In Defense of Reading Recklessly During Quarantine
Estimated Reading Time: 12-15 minutes (Long, I know. But, c’mon, we’re social distancing: you’ve got the time).
Note: Included throughout this essay are 50 or so hyperlinked names and titles that will take you to the website of a NYC area bookstore that has that author or book in stock. Should you feel compelled to order a volume or a gift card, the bookish boutiques in each borough, as well as a few in New Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, will thank you. (I started this piece last week, so it’s pure coincidence that this article about patronizing non-Amazon online bookstores during COVID appeared today in the New York Times.)There are some truly fantastic bookshops in this city, including landmarks like The Strand and Book Culture and gems further afield like The Lit Bar in the South Bronx and Topos Books in Bushwick. I’ve even included the Barnes and Noble at Union Square and Amazon Books at Columbus Circle because, though they may wear the corporate albatross, they employ booksellers, sell books, and encourage the life of the mind, as all great bookstores do. If you prefer small, independent shops, please explore the other 48 suggestions. What follows is all at once anecdote, argument, and invitation to discover neat book businesses that desperately need our support now so that they continue to charm, inform, and inspire us post-COVID.
I’ll admit it: like many students, I haven’t done the assigned reading.
Well, that’s not exactly true. While social distancing, I’ve done some of the assigned reading in intermittent bursts, often haphazardly. With my dissertation in mind, I’ll re-read 100 pages of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Then, I’ll put it down mid-paragraph, pick up Phil Klay’s Redeployment, and open to a vignette at random. Mid-sentence something will unexpectedly “click.” Perhaps you know the experience I’m describing.
Possessed by a writerly clarity in the most cliché, movie-montage sense, I will launch into an hour or two of concentrated work on my proposal, eagerly consulting the essays and fictions that my advisors and I have agreed are most vital to my claims. In a nutshell, I submit that 9/11 and the War on Terror initiated in the Anglophone novel a shift from Postmodernism towards what some, including David Foster Wallace, describe as a “New Sincerity.” All at once focused and exhilarated, I will cheerfully churn out several paragraphs of hopefully usable prose.
Voila! Progress. Theoretical texts read and words on the page. “Deep work” productivity in the time of COVID: a check-mark emoji moment if there ever was one.
But then I’ll hit “save,” refill my coffee, walk my dog, and saunter back to the desk an entirely different person. Really, it’s bewildering how much of a wayward changeling the unsupervised graduate student is. Again, perhaps you can relate.
The person of 10 minutes prior possessed surgical analytical focus and asked the right critical questions. The person who re-enters the room opens Keith Richard’s audaciously titled memoir, Life, and inhales poetic anecdotes of rockstar debauchery. They dig up that indulgent beach read they never started (in my case, Coerte Felski’s The Millennium Girl) and read it cover to cover. They are genuinely startled when they realize that Edward Snowden’s tell-all memoir, Permanent Record, has been out for eight months and they haven’t even read the free snippets available online. This person takes advantage of the astonishingly low “educator price” and subscribes to Architectural Digest, just because. They find an issue of The Atlantic lying around (Jan/Feb 2020) and read every article, even the 7000-word piece on deep-sea mining. They rediscover science fiction juvenilia that they loved in high school, inhale Rhonda Garelick’s Mademoiselle, a dazzling biography of Coco Chanel, and listen while jogging to The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson’s infinitely readable portrait of Winston Churchill during the Blitz.
This person has the curatorial skills of a disco ball. They will perform the most complex rhetorical contortions in their head to justify reading about Christian Dior in the 60s or Patti Smith in the 70s when they should be reading about Don DeLillo, Katheryn Bigelow, and Anthony Swofford in the 2000s.
Like I said, this person is doing the reading, just not the assigned reading - the stuff that informs a dissertation. They are procrastinating, or so it would seem.
“They” is me, and I suspect that they may, from time to time, be you as well.
I submit that this perfectly okay. I support us. I say that periodically departing from what you should be reading and sampling texts unsystematically, even chaotically, is valuable, especially during an exceptional event like COVID. I agree with Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, who suggests in an April 2020 TED talk (via Zoom, of course) that we periodically question the notion “that purpose and passion are everything” and instead prioritize curiosity, which ‘is very gentle, because the stakes are so much lower.”
In true Millennial “listicle” form, here are 10 reasons why you should forgive yourself for letting gentle curiosity guide your reading this summer.
