on reading

Another half-week, another half-post ...

I'm heading to Florida tomorrow to work at the Academic Bowl's Southeast regional competition. It should be a fun outing -- it's my home state, after all, and it's hosted at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, a school I've visited many times. Of course, the town we're going to, St. Augustine, is, by some estimations, anywhere from four to six hours from my actual hometown, so no triumphal return for this good ol' boy. It's okay -- I'll be busy.

In any case, I'm on a little Italo Calvino kick after finishing If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (final verdict: great read but likely to require several attempts first), so I'm deep into Why Read the Classics?, which is a collection of his literary essays. He discusses works ranging from Pliny the Elder's Natural History (we have two volumes; the rest are held by other Consortium schools) to Cyrano de Bergerac's hilarious The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon (the linked record goes to our own copy of a combined edition of this book and its sequel, Voyages to the States of the Sun) to Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Calvino turns out to be a pretty entertaining, thoughtful, and extraordinarily well-read critic; he reviews some works I haven't read or even heard of -- and makes me want to read them, too. He's got a little slant towards Italian literature, which is understandable, given that he's Italian himself. It's also a terrifically well-written book, generated by an author who knows what he's doing and fully understands what he's looking at.

In general, though, I have so far gotten the impression that the essays contained in this book are more useful for figuring out why Calvino reads the classics than why you should read the classics. He makes use of a fairly high-level literary vocabulary that would probably leave most people a little lost, so it's not much of a book to read if you aren't already a strong reader -- in which case, you probably don't actually need the book. This seems to be a fault on the part of the publisher or editor, though, not Calvino; those essays were collected posthumously from various introductions, prefaces, and articles he wrote over the course of thirty years. None of them were written with the express purpose of convincing Joe Six-Pack that he should read some Voltaire between NASCAR races.

Still, it's got me asking myself why I read. It's been a topic of some debate over the past few years, especially when the subject of my age comes up (hint: I was young enough to really appreciate Power Rangers when the very first episode aired); the prevailing opinion seems to be that not very many people under the age of 30 read at all (see The Age of American Unreason and The Dumbest Generation), and that I'm somehow an aberration because I actually like to read. Our Library director suggested months ago that I do at least one post about why I like to read so much, so I guess I'll grab the opportunity to do so right now.

So.

The reason why I read -- and read so much, at that -- is fairly simple: I developed the habit early and reinforced it often. I read at the dinner table, in the car, on the school bus, waiting for the dentist, and before I went to bed at night. I exhausted my preferred genre at the local public library -- science fiction -- sometime in high school and moved on to other subjects and have ended up reading anything that grabs my eye.

I mean anything. One of my favorite professors in graduate school -- she taught cataloging and classification, the stuff that determines what call number ends up on a book's spine and what you see in ALADIN Discovery -- said the same motto at least once in every class session for all three semesters that I had her: Never apologize for your choice of reading material. This rather neatly encapsulates my approach to books.

As a reader, I read whatever I can get my hands on. As a librarian, I don't judge people for the choices they make in what they check out. The same is true for the other librarians working here at the Gallaudet University Library and pretty much any other librarian you'll ever meet. If you want to read Mein Kampf, go ahead and check it out. It's a little meandering -- Adolf wasn't the most coherent thinker at the best of times -- but an interesting read.

As far as the classics are concerned, I do think everyone should read at least a few. Not because you should so everyone thinks you're smart, but so you can see how little human nature has changed over thousands of years. It also expands your horizons a little bit on a couple of levels: first, you'll encounter words and ways of saying things that haven't been around for a long time, so you'll gain the benefit of finding out how different the world can be, depending on how it's said or written -- and maybe even learn how to apply this practically in your approach to the world, your job, and your relationships with others. Second, it really does let you look at the world through different eyes in different places and different times. It's the benefit of experience; 19th-Century Britain looks very different from the way it is today, and you can find out how by reading Dickens. The same goes for Greece through Aristotle, China through Sun Tzu, and, yes, the United States through Washington Irving or Mark Twain.

Ovid's Metamorphoses lets you see the Greek myths in their plainest forms, whether through the eyes of the goddess Athena competing with Arachne on the loom or Pyramus as he whispers to Thisbe through a hole in the wall. Cyrano's States and Empires of the Moon -- or Voltaire's Candide, for that matter -- shows you that the French of the 18th Century were funny. Pliny's Natural History lets you see a magical Greece where unlikely creatures coexist with the animals we know well today.

Above all, reading the classics will let you see that a lot of the problems we struggle with today have been around for a very long time. That we're still around today speaks volumes about us as a species, most of which is good.

That seems to cover things pretty well. Next week's post will appear on Thursday, as I'm again out of town next Friday -- busy guy, I am -- and we'll talk a little more about our Deaf Research Help page.