My Personal Reading History, Defined by Five Books

I have a special copy of the Norton Children’s Anthology of Poetry. A laminated photo plasters the inside cover: my dad looking through a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, a scrunched infant stuffed into the crevice of his elbow. Though I’m oblivious to all but the vague shape of his sounds, he’s reading me poems. In the photo, I see the explanation of what I’ve always thought books were, what I thought they should be: a parental force, a knowledge to hold you, rocking you gently through confusion.  

I grew up in a comfortable suburban home, and so the true and total confusion of leaving a college dorm for a four-month apartment sublet with a stranger was of a new breed. The tiny railroad space was spotless and effortfully decorated when I’d visited and pledged my deposit; the day of my move-in, trash bags crowded the kitchen, contaminated tap water spilled over the brim of a dish-filled sink. A long four months they’d be. 

Loneliness hit me as hard as the subway-car floor I’d recently slipped onto. As good a time as ever, I figured, to mope around the nearest bookstore. Crawling the aisles, I thought of the photograph, my tomato face against a soft fatherly flannel; I sought something that would hold and guide me. 

The things that found me were of an entirely different species. Where I sought a map out of the woods, I found maps of the woods themselves. 

First it was Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in which Harvard-bound Selin discovers the “new world” of email, a fortuitous invention for a student seeking to understand language. Her literature classes provide no beacon, just the knowledge that “it [is] somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.” Her ethernet cable fastens her to a bad romance with an older student whose incoherent philosophizing obscures herself. 

There was the young Adam Gordon of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, a poet whose spent his whole life in search of an experience heavy enough to inspire art. In Spain, he seems to find it: he’s living in Madrid when a terrorist bombing strikes the city’s major train Station. Of course, suffering is just that, and there is no voyeuristic bounty here for the eager artist. Unbeknownst to Adam, we as readers find that the pleasure is in his mistaken journey, and all the little things that get lost in translation along the way. 

I saw myself in the supposed artists of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, who do everything but create art. Why write or create when the most sincere attempt at understanding is carried out off the page, in one’s real-world relationships? 

Tao Lin’s Taipei asks a more hopeless question: why resist the brain-melting pull of the internet when its deadened language has already replaced our own? Lin’s prose reads like internet journalism (the name of a new character is always followed by the character’s age), and his Brooklynites are so steeped in e-chatter that they invent inelegant linguistic shortcuts (the word “soily” replaces ‘earthy,’ for example). 

The two young creatives in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends are drowning in the maelstrom that is one’s first adult relationships. When University students Frances and Bobbi become entangled in the marriage of two bona-fide grown-ups, everything is tested: what you sacrifice to serve your friends, what you sacrifice to create art, and when those two imperatives stand at odds, which you choose. 

Between these covers, I’d find no parental reassurance. For a bit, I felt like an eight-year-old lost in an amusement park, searching for his parents: why didn’t these authors have any answers? But the unsuccessful search led me to something else, something better, a reminder of why I love books in the first place.  

I often find myself wanting books to be a magic bullet. A bible: this is how I should be, this is what life should be. But the simple truth is that nearly all of my favorite books deal in much more matter-of-fact assertions: this is what I am, this is how life is. Life is confusing, it is repetitive, it is only vaguely meaningful.

By the light of a reading lamp, I took step after step. Sleep devolved into a brief interlude, my tired page-flipping resuming as soon as the next morning’s subway train hit its triumphant crossing of the East River. Where was I going? Was I leaving the woods, or simply making them my home? I didn’t know. But on the best days, I didn’t particularly care.