I’m bringing reading back

I am a reader. Not professionally, though I have always dreamed of having a career as one of those people who reads aloud for books-on-tape audio recordings.

But for now anyway, I’m a recreational reader. I read short stories, poems, novels, blogs and self-help manuals. I used to wonder where all the other readers were, when I’d go to the library and find that I was the only person there who didn’t live on the street corner outside of it. Maybe that’s just Santa Monica, but it scared me.

Since then, I have found more and more fellow readers (I’m up to five total), and not all of them are even English students. With this great big group of readers wanting to talk about books and find out about new books, I began to notice the absence of a real forum for such talk.

Suddenly, it occurred to me ““ the Daily Bruin doesn’t even cover books. I couldn’t believe how long it took me to notice this fact. Since then, it’s been explained to me, and it does make sense that it would be difficult to ask writers to read a whole book and review it in the time one is given for a story assignment.

We’ll occasionally profile an author or a poet (I have written about poetry readings at the Hammer Museum), but that’s about all we have time for. To make up for this sad deficit, I plan to personally read and review every book on the National Book Award list for 2009.

Or I did plan to, until I found out that there were 1,129 books on that list this year. If I can’t do that, I’d still like to make this a forum for topics of literary interest, which are also, at best, topics of cultural interest.

To convince you that this might actually be worth doing, I first turned to Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” I thought he’d be a viable source, because he’s not some depressed poet with hermitic tendencies living at Walden Pond, out of touch with modern reality. He’s a former corporate executive at General Foods with a master’s in business administration from Stanford. If poetry matters in his world, it must matter everywhere.

Trudging through the first 18 pages, however, I found only reasons why poetry and literary readership has declined dramatically in the past few decades. How can I argue in favor of reading (other than proudly displaying a “Reading is Sexy” pin on my backpack) if I’m the only one who does it anymore?

While I am tempted to blame lazy citizens who would rather watch TV or play a video game, Gioia blames the poets themselves. Professor-poets who turn out mediocre sludge in their need to publish prolifically and the uninteresting way it’s presented are chief culprits.

As a result, the only people reading these days are other writers. Not just the Daily Bruin, but nearly all newspapers have given up book coverage, and literature has been reduced to something that’s simply studied in universities, almost as archaic and un-useful as conversational Latin. As one of my creative writing professors said as we discussed the difficulty of getting a coveted spot in a creative writing master’s program, there are more writers than readers these days. Sad times (especially for the aspiring writer).

Finally, on page 19 of Gioia’s essay, there’s a “but.” But, he says, you should care about literature (in so many words). His most engaging contention is that a nation’s language, the way its people speak ““ its clearness, its honesty, its truth ““ is dependent on good literature, not just existing, but being read.

Gioia describes poetry as “the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning” ““ surely in this day and age that’s something we need. I’ve come to blame technology (specifically text messages, e-mailing and Gchat) for my inability to express myself clearly through language, but maybe I just haven’t been reading enough good poetry.

But by far the best argument for reading is stated in the eloquent words of Wallace Stevens: “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” How could we have forgotten that? You may say that you just don’t get that much happiness out of reading, and again, I’m quick to blame you for that.

But Gioia notes that this is because the emphasis is too much on critique, on “close reading” as we English students call it, on dissecting a piece of literature so exhaustively that it’s no longer any fun to read. Especially considering that you can easily love a poem without fully understanding it, maybe it’s better not to scrutinize poems beyond recognition. Take up reading not as a chore, not to help you say smart things in conversation, but just to enjoy it.

I hope to show you in this column, over the next two quarters, that reading can be fun and can raise a lot of interesting issues worth exploring. “Moby Dick” and “Lolita” are more relevant to your life than you’d think.

I couldn’t think of a better call to read than Gioia’s closing words in “Can Poetry Matter?” so I’ll leave it to him: “Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.” Shall we?

“Fictions” runs every other Thursday.

E-mail Bastien at [email protected].