been dead just long
enough to be considered a classic writer but not so long that he's boring; or
who is still alive and has been long enough that he's achieved a sort of elder
statesman status. Oh, the fur and feathers will fly then. Hating certain
writers in the right company will arouse a fever pitch of indignation you'll
never see on announcing that you can't stomach, oh, Milton or Hawthorne. We
expect that. But if you don't like Hemingway, it's not because liking or
disliking him is a matter of taste. You just must not have read the right
Hemingway, is all. Read A Moveable Feast
One can while away an entire evening listening to the screams. If you like that kind of thing.
If you don't (heck, even if you do), try something I do that I don't understand, don't defend, and spend way more of my disposable time at than I even like to admit I have. Read a writer you really love to hate. I don't mean someone you've just never liked, or someone you know you ought to like, you've every reason to enjoy, you admire all his friends, but the chemistry just isn't right and you can't make it work. Kind of like some dates and marriages, and I name no names here. I've had this kind of doomed, hopeless relationship with Henry James for years. Ask me how I can swoon over Wharton and not be able to click with James. Go on, ask me. I can't answer. But I'm not talking about an undeveloped, for whatever reason, taste. I'm talking about writers I know I detest and at the same time I just can't get enough of.
Call me some kind of literary masochist. I don't even mean those books that are so bad they're good, or at least funny. Cornball over-the-top romances and men's adventure novels come to mind. I'm talking about just plain bad books.
Some are obscure. Take the works of Sonia Johnson, of whom you've never heard and it's probably just as well. A long time ago, say a couple of decades, Ms. Johnson actually lived on the same planet we do. She was a Mormon (and no, that doesn't contradict what I just said -- be nice) who thought that being a feminist didn't mean having to give up her religion. Her church thought otherwise and kicked her out, and she, not unnaturally, was pissed. So she wrote her autobiography, From Housewife to Heretic, and was one of your fifteen-minute celebrities.
So big whoop. That book was actually a really good one -- Mormon history, Mormon not-so-history (their allowing blacks full membership privileges is within living memory -- what schmucks), women's history, gory details about a marriage gone down the tubes. Lots of fun.
Except that Johnson didn't stop writing after that. She became one of those people who figures, hey, why blame just one guy or religion or deity when I can trash an entire gender, all organized religions, and any deity out there who doesn't agree with me, which weirdly enough meant pretty much all of them in Johnson's case. So each book she wrote got a little weirder and a little worse, and I went from interested admiration to slack-jawed incredulity until the stretch of time between the calls I was compelled to make to my husband, no matter where he was, and insist that he listen to the most bizarre nonsensicality he'd ever heard got so small that the most sensitive instruments on the planet couldn't measure it. I ate these books up with unfading fascination and endless enjoyment. Sure, part of me railed against a writer who once did such fine work and was now writing novels about channeling spirits and theorizing that people could once see in the dark, like cats (and if they can't any more, it's all men's fault, and someone please figure that one out and get back to me). But mostly I was delighted at this turn for the worse. I wanted to write her a note thanking her for adding to the sum total of human pleasure in the world. Kind of like "Calvin and Hobbes," only funnier and less self-aware. Which sentiment I realized Johnson might not appreciate, so I kept it to myself after all.
Then the women's bookstore I'd been working at and borrowing her books from (why buy Wonderland when you can get psychedelic mushrooms for free?) closed, Sonia Johnson became unfindable to even my most impassioned internet searches, and I had to find someone else to love hating.
Anais Nin was good for that -- the great cosmic slut who thought that if she slept with enough writers she'd figure out how to put two coherent sentences together, in which belief she was enjoyably mistaken. Then there was Dickens. Oh, Dickens. For every one of his books I actually like (yes, there are a few -- I'm not an irredeemable cretin), there are two I just love to hate. We're talking the kind of detestation generally reserved for in-laws and exes. And the nicer his characters are supposed to be, the more I loathe them. I must be the only person who despised David Copperfield even when he was a smacked-around little tyke, let alone when he grew up and married first a retard and then the patron saint of cows and other bovine females in rapid succession. Both of whom he no doubt gave syphilis to, thanks to that boyhood affair with James "Just a Friend, No, Really" Steerforth in boarding school. You remember Steerforth -- the one who ran off with Little Emily? Don't get her confused with Little Dorrit. Or Little Nell. Or Tiny Tim. Oh, screw them, every one.
Manly classic science fiction gets under my skin and into my
heart much the same way Dickens does. I actually got paid to copyedit a volume
of that not long ago, and I hated the book so much I wouldn't have been able to
put it down even if I hadn't had the publisher breathing down my neck. Any book
featuring bronze brave men and the women who love them does it for me. God, do
I hate Heinlein. Him and his full-figured fantasies
disguised as science fiction. Is that Stranger in a Strange Land
And then -- I know I'm going to get threats for this one --
there's Armistead Maupin, he of Tales of the City
It's hard to be a hate-lover in a world that assumes you
admire any book you're caught reading. "Oh, The Old Curiosity Shop
"It will be in a minute."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm just waiting for the part where Little Nell dies so I can start cheering."
The thing is, a writer has to be just the right kind of bad, or the wrong kind of good, to appeal to me in just this fashion. And most of the writers I've mentioned are dead or otherwise limited in their ability to produce more books for my bitter enjoyment. And rereading does get dull after a while. If only there were some way of guaranteeing a constant supply of just the kind of book I mean.
Maybe I should put all my Anais Nins and all my Heinleins on the same shelf. Just to see what happens.
On second thought, maybe I won't. Diary of a Puppet Master, Volume Five: Bolt Astley finds out he's his own father and sleeps with him anyway? That'd be a bit much even for me.
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