You Can't Just Use a Book Like That, Or Can You?

I read some lady's blog the other day and it pissed me off. If I felt like being nice about it, and considerate of my readers, I would say instead that it angered me. Poor lady. I'm certain, absolutely certain, that she is a very nice lady, but she unblushingly stated that she often doesn't finish reading books. Sometimes she just reads them until she's gotten what she wants from them. What she wants from them? I thoroughly disapprove.

I preceded to post on facebook that I don't like people, and have decided to become a misanthrope. It made my husband laugh, especially when I tried to use every form of the world I could think of. "Are you amused by my misanthropy? Isaac, I am going to put you down for your nap now because I am feeling very misanthropic."

Before you walk away in dread of incurring the wrath of Kelly because you don't finish every book you read either, I will tell you that I do not typically judge those people who I know and interact with in the same way as I would some nice lady I have never seen or corresponded with. I also acknowledge that there is such a thing as a legitimate reason for reading only part of any given book.

The thing that I think bothered me about this woman was the idea that she could start a book, presumably from the beginning and make the sovereign determination that she had gotten all she needed or desired from the author. It didn't for one moment occur to me that she may engage in careful examination before making the decision to move on. The way I interpreted what she said bothers me because it indicates certain assumptions about reading which I can neither agree with or condone, and because I have this peculiar conviction that I haven't really read a book unless I've read it's every word. "I've read that," I might say, but I have to add the qualifier that I read the abridged version, or that I only read the chapters on forgiveness, or that I skipped fifty pages of philosophy at the end. I'd have to explain why I'd read part but not all. I couldn't bear to give the impression that I knew the book if I hadn't taken the proper space and time to get to know it.

So now I have to talk about what I consider the legitimate reasons for reading only part of a book, and I have to explain what that underlying assumption was that I referenced before. I have to tell you that, yes, it is okay if you get half-way through a book and decide not to finish it, as if you needed my permission to do so. I have to confess that I have done the same. These will be the subjects of another day. Want to know how I know? Because I think that if I stopped trying to write about reading and writing I might combust, and that wouldn't be of benefit to anybody, though it might make an interesting experiment.

Brain Barf: The Beginnings of Letters I Shall Never Write

Dear Heather, My parents met you this past weekend at a Christian Faculty Retreat, and suggested that I contact you with my questions about blogging. I have questions about blogging. Because all my life I thought I wanted to be a writer, but never really got to spend all that much time on it, and now I'm 34 years old and hardly know how to write more than a paragraph or two on any given subject. I have some natural ability, which has probably only held me back because I haven't had to develop the congruent discipline. Complain, complain, whine...

Dear David, If I ever find your email address, I may drop you a line and go into all sorts of rambling detail beginning with how I first started listening to your wife, Sarah's, music in college and thought it wasn't very good at first. The first time I heard her CD it was on a cheap CD player, the kind that plugged into a cassette player, a cassette player that had been inexpertly spliced into the wiring of my dad's car. It was a tape deck that was clamped to the underside of the hatch-back's center console, not sophisticated in any way and with terrible speakers. You know I was grateful to have it, the cassette player I mean, but I was on my way to a building site, the day I first heard your wife's CD, a building site where I was supposed to be taking photos for a photo journal, assigned in a class that was about Technical Drawing and Light Construction for Interior Design students. Only later did I realize that the reason I didn't think it was very good was because it was in fact very good, only something I had not been prepared by my other listening to enjoy, particularly that Victoria Williams song, "Love," which I don't mind telling you was strange the first half a dozen times I heard her sing it. Later my husband, a terrible music snob, and a jazz player, somehow agreed that of the music I listened to before I met him, Sarah Masen's second CD, Carry Us Through, was among the good ones. In other words, I read your book because of a vicarious relationship I have with your wife's music, and now I want to know why you do what you do, and maybe who else does it, because while I didn't much enjoy your political commentary, I liked your book very, very much.

Most of this came out of me in a rush sometime last week, and while these are messages I shall never send to the parties to whom they are addressed, I am glad I wrote them because they relieved some of the pressure I was feeling to communicate with others who are doing things that I may someday get the chance to do. Maybe someday I will actually write that letter to Lauren Winner that I've been thinking about ever since I first read her material on confession in Girl Meets God.