Quality of Reading

After reading interviews with Zadie Smith and essays by her, and being impressed with how sharp and interesting she is, I finally -- finally -- got around to reading On Beauty. I liked it very much; this novel has sophistication and depth. It is the story of two black families -- one mostly American and one British; one liberal, one mostly conservative -- who intersect at a small liberal arts college near Boston. The book takes on the culture wars, black identity, class issues, love and fidelity, and, of course, beauty.
Playing alongside the novel for me, though, has been Smith's essay on the importance of reading. Her analogy of a violinist playing a composer's work haunts me, because I play the violin, and I know there are diligent ways to practice and sloppy ways to practice. It makes me wonder, am I reading sloppily? Am I doing justice to the work I'm reading?
I've often thought that I sometimes read books too fast to really enjoy and even digest them. Books that I find to be clearly and simply written are books that I read fast -- books like Harry Potter and authors like John Grisham and Anne Rice. With Harry Potter, I've noticed myself reading about half of each sentence, getting the gist of where it's going, and skipping to the next sentence. (I suspect that's what most speed readers do.) But even books that are written with a more complex style, sometimes I tear through those, too. So lately I've been trying to consciously slow down, to read a little slower, to savor the language more.
But what else do I do that's bad? How about stopping in the middle of the chapter, or even worse, in mid-sentence? I certainly do that sometimes. Isn't that doing harm to the reading of the work to stop at an unnatural stopping point?
So I've been trying to be more respectful in my reading -- not reading right before bed when I'm exhausted, or when I don't have enough time to finish a chapter. It's definitely slowing me down. But hopefully it's making me a better reader, too.

Harry Potter in 2007

I know I'm super late on posting this, but I am so thrilled that the last Harry Potter book will be published this year on July 21, less than 150 days away as of this writing. (You can check the countdown on mighty Mugglenet's homepage.) I was really worried that it wouldn't come out until 2008.
These books are fanciful and funny, and impossible to put down. Each chapter ends in a way specially designed to irresistibly (literally!) lure you on, until you've fin shed the whole darn thing. In some ways, they are like literary heroin. They get a powerful grip on you.
I made a pact with myself after seeing the third Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was quite good) that I wouldn't watch anymore of the movies until I had finished reading the whole series. I don't like the movie images in my head when I read the books. So far, so good.

Flannery O'Connor Pilgrimage

The New York Times has a marvelous travel story about visiting the birth place of Flannery O'Connor. It's very much worth reading if like her. Hurray for the writer, Lawrence Downes! I love the way he encapsulates the O'Connor body of work. He writes:

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.
Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.

I also got a real kick out of how my friend L. sent me an email about the story, noting that it included our friend J.'s favorite line from a Flannery O'Connor story. She didn't even have to include the line. I knew exactly which one she meant: “She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Read the whole NYT story here.