Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Is literature (reading) dead?

No, I don’t think so. I think it is more alive than ever. Only it has taken different forms and different media and devices.

I just finished reading The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin. In the beginning of the book, the author tries to motivate his son to read. The son rejects reading and when asked why, he says it is because literature is dead. The author wonders about that throughout the book.

While I found the book and the author’s ideas very interesting and some of them very close to my way of thinking, I think people do read today and a lot; maybe they do it differently, and not in the way the author reads or some people read or I read or Pat Conroy reads, as there are many references to Conroy’s My Reading Life.

On the other hand, one passage described exactly why I read and what literature does to people. ”This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that, for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the fullest sense.” The way the author expressed what I always felt was just beautiful.

The book also touches many different areas and different situations in our time from classics like Joyce to politics to daily living to electronic media. He is ambivalent about the electronic media, unlike me. I applaud the new media, e-books and everything in it. It opened doors for me I didn’t know existed.

This book also made me realize a few things about myself. One of them was Hermann Goering’s statement at Nuremberg. I have so hated the Nazis that I refused to read anything or listen to anything about them. Their victims and how they stood under cruelty, I would read, but not about the Nazis themselves. Maybe I should.

After stating that no matter what the regime is the people are under, Goering says the common people don’t want war. The way to incite them to war (in Goering’s exact words) is: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

OMG! History surely has repeated itself. I suppose inspecting the dark things and how and why they operate the way they do has some merit to it.

Leaving the nasty people’s comments, though applicable they may be to situations after their time, I’m going to jump to the author’s another profound comment on reading. “Reader becomes the book.”

How many times, after finishing a book we like, do we walk around carrying the book inside our heads and feel we are one with the characters and the situations in it!

While reading The Lost Art of Reading, I sometimes agreed with the author, sometimes not, but I thoroughly appreciated his opinions and the quotations—mostly literary—that he offered. The book is short only 149 pages, yet it deserves stopping here and there for reflection.

Rarely I read a worthwhile book that discusses the one thing I love doing the most: reading. This one was a very pleasant experience.