The Child That Books Built

The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lifelong reading addict guides us through not only his own autobiographical journey, but also through the wild geography of children's literature, from Little House on the Prairie to Narnia and beyond.

This has to be hands-down my favorite books about the reading life, which is why I reread it this year. It's not your typical autobiography, nor your typical reading life journey. Spufford is much more interested in the movement of the human mind from childhood to adolescence, and he brings a panoply of deeply literary references to bear on the subject. His style is reminiscent of my other favorite essayists, particularly Annie Dillard (if you haven't read her and love gorgeously written science essays, start with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, though her other collections are also excellent).

Spufford starts with a dense discussion of the universal psychology of child development, moving from Freud and Jung to Piaget. Each of the next three sections is about a different type of encounter with literature - the pure joy of entering Narnia, with a thoughtful and nuanced take on C.S. Lewis's fervently sensualist Christianity; an Englishman's perspective of America, informed by encounters with Laura Ingalls Wilder and To Kill a Mockingbird; and an adolescence where his reading arc moved from children's literature to science fiction (like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness) to the metafiction of Jorges Luis Borges and Italo Calvino (two of my favorite writers).

In fact, his childhood reading life so closely mirrors my own that it felt spooky to read the journey of someone who was born a continent and an ocean away, who is roughly the age of my parents, and male - but who read the same books with many of the same emotions. (He only read other books after the discovery of Narnia, he says, because there were only seven Narnia books and he couldn't be constantly rereading them.) Of course, I did not have a sister with a devastating disease, either, or have to wrestle with the complex guilt he felt at his instinctive reaction to her illness.

Spufford is what Nancy Pearl would call a story reader, primarily in it for plot, coming to the pleasures of more subtle adult fiction where character and language overcome story and setting much later, and never as a native to the territory. I'm similarly in it to be carried along by a great story or taken to a fascinating new world. Thanks to Spufford I picked up Arthur Ransome's wonderful Swallows and Amazons (it beats even the first The Boxcar Children hollow as a story of childhood independence), and discovered the alternative-history England - chillingly wolf-infested - of Joan Aiken.

It is tempting to simply spin out title after title of the great books he discusses with such clarity and insight, but I'll resist and instead pepper you with quotations. I was amazed, since it's been so long since I first read this, at how many of his insights and opinions I have internalized without remembering their source. One of the dangers of reading great essayists: your mental landscape will never be the same.

Quotable:
On learning to read
The formerly sacred nature of books

"Compared to the books I was used to, and was growing out of, grown-up literature seemed spectacularly open-ended. I would read a few pages, and there would seem to be no edges and limits to what was going on; no sense of an evolving shape, and so no urgency, and no particular reason to read on. Of course, the reformulating jump into adult fiction consists exactly of a retuning of your reading mind to those subtler, wider, but still ultimately decisive cues to meaning that a writer for adults constructs in the expectation that the person reading will bring an active, participatory judgment to the task. No book is truly open-ended." - 170

On science fiction genre reading in his teens:
"Some of it was frankly bad. Some of it was good on one point only - one idea, one invention - and the whole of the rest of the novel existed only as a scaffolding to hold that one good thing in place. And some of it was 'good' in a purely efficient way, because it worked out a daft premise sleekly. So what. Who cares. Good books are so often committed to self-denial of one sort or another. They make their fictional world real by making it austere; they hammer events into proportion, and subdue them with probabilities." - 178

"Sensible, probable books keep sending you back where you came from. It's the wild and tacky ones that let you see further into the world you do not yet know. It's the books that dispense with rigor and proportion that let your imagination billow out, and go exploring. They give you time, space, empire, power; an existence answerable to your wishes as your own really is not. Their freedom from what really is becomes your freedom, very directly. They give you scope." - 178

Quotable: The Child That Books Built

"When I caught mumps, I couldn't read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together. Primary schools in Britain now sometimes send home a photocopy of a page of Russian or Arabic to remind parents of that initial state when writing was a wall of spiky unknowns, an excluding briar hedge. By the time I reached The Hobbit's last page, though, writing had softened and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a change in the medium. In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing - an object in the world - and become a medium, a substance you look through."

- Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, pages 64-65

Quotable: The Child That Books Built

"Once books were sacred, literally: the regime of reading was set by the experience of reading scripture. But in the secular times of the last three centuries, which brought us printed words on every subject, print to screw into a ball and flip away after a single reading sometimes, the promise of revelation has splintered, and the splinters have fallen separately, without losing all of their original brightness. One smithereen (at least) has glimmered in the novel. With its conventions that mimic the three dimensions of the world off the page, and its simulation of time passing as measured by experience's ordinary clocks, we hope it can bring a fully uttered clarity to the living we do, which is, we know, so hard to disentangle and articulate."

- Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

Maps and Legends

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon writes about genres, comics, fan fiction, tricksters, writing, maps, and golems in this engaging collection of essays.

I'm a sucker for books about books, books about reading, books about writing. So it's no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of Chabon's accessible nonfiction essays. Along the way he stops to argue with the scorn heaped on genre fiction, read some comic books, discuss ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes, and talk about a controversial article on Yiddish that was the germ of his magical realist novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (see the NYT article for more details).

I especially liked "On Daemons & Dust", where Chabon discusses Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy with great insight (it's a trilogy I have mixed feelings about and was happy to read a thoughtful analysis of - I acknowledge the greatness of its inventions, particularly daemons and the alethiometer, but the third book was venomously anti-Christian and spoiled my enjoyment of the series). I was also drawn in by the final essay "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon" where Chabon mixes truth and fiction and ties the themes of the book together.

One tiny quibble: this is the librarian in me speaking, but I am a little sad there's no index to help me re-find some of the many authors and books he mentions in passing.

Chabon's love of literature shines through clearly, and those who want a good introduction to his work should check out his 2001 Pulitzer novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or his most recent book, Telegraph Avenue. For more great essays on reading and literature, I highly recommend Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built.

Quotable:

"A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are all good things; but a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything in connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing of its nethermost edge." - 94

"The mass synthesis, marketing, and distribution of versions and simulacra of an artificial past, perfected over the last thirty years or so, has ruined the reputation and driven a fatal stake through the heart of nostalgia. Those of us who cannot make it from one end of the street to another without being momentarily upended by some fragment of outmoded typography, curve of chrome fender, or whiff of lavender oil from the pate of a semi-retired neighbor are compelled by the disrepute into which nostalgia has fallen to mourn secretly the passing of a million marvelous quotidian things." - 135

The Lost Art of Reading

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David L. Ulin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a book-length meditation on reading which started out life as this editorial in the L.A. Times. As essays do, it wanders through the author's own experiences and political ideas. Fortunately, he's not a Luddite and accepts e-reading as reading, and even considers that reading on the Internet may also be real reading: his point is that we have lost the ability of paying sustained attention to anything, particularly books.

Interesting premise, but I'm not sure this expansion is an improvement of the original essay. It doesn't cover new ground, and it doesn't retread the old territory better than other books of this type. An exceptional reading memoir is Francis Spufford's lovely The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading.

Ulin makes good points about the drawbacks of ebook technology, points I've heard before: limited selection (you can find Faulkner now!), readers' inability to share ebooks, censorship and the threat a monopoly poses to our shared cultural heritage. Ebooks can close up our reading choices, unlike the openness of books on shelves that your friends can see and comment upon. (I've had some great conversations at my bookshelves, but rarely around my Nook and never around my iPad.) Also, reading books on a device like an iPad invites distraction - and I suppose I proved Ulin's point by being distracted as I read by looking up the books and articles he mentions while at the same time taking notes for this review.

Further reading:

Ulin mentions the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr (another book that began life as an essay, this one for the Atlantic Monthly).

Everyone interested in information and libraries should read Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Library of Babel"! Borges' story may be magical realism, but the slim So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid (translated by Natasha Wimmer) reveals our book-glutted reality and may make you rethink your relationship to your "To Read" list.

Quotations:

• "How do we pause when we must know everything in an instant? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?" - 78
• "In December 2009, a study by the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego, found that, 'in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillions hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.' One hundred thousand words is the equivalent of a three-hundred-page novel, and it's encouraging to learn that we all read that much." - 81
• "For the culture, though, books serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, bigger than mere commerce, not only to be bought and sold. When we can't share them, directly, one-to-one, our common informational heritage is compromised." - 123