Keep your fancy free — reading at whim
Fifty years ago this year, I dropped out of graduate school and my studies in medieval history, and set off in a different direction. I’ve never forgotten the thought that came rolling along right behind my escape from academia: “Now I can finally read whatever I want.”
Middle school, high school, college: all feature book lists in the liberal arts, a course of reading often required of the students. At their best, these lists equip students with a broad selection of the best of literature, history and philosophy.
Not everyone is happy with this enforced reading. Diploma in hand, these are the graduates who declare, “Now I never have to read a book again.” Feeling poisoned by print and paper, they prefer screens: television, movies, phones.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are those graduates determined to keep reading books of import, both new and old. Probably few of these men and women follow some rigid lifetime reading program, but they remain devotees of fiction, history, biography, philosophy and so on. Some are doubtless motivated by a true love of learning for learning’s sake, some for reasons of intellectual one upmanship, the superiority of having twice gotten through Joyce’s “Ulysses” while their neighbor immerses herself in romance novels.
In “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (Oxford University Press, 2011, 172 pages), Alan Jacobs encourages those who shy away from books to take a stab at reading while urging those who already read to dive a bit more deeply into why and what they read. Jacobs’ tone and approach are wise and friendly as he discusses the pleasures and difficulties of reading, and an array of tangential subjects like libraries, the value of silence, and book clubs.
One point that hit home with me involved Jacobs’ thoughts on the written word and whim, the act of picking up a book in a library or a shop, browsing the cover and a few lines, and, upon finding pleasure there, taking it home.
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In this circumstance, that young person who detested reading in high school may do a complete 180 as an adult. Jacobs cites the case of Cathleen Schine, who in an essay for The ‘New York Times’ described herself as a teenage illiterate. Several years later, in a bag left in her closet by an ex-boyfriend, she found a copy of Charles Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend,” which she decided to read on a whim. She then writes, “A few days later I emerged from that exquisite book and cursed myself for wasting so much of my life doing things other than what God in all his wisdom clearly meant for me to do for the rest of my life: read Dickens.”
Derived from whim-wham, a word of unknown origin, whim can be a lovely act of caprice, particularly when applied to books. Recently, for instance, I picked up on a whim Brad Thor’s 2008 thriller “The Last Patriot” (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2021, 336 pages) from the freebie shelf at my public library. Though I’d sworn off Thor’s ongoing saga of special agent Scott Harvath after reading a couple of the novels in this series, the blurb for “The Last Patriot” somehow rekindled my interest. Whim did its work, and soon I was deep into the story of Harvath and other federal agents trying to break up an Islamist terrorism ring in the U.S. Here I also learned a few bits of history from the back-and-forth discussions of Islam, and the passages on Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars.
As the pages flew by, however, I remembered what I disliked about Thor’s novels. For one, stories littered with corpses without apparent consequences soon become unrealistic and therefore, unbelievable. For another, Harvath and some of the other characters are clearly operating outside of federal law, with the CIA battling terrorists while on U.S. soil. Given the many transgressions of our government against private citizens in the 21st century, this part of the story should sound warning bells rather than spark admiration for these vigilantes.
Whim also grants readers the right to put a book down unfinished. About the time I picked up “The Last Patriot,” I stumbled across Maryanne Wolf’s 2019 “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” (Harper Paperbacks, 2019, 288 pages). This side of our electronic culture fascinates me, affected as I am personally, like so many others, by the manner in which digitalized screens are changing how we think and focus.
Acting on impulse, I checked the book out of the library and began reading. Midway through the second chapter, with its analysis of the “reading brain” and how it works, I stopped and returned the book. For one, I wasn’t really interested in Wolfe’s technical descriptions of the act of reading vis-à-vis the brain, but even more, I lacked the intelligence to follow some of her arguments and descriptions. Closer study might have produced better results, but I gave up. A man in his mid-70s should take seriously the expenditure of his time, and learning how the brain processes the printed word was absent from my bucket list.
So, caprice in reading, just as in life, is not always profitable. Nevertheless, I’ll continue to obey, and to encourage others to do likewise, the grand recommendation from writer Randall Jarrell which Jacobs includes in his book: “So I say to you, for a closing sentence, ‘Read at whim! Read at whim!’”
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings;” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
