Reading and Writing

Pleasure in reading a certain book need not come directly from what the book is about. Similarly, writing need not actually be about what it purports to be about. I have friends who push books on me seeming to believe the subject is just what I need and want. They are nearly always wrong. Recommending books is about as hopeless an enterprise as fixing someone up with a date.  

I stumbled upon this truth after having observed myself reading the same books over and over. There is the book, and then there's the shadow book, the book we invent as we read.  I'm more likely to reread non-fiction, than I am fiction. I'm now reading 'Bobby Fischer Goes to War' for the fourth time. I will reread 'Great Expectations' and 'Bleak House' for the rest of my life. All three books are about a young man having a bad time getting along in life.

Writing: Here's the secret to writing fiction. Swann's Way, a section of  Remembrance of Things Past, reads as if it were an intimate memoir but is in fact fiction.   The gulf between the invented reality, and concrete reality is a sleight of hand pulled off by the author, Marcel Proust. Still-living author of Goodbye Columbus, Philip Roth wrote a book titled 'The Facts' in which he set out to angrily insist that none of the plots of his fiction reflected his actual lived life. Gee, he could have saved himself the trouble.

So, the reader invents what the reader wants a book to be about, and the writer writes the book to be about what he wants it to be about. Given those truths it's amazing that writing exists at all.  Notice that in the larger scheme of things writing is a very new human skill.

Barry