Why Read: Seven Books About Our Passion And Need For Reading

I person written lists for illustration this earlier during each nan years I’ve been penning and giving talks astir why books and reference matter. But I do truthful now pinch expanding urgency arsenic we are inundated by a tsunami of censorship, from book bans to assaults against nan free property and schoolhouse curriculums, nan excising of facts and words from authorities websites (our websites, our history), and attacks connected educators and students. These diabolical onslaughts are further weaponized by nan reckless defunding of technological and aesculapian investigation and nan undermining of nationalist libraries (including nan Library of Congress), museums, and different taste institutions. These shockingly destructive actions are meant to erode intelligence and creator state and dismantle our law rights.

To publication and advocator for books during this situation is simply a mini but not insignificant enactment of resistance. Many of america are taking refuge successful books, uncovering succor and perspective, beauty and truth, flight and connection. In nan memoirs, polemics, and conversations below, writers ardently and incisively attest to really books prevention and prolong them, elucidating our profound request for books and affirming nan request for america to take sides our correct to publication and constitute freely.

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Glory Edim, Gather Me: A Memoir successful Praise of nan Books That Saved Me
(Ballentine Books)

Many of america opportunity that books person saved america by providing perspective, companionship, and sanctuary, but nan predicaments Edim needed thief navigating were exceptionally difficult. The firstborn kid of immigrants from Nigeria, Edim was 5 erstwhile her brother, Maurice, was born; she was 8 erstwhile their parents divided and her mother, a erstwhile coach who taught a very young Edim to read, began moving agelong shifts arsenic a nurse, leaving Edim to attraction for her brother. The siblings reveled successful nan weekends spent pinch their begetter until he abruptly disappeared. Worse yet was her mother’s doomed 2nd matrimony which near Edim responsible for Maurice and a caller babe brother. Not moreover assemblage brought alleviation erstwhile her long-traumatized mother needed care.

From nan start, Edim publication hungrily, searchingly, steeping herself successful “survival stories.” She recovered comfortableness successful Little Women, arsenic person truthful galore book-loving girls and early writers, and inspiration successful Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a caller astir a ten-year-old Black woman successful Mississippi during nan Great Depression. Edim loved some books because, for illustration her, their young female characters “were struggling, they had burdens and responsibilities beyond their years, and they still recovered a measurement to beryllium emotionally fulfilled. They recovered a measurement retired of nan threat that surrounded them.” The much demanding her life became, nan much urgently and astutely Edim read, uncovering her measurement to nan contented and artistry of Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, doorbell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison. Ultimately her ardor for and abiding religion successful literature, particularly penning by Black women poets and writers, inspired her to recovered Well-Read Black Girl, an innovative, impactful, and award-winning nonprofit literate organization.

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading astir Eating, and Eating While Reading
(Picador)

New York Times book professional Garner shares his entwined passions for reference and eating, preferably performed simultaneously, successful this warm, funny, unabashed, quick-footed, and erudite memoir. He originates pinch his formative years successful West Virginia and Florida, wherever he rushed location aft schoolhouse to “gather an armload of newspapers and magazines and room books and paperback novels” and amass an arsenic hefty array of food, diving into it each connected nan surviving room floor. These “combined gluttonies” yet led Garner to “keep a sentry lookout” for writers of each kinds penning astir food, which, he wryly observes, “has not been among literature’s awesome subjects.” His avidity successful collecting nutrient references enables him to deftly harvester delectable quotes, writer anecdotes, and individual experiences for illustration a cook stirring unexpected ingredients into a savory stew.

Critic Seymour Krim coined “upper delicatessen” arsenic a metaphor for his memory, providing nan cleanable title for voracious eater and scholar Garner’s energetic and witty relationship of a emblematic Garner day, from meal to lunch, shopping, a aquatics aliases a nap, drinking, and dinner. Throughout he succinctly considers nutrient arsenic it relates to family, class, and culture, recounts really he became a book critic, and tells stories astir his matrimony to cookbook writer Cree LeFavour. Garner’s depletion swings from accelerated nutrient to farm-to-table, Diet Coke to martinis, while nan mind-blowing array of writers he spotlights encompasses Zola, George Orwell, Jim Harrison, Albert Murray, Gary Shteyngart, Nora Ephron, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Namwali Serpell, and many, galore more.  Garner leaves america bedazzled pinch his unsocial ceremony of eating and nan nutrient for thought reference provides.

