Thoughts on Books

 “In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. .... Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.” (p. 2)  CS Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

My previous blogging forays have been for the most part book-oriented (see here and here and here) and this one probably will be no exception.    In reference to CS Lewis's quote above, I do a lot of "reading only once" and I think there is a value to this.   Many scholars, including CS Lewis himself,  have obviously read very widely, and draw from a variety of sources, which indicates that they know how to read in such a way that the new material is organized in their mental library and can be employed in future.   Part of this mental organization, I would say, is a matter of what they have consciously stocked in their minds.     

CS Lewis also said:

I rather doubt whether a list of masterpieces picked from all over the world–mostly, I presume to be read in translations?–is a v. useful thing. I would rather see young men beginning from where they are and being led on from one thing to another: e.g. that Milton shd. lead them either to Virgil and Homer (and therefore to a really serious study of Latin or Greek) or to Dante (and therefore to a whole course of Medieval and Italian studies). That, after all, is how every educated person’s development has actually come about.

I think most people who read a lot strike a balance between what Ignatians called "lectio cursiva" and "lectio stataria" .   Mortimer Adler's book How to Read a Book might be helpful here.    

 When I was a child, I reread some books multiple times, partly because they were the only books I had available and partly because I loved them and every time I reread them, I found them different because I was different.   Looking back at this now, I am heartily grateful for the fact that I had a smallish stock of what John Senior calls "Good Books" to come back to again and again.   

I also had the opportunity, at least at some times in my young life, to read in inquiring trails as CS Lewis describes above.    Here I will insert one more Lewis quote -- though the circumstances were different in my life, the details were somewhat similar:

“I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

What Lewis says about his father's library is true in endless multiplication as a result of the internet and digital print.   A reader could skim books 24/7 for the rest of my life and never come to the end.  So as an adult, there is a selection process.  In my case, I generally start reading a book because it seems like the next step in some way, whether the next available book in a mystery series, or a useful commentary upon a topic of interest, or a manual of how to do something.    After reading, or at least making an effort to read the book, one puts it down and makes a decision whether it belongs in the mental vestibule, or in the mental library.  If it makes it to the library,  that is when rereading happens, and sometimes it's a matter of reading it cover to cover for a second or third time, while sometimes it's a matter of consulting it for a point or argument you remember but not well enough. 

Maybe another way to think about it is to make an analogy with the Parable of the Sower.    The parable is referring to the Evangelium, of course, but most habitual readers are, in some way, looking for that

far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.

How a book is perceived by a reader, how it is assimilated and bears fruit, will vary depending not just on the soil and climate and work of the reader at that time, but also partly on the innate power of the book in itself.     CS Lewis talks at one point, perhaps also in An Experiment in Criticism, about the reader who is better than the book he reads and ennobles it.   The example he uses is the young boy who reads some strictly third rate adventure story but because of something in him, it takes on more meaning than it actually has.   

Most readers, in their lives, read a lot of books that don't really in their nature bear much fruit in the mind.   Perhaps they are strictly topical, perhaps they are standard thrillers, perhaps they are banal self-help books that you read just to get encouragement and a useful tip or two.    For example, for several years recently I read very little beyond mystery series (British procedurals by choice, but others if I couldn't find my preferences).    Many of them were competent, some were very close to literary.   I could imagine rereading a couple of them, but at this stage in my life probably won't.     Maybe up in the heavenly archive, if I should be so blessed.