1. Read outside your area to stay abreast of current events. Students expect English professors to facilitate discussions on urgent issues having to do with race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. In the past couple weeks, I’ve re-read sections of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant Between the World and Me, surely at the expense of reading an article or two related to my dissertation. Given the prevailing debates about race, class, and policing in this country, it would have been irresponsible notto. When I teach Composition II, I always assign the introduction to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and the next time I teach that course I’m resolved to include an excerpt from Coates too. I may also distribute a chapter or two from a memoir that I read last month: The Chiffon Trenches, by André Leon Talley, the first authoritative black voice in fashion journalism. Like many others, I came to Talley’s book for the poetic anecdotes of excess, luxury, and artistry, but I’ll return to it for the first-hand insight the former Vogueeditor, who was in the 1970 referred to openly as “Queen Kong,” provides on being black in the uniformly white world of high fashion. “A black man goes through life,” writes Talley, “realizing, There but for the grace of God go I. Racism moves under the epidermis as a constant, constant reality. It’s part of the fabric of our existence” (italics original). Aimless quarantine reading can, unexpectedly, become vital lesson planning.
2. As two decades of Spanish, Russian, and French teachers can confirm, I struggle mightily with languages that are not English. So, during this lull in social life, I’ve devoted an hour or two per week to stumbling gracelessly through side-by-side copies of Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer, Or the End of Youth, in both English and French. I’m glacially slow to parse the French, but it’s fun and leads to some laughs with my fiancée, who is fluent. Quarantine “reading” can be in another “language,” whether French, Spanish, Latin, JavaScript, vegan cooking, stick shift, musical notation, etc.
3. As a teacher, I support my students by suggesting books to fuel, and sometimes challenge, their passions. When I review my college notebooks, I am struck by the number of names and titles scribbled in the margins. Many of these professorial recommendations are now beloved personal favorites or key foundational texts in my research. I’m enormously grateful for them and I strive to provide similar notes for my students. Seeking long-form journalism that Gabelli students might especially enjoy? Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Questfor a Fantastic Future and Turney Duff’s The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess might please. Want something for the no-nonsense pre-law student who demands to know what composition and rhetoric “do” in the “real” world? Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense ofa Liberal Education and Clarence Thomas’ My Grandfather's Son might do the trick. Need something to encourage a student to keep asking difficult questions about literature in the digital age? Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong? and This is Not the End of the Book by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière. Quarantine reading can prepare you to support students’ reading in unpredictable ways.
4. Reading a topic and its opposite grants a clearer picture of both. Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War novel about war crimes and PTSD, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a literary memoir of NYC’s bohemian music and art scene in the 60s and 70s, seem to share little in common. Yet, at the heart of both stories are young people with few options. Smith recalls moving to the NYC of Dylan and Warhol with no money and few prospects, while Powers details deployment in the Iraqi countryside for those for whom the military is the only way out of post-industrial blight. Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010, while The Yellow Birds was a finalist for the Fiction category in 2013. Quarantine reading can yield unlikely pairings and counterintuitive connections that might be overlooked by more regimented research.
5. Encountering texts you like and dislike helps you clarify your own tastes. I know I adore twentieth century American novels, yet in high school I abhorred Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I re-read it last year and loved it (of course). A friend recently recommended Frank Chin’s Donald Duk, which I didn’t love and didn’t finish. On the other hand, just last month I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast for what has to be the tenth time. In the next year I’ll likely give Donald Duk another shot, and I know I’ll re-read Hemingway’s Parisian memoirs again. Quarantine reads, whether abandoned, second or third attempts, or beloved reunions with old favorites, solidify your palate.
6. Many of the authors we read are, of course, no longer around around to meet and debate. Reading outside your field facilitates that special, giddy pleasure of meeting a living author whose work you adore. I loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and made an absolute fool of myself when I met Ishiguro at a book signing at the Strand in 2015, two years before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Felski’s The Millennium Girlwasn’t particularly compelling, but it was neat to stay at the Airbnb that Coerte runs on Long Island and hear stories (supposedly not apocryphal, but who knows?) of mingling with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Beard, and other luminaries “back in the day.” When Ann Patchett visited a creative writing class I took in 2011, the Bel Canto author gave me unforgettable writing advice (“Writer’s block? I don’t get writer’s block. Surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block and lawyers don’t get lawyer’s block. They work harder, do more research, try a different approach, etc.”). Again, none of these authors directly inform my doctoral research, but anecdotes like these remind me of the inimitable delight of not only encountering a book, but also its author (sorry, Barthes). Quarantine reading enhances book signings, author visits, and Q and A sessions past, present, and future.