Peter Orner, Still No Word from You: Notes successful nan Margins
(Catapult)

Orner is simply a virtuoso of subtlety, nuance, and essence. He approaches moments, memories, and nan emotions they arouse astatine a slant, almost surreptitiously, his reside wistful, pensive. He is besides edgy and witty and sometimes furious. In some his fiction, including nan ravishing short-story postulation Maggie Brown & Others, and his essays, Orner mulls complete his experiences increasing up Jewish successful Chicago and its North Shore suburbs, a milieu rife pinch struggle, longing, anger, secrets, lies, and love. Books are his refuge, arsenic he asserts successful Am I Alone Here? Notes connected Living to Read and Reading to Live (2016) and, somewhat much covertly, Still No Word from You.

Like Garner’s reference memoir, Orner’s is loosely system arsenic a time successful nan life of a writer, but alternatively of pegging it to meals, he marks time, from “Morning” to “Mid-Morning,” “Noon,”“3 P.M.,” “Dusk,” and “Night.” That said, this is really an relationship of a time successful nan mind of a writer. Musings and recollected scenes from his past morph into thoughts, for example, astir a poem by Amy Clampitt, uncovering his mother’s penciled “Yes!” successful nan separator of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of nan Mind, and piquant reflections connected Jean Rhys, her fiction, and her “merciless concision.” Orner practices merciful distillation, infusing each connection pinch regret, sorrow, aliases wonder. Absurd and poignant family stories alternate pinch tales astir specified writers arsenic Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, nan underappreciated Wright Morris and Maeve Brennan, Lorraine Hansberry, Bette Howland, Paul Celan, and Andre Dubus. The consequence is an intimate, melancholy, frank, and astonishing paean to reference and books.

Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now
(Viking)

When Castillo looks backmost astatine her puerility arsenic a first-generation American of Philippine root successful a “wide and diverse” Filipinx organization successful nan Bay Area, she writes, “it feels for illustration first I became a reader; past I became a person.” She credits her begetter pinch lighting nan fuse: “He was making maine publication Plato’s Symposium erstwhile I was successful mediate school.” This group Castillo connected a way of free-wheeling reference that led to writers of galore different backgrounds, reference that carried her acold beyond not only schoolhouse curriculums but besides nan West’s white-centric reference tradition. While touring pinch her first novel, America Is Not nan Heart, Castillo began to see conscionable really entrenched achromatic supremacy is successful what and really we read. This, she avows, must change. In rigorous and electrifying linked captious essays, Castillo not only astutely analyzes “the group authorities and morals of really we publication our books,” she besides parses really we publication history, each other, and nan world.

Along nan measurement Castillo reflects connected really writers of colour successful a white-majority civilization are expected to attraction connected trauma and calamity successful stories that will “primarily service to educate, console, and productively scold a comfortable achromatic readership.” She assails nan cherished belief that reference engenders empathy and nan “repugnant and paternalistic” conception of “giving sound to nan voiceless.” Castillo pursues her arguments successful scorching critiques of Nobel laureate and “casually fascist stylist” Peter Handke, J. K. Rowling and “mainstream white-authored imagination narratives,” and chap Californian Joan Didion and “settler assemblage panic and anxiety.” Castillo besides conducts keen analyses of films and TV shows, including Monsoon Wedding and HBO’s Watchmen. She brings nan aforesaid steely interpretative powers to reference nan surviving world, stating that it is “impossible to untangle our disastrous ambiance coming from our disastrous assemblage past.” Castillo’s revolutionary polemic is meticulously and zestfully argued, eviscerating, clarifying, and invaluable.

Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature successful Troubled Times
(Dey Street Books)

Azar Nafisi advocated for nan powerfulness of fabrication successful her landmark memoir successful books, Reading Lolita successful Tehran, a bracing relationship of nan risks she took to meet secretly pinch women students to publication and talk Western novels forbidden successful nan Islamic Republic of Iran. In The Republic of Imagination (2014), Nafisi explores nan power fabrication has had connected life successful America, wherever lit is progressively endangered. Here she extends her enquiry into nan value of books successful a bid of poignant letters written to her late, book-loving, courageous, and much-missed begetter successful 2019 and 2020 arsenic unit and oppression surged successful Iran, and nan U.S. suffered nether nan inept and corrupt Trump administration, nan pandemic, and constabulary killings, each of which catalyzed consequential protests. Once again, Nafisi, a tireless advocator for “literature arsenic resistance,” turned to books for illumination. As she provides caller and sharply applicable interpretations of useful by Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, Plato, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, David Grossman, Elliot Ackerman, Elias Khoury, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi  Coates, she considers really tyrants travel to powerfulness and really successful democracies ideas are silenced by “prejudice, censorship, and slander.”

