----

Two facts:

First, I am a slow reader. It used to bother me, at least a little. I used to think of my reading speed as a dieficit, that I'd never really mastered that skill of racing through the SRA cards in school to impress the teacher and to gain the glory of the highest colors of achievement. I read quickly to gain points and recognition, but I never read that way at any otheer time. Now, I read far more slowly, almost ploddingly, and will not rush. In fact, as a reader, i am incapable of rushing.)

Second, I dream more often, and dream more richly, when I read writing that has substance, that provokes deep thinking, thinking on several levels. It's as if reading rich imaginative writing, especially prose, triggers my subconscious mind as well as my waking mind." (True, these dreams are often troubled, full of slippery juxtapositions and jumpcuts between the psychic core and emotional anchors. In a dream, sense is blurred, but a language of fragments and associations creates a powerful feeling tone, slippages, possibilities, a deep grammar...)





First of all, Schwartz explores more about reading, reading as an act of self-formation, than she does about a life in books. All the better, If this were simply a book about her reading life, one can imagine how familiar it might have become. Another memoir constructed by reading great books.

But Schwartz writes more about the act of reading, the unfolding, growing process of reading, how she became the quirky, particular reader she is, without drowning us in sympathetic raptures with the characters or the authors. She writes about how reading "intereferes" with her thinking, how seeking out the voices and world constructed by writers develops her, invites her to grow.

What is delightful is that Schwatrz discusses misreadings, errors, mistakes, failures of imagination: she does not pose herself as a master reader hammering down the classics. Her reading life was eclectic rather than preformulated or precocious, and so it is discovering those moments of particularity, those moments of dense misreading and attempts to understand what was beyond her comprehension, that make the book playful, real, admirable.



I remember trying to read this book seven or eight years ago. The opening was smashing, heady. And then I somehow put the book down, was interrupted by a series of intrusions and distractions, but I faithfully carried that red book around with me, as shhort as it was, in an effort to find time to finish it. I felt guilty, that I had somehow failed the book. I'd lost momentum--some I love when reading, that gathering of a gestalt, a coalescence in which I am trying to do my part--I am playing! --and something I hate to lose! I hate losing the momentum of reading. It's disruptive and seems to pain me, every time I spy the unfinished book, the book laid away or spread face down and never returned to, I wince with a sense of betrayal and shame. I know I carried it with me out of town at least 3 times, once on vacation in a valiant effort to free up reading time, and also on my way to two academic conferences. Eventually I picked it up and plowed through it, somehow missing all of the energy and dash and attraction that had pulled me in the first 30 pages or so.

So I remember that the opening nof the book was powerful, intelligent, smart. And I'd lost out on the rest.

I'd always meant to retrieve the book and give it a solid rereading, so that I coud pull together what I had obviously lost over thee interrupted time.



So yesterday, after completing A History of Walking, I pulled out Ruined by Reading, fully expecting and hoping to get swept away once again by the wonder of Schwatrz's thought and vpice.

It did not take me long. I was hooked by the opening paragraph, the way that she talked about reading and mind. I found that smartness. I committed myself and read as carefully as I could, slowly, so as to enjoy it anew, find her rhythms and textures, and to mark up those spots that I admired or that mademe think.

The opening 30 pages or so were rapturous, exquisite. But, as I moved on and ventured into territory that suggested that I had fallen out of the book in the same area, i realized there was a reason for this "falling out": the rest of the book could not measure up in idea or shape or weight to those opening pages. Her description of her reading life sags. She loses a sense of portraying wonder and delight and challenege. The story she tells of her ascending literacy is a story so familiar to the typical reading memoir that it is not at all distinct. The texts she discusses are not classics, nor does she characterize them as rich moments of being. Too often, the reading is caught between the familar, the banal, and the kind of interesting, like the talk you hear at a party when people have lost their commitment to delighting the listener.

So the book becomes more of a real-life confession without a sense of "story"--there is not punch or shape or dramatic conflict at stake. She is merely a committed, devoted, and dutiful reader. If she grows, we don't feel rhe shape or texture of that mind growing on the page before us. We don't see any conflict or challenge.




So I was disappointed a second time, but in less time. I finished the book this morning, skimming the last half because with every new instance of reading she achieved what I thought I had been guilty of: uninspired discusssion.

Talking about books and reading is not easy. It can quickly slip to effetes sharing aesthetic visions. It can drift into "Have you read...? and "have you read...?"

When reading is at its best, when a reader is at her best, when a writer is at her best, reading is delightfully hypnotic, challenging, difficult, hard, wonderful, electrifying, damning, entertaining, full of awareness. Reading invites us to become something more.

So, re-reading this book, I was delighted by the opening, as i had been several years back, and i was damned glad to find her ideas and thoughts and discover how they influence and speak to me today. But I was sad again with where the book did not go after that. I was waiting.

This is the second straight book I've read that has been at times compelling and then petered out atbn the end. The History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit, is dazzling, fun, insightful, and opens up many ideas, so many possible connections, it makes me better. But the last chapter fizzles. It's as if she, like Schwartz, has lost her ability to write an ending. Both writers commit us to rich thinking. Both fall short at the end, where, typically, most writers struggle to seize our attention.

A book has a finish, a completeness, and drizzling off into a stillness and a silence is a shame. We expect better, especially from those writers who have been able to compel us.

A poem usually has a kicker, a twist, a resolution. Prose requires that, too. A sense of realization, resolution, an invitation to a deeper awareness, a solidifying image or knowledge. A place to stand.