I spend a lot of time thinking about the art of writing. When I write, I am caught in a certain wonder about how my thoughts find their way into the thoughts of others. Writing mystifies me.
Even more mystifying is the art of reading. I observe the rapid psychological shifts my mind goes through when I'm reading something good. It is like watching a master equestrian put a stallion through its paces: the slightest nudge moves the horse, speeds it, slows it down. There are times when one is similarly ridden by text. The mind under the book's influence becomes nimble, and dangerously receptive.
Regardless of a book's genre, the process by which the reading mind is altered is strikingly similar. In our time, the novel reigns, and as a form it is particularly available for these flights of fantasy. The novel is culturally specific, and though today we have long-form prose fictions from all corners of the world, they are all responses to an art that developed in Europe. This shouldn't be controversial, though every now and again we see nativist novelists who claim zero European influence; this is as absurd as an Afrobeat band in New York saying it has no African influence.
The novel settled into the form we are familiar with sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. It hasn't changed much since then, and the novels written today retain striking similarities to the works of Austen, Zola, Fontane and Flaubert. The readership has also retained a certain bias: more women read novels than do men. Dickens' practice of serialising his novels isn't common anymore, and the long and winding tales he, John Galsworthy and George Eliot wrote are rarer now. That is an important change. But the core of the form remains: the physical setting of a story, the plot (however faint), the evocation of a psychological interiority, and the journey through the narrator's or lead character's mind.
Neither epic nor lyric poetry is like this, nor are works written for the theatre, with exceptions. For so subtle an art as fictional prose is, I often think, there should be a commitment to a correspondingly subtle response. We don't read novels simply to gain information about the world. In fact, in a world awash in facts, the good novelist specialises in withholding facts. The good reader learns to enjoy those missing facts.
"To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life," Orhan Pamuk writes. I know what he's talking about. I always have a good book near at hand, never farther away than the invalid's oxygen tank is from her or the nicotine addict's crumpled carton is from him. Like any self-respecting bibliomane, I'm always in search of the next high.
Now, I'll admit I am singularly unqualified to deliver a coherent theory of reading. I am not a professor of English. I have never taken a literature class, not even when I was in secondary school, and certainly not in university where, for one reason or another, I avoided any class that involved analyses of literary works. The result of this is that almost every novel I've ever read, I've read because it pleased me to do so. I did not, as Mark Twain once put it, let school interfere with my education.
My education in literature was self-directed. School was a means of access to libraries or the forum for meeting the classmates from whom I borrowed books or with whom I shared exciting discoveries. There have been downsides to this autodidactic approach. Reading for pleasure has often meant that I read only what I want, when I want. That doesn't sound so bad, but in practice it means that I leave many books unfinished, and many more unstarted. There are gaping holes in my literary knowledge.
These omissions would trouble a more responsible reader. For me, they are facts of life, acceptable to me, and enjoyed. I have returned to favourite books five times over, reading them all the way through each time. Meanwhile, I have failed to pass page twenty of some wonderful novels, having experienced such a deep satisfaction in reading part of the book that it has seemed pointless to me to continue all the way to the end.
This is how I always wish to approach reading: guiltlessly, joyously, freely, with only the sense of responsibility I have imposed on myself. I won't read a book simply because the author is Nigerian, or because the writer in question is famous, or was nice to me at a party, or just won a prize.
Reading, as an art, sometimes comes down to nosing out a sympathetic imagination to spend a few hours with. On my desk as I write these words are books by a pair of very different writers: the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani, and the French philosopher Michel Serres' The Five Senses. Opening either book, I feel a relaxation similar to that of setting out on the open road, and a flood of gratitude not unlike the one that accompanies that first splash of fresh-brewed coffee at the back of the throat on a winter's morning.
I, the reader, watch the writer with a sniper's patience. I follow every twitch and gesture, not merely as a fellow scribbler on high alert for tricks worth stealing, but as a humble reader seeking to deepen my pleasure in the work. Vladimir Nabokov once said that, in writing, he aimed to produce "that little sob in the spine of the reader-artist."
The "reader-artist": it acknowledges a collaboration. The thinker-writer has done substantial work. With pliancy, dedication, patience, skepticism, incredible stubbornness, and a childlike happiness, the reader-artist adds her own. Reading slows down to the pace of writing. Reading becomes a form of rewriting.
The mystery of reading is precisely in this meeting of minds. Perhaps the equestrian analogy I made earlier is inapt. A better image might be that of a pair of Eid rams racing towards each other at great speed and slamming heads. Yes, I like that better. There are great writers, and there are great readers, and a great book is what happens when the two collide.