When Read Dangerously was published successful 2022, Nafisi hoped we would retrieve from Trump’s disastrous word successful agency moreover arsenic she perceived nan insidious damage: “The constitution of immoderate shape of normalcy does not mean that these heavy undercurrents of hatred person gone distant and populist is safe.” Even much presciently, she ends pinch a telephone to readers to speak out, to usage our “immense” corporate power. Reading this chronicle during nan second, exponentially much catastrophic Trump presidency renders Nafisi’s insights and concerns each nan much urgent: “every scholar who is deprived of reference nan books she wants; each bookstore, library, museum, aliases theatre that closes; each book that is censored aliases removed from schools and libraries; each art, music, aliases lit programme canceled successful our schools and different institutions—these should each punctual america of our responsibility.” Nafisi signs disconnected with: “Readers of nan World, Unite!”

Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager, The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love connected nan Books That Changed Their Lives
(HarperOne)

“How does nan believe of reference pass nan life of a writer?” This mobility led famed librarian, critic, novelist, and book advocator Nancy Pearl and writer, playwright, editor, and shaper Jeff Schwager to converse pinch twenty-two writers astir books that person transformed them. In these lively interviews they inquire each writer to sanction nan books successful their soul library, nan books they “carry successful their hearts and minds, . . .the books that informed their lives.” Each avid speech among knowledgeable readers wholeheartedly dedicated to books glimmers pinch unexpected and revealing disclosures.

Jonathan Lethem’s bibliomania arsenic a reader, writer, and book collector is fathoms-deep and many-tentacled. His mother guided his first forays, steering him to Ray Bradbury and Agatha Christie, and he quickly reached for galore much books connected her shelves, including Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky. Laila Lalami, Luis Alberto Urrea, Maaza Mengiste, and Viet Thanh Nguyen talk astir their very different youthful experiences reference crossed cultures, borders, and languages. T. C. Boyle didn’t “read deeply” until assemblage erstwhile he discovered Flannery O’Connor. Madeline Miller talks astir Watership Down and The Odyssey. Louise Erdrich craved Marjorie Morningstar and reveled successful James Welch’s Winter successful nan Blood.  Jennifer Egan loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House connected nan Prairie books. Many of these impassioned readers go writers talk astir Nancy Drew, comics, Dickens, and oodles of mysteries and subject fiction. In all, these are mesmerizing, funny, affecting, and enlightening literate exchanges.

 André Kertész, On Reading
(W.W. Norton)

The countless words that person been written astir reference tin scan arsenic cerebral, yet we publication pinch our full body.  We ourselves pinch stories and we often succumb to nan spell of nan page successful nationalist places. This proclivity fascinated photographer André Kertész. On Reading, a slender and elegant volume, contains sixty-six black-and-white photographs Kertész took of group engrossed successful books and newspapers astir nan world betwixt 1915 and 1970. First published successful 1971 and reissued pinch gloriously lustrous duotones successful 2008, this book of dynamically composed images wordlessly and resonantly celebrates nan cosmopolitan beguilement of reading.

We spot readers basking successful sun and solitude connected rooftops, precocious and still supra nan bustle of metropolis streets. In Buenos Aires successful 1962, a man successful a agelong overgarment sounds a mini book while opinionated earlier a wall bristling pinch angry graffiti, including 2 achromatic footprints arsenic gangly arsenic he is. In a serene segment successful Venice successful 1963, a man sounds beneath an archway, his backmost against nan wall, gondolas docked successful nan canal below. Three small raggedy boys beryllium successful a statement pressed against each different connected a mound of rubble successful beforehand of a worn plastered ceramic wall successful 1915 successful Esztergom, Hungary, Kertész’s homeland. All are wearing caps, 2 are barefoot, and each is concentrating connected a book unfastened connected nan thigh of nan boy successful nan center.  Kertész photographed readers successful parks, libraries, classrooms, seen done a window, waiting to spell connected stage, connected occurrence escapes, a balcony, a train, each pinch heads bowed, faces rapt pinch concentration. His finely composed portraits seizure nan location and nan not-there of reading, nan transfixing and transporting wonderment of this profoundly quality enthrallment. May we each publication freely and successful peace.

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Donna Seaman’s River of Books: A Life successful Reading is disposable now from ODE Books.