Communal Reading

One of the great delights of reading is being able to talk with someone else about it, being able to share a bit of thought space with another person who has similarly read a book you have, being able to discuss the characters of a book as though they were friends in common. The world-wide experience people had of sharing the Harry Potter books was a great deal of fun. Many, if not most, young girls could tell you who Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are, and probably also Mary, Laura and their sisters Carrie and Grace. Few books approach the epic number of readers these books have had, and of course the films of each of them help.

The number of my friends who are members of at least one book group are testimony to the power of shared thought spaces as well. People seem to enjoy both the expansion of their own reading choices, and the enjoyment of sharing something that they have loved, as everyone takes turns choosing the next book. From what I’ve seen, however, people in book groups learn more about each other than anything else, using the back and forth conversation about characters and themes to define themselves and enrich their understanding of life. This deepening of friendship is certainly as valuable as knowing about the books themselves. And the communities which are formed around book groups may be some of the most intense we have in our loosely knit modern “villages”.

A lifetime of reading now stands me in very good stead. My reading has been wide-ranging, and while much of it has been somewhat esoteric, going far back in time and far out in geographic space, the core of it has been a search for deep reality. From “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Basho) to “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (Cather) to “Doctor Zhivago” (Pasternak) to “Light Years” (Salter), I am looking for that point at which rich language provides a glimpse of transcendence in which big mind meets actually sensed existence. If the imagination does take flight, for me it must still be an illumination of the truths of life. Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is deeply true, while also an empathetic meditation on her real family.

I’m having as much fun grounding my characters in real life as I used to do reading. They are still little, most under ten years of age. But they are already themselves, holographically representing the people they will become, given environment and time. Whether my writing craft will be able to reach down and provide readers with a glimpse of their transcendent reality remains to be seen, but that is what I wish for them.