How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [QUINDLEN, ANNA]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76352-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you’ll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union.

—EDWARD ALBEE

IN 1997 KATHERINE Paterson, whose novel Bridge to Terebithia has engaged several generations of young people with its story of friendship and loss—and also led to a policy in a school district in Kansas requiring a teacher to list each profanity in required reading and forward the list to parents—gave the Anne Carroll Moore Lecture at the New York Public Library. It was a speech as fine as Ms. Paterson’s books, which are fine indeed, and she spoke of the dedication of the children who are her readers: “I increasingly feel a sense of pity toward my fellow writers who spend their lives writing for the speeded-up audience of adults. They look at me, I realize, with a patronizing air, I who only write for the young. But I don’t know any of them who have readers who will read their novels over and over again.”

As someone who reads the same books over and over again, I think Ms. Paterson is wrong about that, although I know what she means. I have sat on the edge of several beds while Green Eggs and Ham was read, or recited more or less from memory; I read A Wrinkle in Time three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn’t bear for it to end, wanted them all, Meg and Charles Murry and even the horribly pulsing brain called It, to be alive again as they could only live within my mind, so that I felt as if I killed them when I closed the cover and gave them the kiss of life when my eyes met the words that created their lives. I still reread that way, always have, always will. I suspect there are more of us than Ms. Paterson knows. And I think I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

For some of us, reading begets rereading, and rereading begets writing. (Although there is no doubt which is first, and supreme; as Alberto Manguel writes in his wonderful A History of Reading, “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading.”) After a while the story is familiar, the settings known, the characters understood, and there is nothing left to discover but technique. Why that sentence structure and not something simpler, or more complex? Why that way of ordering events instead of something more straightforward, or more experimental? What grabs the reader by the throat? What sags and bags and fails? There are only two ways, really, to become a writer.

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