7. The claim that all liberal arts degrees do is prepare you for dinner party conversations is an egregious generalization, but nonetheless contains some truth (sans the qualifier “all”). I landed my first salaried, “adult” job by attending an alumni networking event put on by my college. I said hello to the person who would go on to recommend me for the position and we chatted animatedly about a novel we had both read in college, decades apart. Thus, encountering in 2010 Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, was instrumental in landing me a job with Uncommon Schools in 2015. More recently, my father-in-law and I were amused to discover that we both knew of John Pomfret, author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China. I read Pomfret’s memoir as a college freshman in 2008 and my father-in-law tutored him in Mandarin at Stanford in the 1970s. The books you read will serve you in unexpected, whimsical ways and may open doors, both professional and personal. What seems like haphazard quarantine reading now may provide invaluable talking points in the future.
8. Reading about where you are is inherently fascinating because it collapses the distance between place and page. While waiting out COVID, read Walter Isaacson’s eponymous biography of Steve Jobs and, when doing so is safe again, wander through Apple’s flagship NYC store on Fifth Avenue and recall Jobs’ unforgettable narration of the building’s unprecedented design. Read Smith’s intoxicatingly good descriptions of Cafe Dantein M. Train and then buy a gift card online so that you are ready to enjoy a cappuccinoand a pastry at the venerable West Village cafe post-COVID. Flip through Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and then invite your friends on walks, jogs, and bicycle rides to celebrate when socializing is safe again. NYC’s streets and parks and subway lines contain stories worth savoring, if only for that delicious readerly pleasure of announcing under your breath, “Hey, I know where that is!” The “New York is my campus” part of Fordham’s slogan is corny, but wonderfully true. Quarantine reading can take you out and about from the safe comfort of your couch.
9. Reading a book that helps you connect with a family member is never time poorly spent. After reading the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I gifted it to my father, who admitted that he could not get through the first 50 pages. In addition to serving as an enduring inside joke, this experience also helps me know my father better, which is thrilling and invaluable. He’s a MIT-educated professor of physics and I am grateful to him for never dissuading me from studying creative writing and anthropology. A few weeks ago, I started Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the stunningly well-reviewed biography of Richard Feynman, recipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. In a symmetrical turn of events, I found it ponderous and put it down after 50 pages. Happily, my dad and I both loved Amor Towles’ thoroughly marvelous A Gentleman in Moscow. To read is to encounter both mirror and window, and the people we love often figure in what we see. At the PEN World Voices Festival in NYC in 2010 the Nigerian novelist and author of The Famished Road, Ben Okri, offered in a speech“ten and a half inclinations” about what to read and why. Included are “Read the books your parents love,” “read the books your parents hate,” and “read what you’re not supposed to read.” Quarantine reading can—and should—be all of these and more.
10. Finally, reading widely is worth our time because, like the gloating villain so often proclaims to the seemingly defeated protagonist right before the sidekick steps in to save the day, the statement “we’re not so different, you and I” is cliché but true when it comes to books. Keith Richard’s life story, Malcom X’s autobiography, Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” and Mademoiselle, the authoritative biography of Chanel, all offer equally valid explanations of the twentieth century in the West. Poetry, music, fashion, protest, and more all inform the same fascinating thread that leads to today. “If you were to open a book today on the history of literature,” writes literary critic Roland Barthes in The Language of Fashion, “you’d find the name of a new classic author: Coco Chanel. Chanel doesn’t write with paper and ink (except in her spare time), but with fabric, shapes and colours.”
I believe this to be intensely true. “New classic” authors appear every time we make an unlikely literary pairing, read what our more critical selves might dismiss, or enter a topic from an atypical direction. Read Obama, Churchill, and Laga Gaga as literary figures. Put the Harlem Renaissance in conversation with contemporary British painting. Juxtapose Annie Liebovitz, Art Spiegelman, and Bob Dylan. Read Keith Richards, Toni Morrison, and Tony Judt against one another. Read high and low, left and right, familiar and foreign. Ultimately, none of it will permanently disrupt your research focus and, as Churchill said (can you tell who I’ve been reading lots of during COVID?) of alcohol, you’ll take more out of it than it will take out of you. In the end, books are all fabric, shape, and color, tone, depth, and theme, and quarantine reading enables us to view it all anew.
Written for English Connect by Peter Krause, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English