Writing about Reading

My friend SP (who writes an excellent blog at no power in the 'verse) recently shared with me one of her struggles: feeling obligated to write about every book she reads before she lets herself return it to the library (even to the point that she sometimes racks up library fines!).

Now, I certainly have my share of reading-related compulsions.  I keep a spreadsheet in my GoogleDocs with an alphabetized list of authors I like, and I try to read their works in chronological order of publication, resorting to interlibrary loan and field trips to research libraries as necessary.  I have other GoogleDocs for collecting quotes and for keeping track of books I want to read in the future.  Etc.  But until I listened to SP talk about it, I had never thought about whether I feel the need to write about each book that I read.  In my head, reading and writing constitute two fairly separate portions of my life -- but I'm starting to realize that I do have more of a need to connect the two activities than I previously realized.  This has become most evident in my foreign language reading.

Last year, I "broke the sound barrier," so to speak, with regard to reading in languages other than English.  In fact, I had read in Spanish before, a handful of children's novels and adult short stories, and I knew it was a powerful way to absorb new vocabulary and the טעם (flavor) of a language (or even a dialect).  But reading in another language was always like pulling teeth -- I found it impossible to sustain momentum.  Last year, however, I crested some kind of small mountain and found myself coasting down the other side -- it became easy and even enthralling to consume novels and short stories in Hebrew and, later in the year, in Yiddish.

However, I didn't do this on my own by any stretch of the imagination.  The reading materials, and their volume, were not assigned to me by any teacher.  But I did have teachers, very significant teachers.  My teachers did five important things for me (though not all of them did all five).

• They were excited that I was reading, that I was reading a lot, that I was engaged with the literature, that I was excited about reading.
• They gave me guidance about what to read.
• They spoke with me about what I was reading, in the language that I was reading it in.
• They read and engaged with what I wrote (in the language I was reading in) about what I was reading.
• They created and facilitated opportunities for me to interact with peers/classmates about reading.

With teachers functioning in these ways, I felt that my capacity to read in Hebrew and Yiddish was limitless.

But now I'm at a sort of new juncture with my reading.  I don't actively have connections right now with teachers who can support my reading.  And reading a book in Hebrew or Yiddish takes me on a powerful journey, out of my body and out of my own life -- a journey on which few of my friends and family members can follow me.  Reading, which can create such a profound experience of connection, can also lead to profound feelings of disconnection.  And I don't (yet) have a sense of a "bigger picture" destination, greater than the sum of the individual books, each of which takes me to a wildly different "individual" destination -- and without that, it can be hard sometimes to maintain momentum.

So this brings me back to the question of writing about what I read.  I'm finding that in the absence of stable, ongoing relationships with teachers (or perhaps with like-minded peers), I'm not able to sustain the kind of foreign-language reading I was doing previously.  Partly, this is just because it's hard to read that stuff, and it's even harder to do something hard alone.  But I think it's also because reading in a foreign language, even more so than in English, causes so many sparks to go off in my mind, and it's hard not to have anyone with whom to share those sparks.

Observing this, I'm becoming aware of something else, too -- there is a very long list of books in English that I'm not willing to read because I have no one to talk to about the plethora of intense thoughts, ideas, and reactions that the books on that list are inevitably going to elicit in me.  And I'm coming to realize that actually, what I want to do, and what I've wanted (or perhaps even needed) to do for years, is to write about what I'm reading.  Through writing, I might become more able to read (in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English!) on my own.  Through writing, I might figure out where all this reading is taking me.  And through writing, I might also be able to give something back to the world -- a tiny fraction of that which reading gives me.