Melange Magazine

Shelf Life

Why Bother Reading?
By LORETTE C LUZAJIC

How many “shoulds” do you have on your reading list? If you’re like me, the list is longer than a cross-Canada trip on a Greyhound. No matter how many titles I get through, the list always outruns me.

Recently, I did something radical and destroyed the list. I even passed some of the books along. They had been patient for years on my shelves, awaiting a lover, and it was only fair to let them go. If it was meant to be, we would find each other when the time was right.

I am taking a break from my internally-imposed reading quotas. For about a decade I’ve worked in the front lines of book retail where books rush in and out of my life. I am a firsthand witness to the precious impossibility of reading everything I have ever wanted to. I’ve had to accept that this will only happen in Heaven. If eternity is paradise, then it is a library with no due dates, late fees or closing hours. In paradise I can read all the books in the world, and favourites like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History I can read over and over again.

A friend recently asked me why I bother reading at all. Literacy is a highly-championed cause, but why? Over and above the obvious- that we can read and write and function in the workplace and decipher menus or cable bills- why read? Time spent reading could be traded for TV, sex, shopping, sleep.

I’ve always felt these things to be hours robbed from my reading time. Reading is socially and academically accepted, expected, respected. But who’s to say that these hours aren’t better spent with my family, or knitting, or learning regional Mexican cuisines? The friend had read deeply when he was younger. Our mutual love of books was one of the introductory factors of our friendship. Now, he said, he had no time for long analyses of people who weren’t real anyway, not when a click of the mouse could reference for you any fact you ever needed. I felt betrayed to hear this. I thought I knew you.

Buddhism teaches that attachment is the source of all suffering (a tidbit thanks to one ‘streak’ of reading. Don’t you also read in topic stints? There was the year I read about Africa, and then a few months on constellations. There was ‘award nominee and winner’ year, full of prize-winning ‘shoulds’. There were periods for Bradbury, Paglia, ‘exorcist’ novels, and a line-up on environment issues. ) Attachment to my books and impossible reading lists has indeed been a source of turmoil, despite the hefty rewards.

I can argue how much it may have been worth that turmoil- how much passion I have uncovered from the human heart in all its guises. Still, I was always facing a to-do list that could never be done, and storage units stuffed with so many volumes that I could barely find certain titles when I needed them.

I would never, ever give up reading, but I resolved to release some of my attachment to its lofty importance in my head. If something more impressive came my way, I would devote less time to my first love. I would release the long lists that I could never expect to fulfill, and simply choose what I was most drawn to at the time, if and when I was.

Since that day, I finally read Memoirs of a Geisha. The day was filled with more time, and fewer stacks of half-read books: this new sparseness revealed her, dusty and alone on the shelf. Memoirs had been on my ‘list’ for many years. At the bookstore, it was embarrassing for me to tell customers that I hadn’t yet read it. I had been in the mood many times over those years to read Arthur Golden’s instant classic. But competition was fierce, and by chance, this one had always gotten left out.

Now, with roomier shelves and fewer obligations, I was able to see this book. How politely and demurely she had waited for my attention, just like the geisha inside. I love books that are filled with secrets, and soon Sayuri was telling me in exquisite detail about a life I knew nothing of.

Writing has always been an intimate act, above and beyond its necessity to impart instruction. This is where the importance of reading lies. Writing is more than a sum of its parts- ink or hardware, paper, information. Writing is about getting to know each other, a window. It’s about how someone you have never met sees the world. It’s about how passionate and corrupt and crazy and stupid and intelligent we are, have always been, how diverse and yet similar in our light and darkness. “I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver.

Perhaps you do not care to know how Jung or Annie Proulx thought, and find the words of Christ irrelevant. And lovely though it may be, you do not care to know of poet Esta Spalding’s world. Perhaps Atwood never made you curious and the Brontes were a bore. Maybe the adventures of Nancy Drew or the ramblings of Brit-bloke Adrian Mole are of no significance. You never wondered what the hell is up with modern ‘art’ or wondered how bad marijuana could possibly be.

But perhaps there is a world outside of myself and my own perceptions. Perhaps this world is 5.99 billion times my personal perspective. And perhaps it is quite interesting out there, a veritable freak show. It’s wild and crazy, with heartbreaking hypocrisies and incredible feats of human accomplishment. Magic and mystery and medicine and God.

I remove any and all academic arguments from my pursuit of literature. With no veneer of intellect or education, of historical or social status, literacy has spoken to me freshly again. I’m curious, or nosy: I want to know what’s out there. I read because I’m alive!

And of course, like so many of you, I am a reader because I am a writer. I want to leave a record for others. It’s a form of archeology. I can show you a vivid and colourful life, I can show you scars and adventures and the landscape of northern Ontario. The records are there: some have been made public in journals or websites. And some are still stacked in crates, or in electronic files, poems that have not yet and may never find a home.

But they may- one day, when you have fewer obligations and a delicious flavour of melancholy unexpectedly enters your world, you might reach for me. When the time is right, my time will come.