You Are What You Read
There is, of course, long-standing wisdom that you are what you eat. I think for book addicts, those of us who fill some or most of our free time with reading for leisure, there is a real sense in which we are what we read. Just as viewing a moving film, or listening to music can effect your mood, so too can the reading of a book. And while those activities can have lingering effects, they are at least themselves normally finished within an hour or two. You watch the movie, then it is over. You listen to the album, then it is over. Whereas a book of any substantial length can be a part of your active life for days or weeks (sometimes months if the book is long enough or life is busy). So there is a sense in which part of a book addict's active existence is always occurring within that sphere, within that book.
This is not a ground-breaking idea. It is exemplified most obviously in the idea of "beach reads," which are supposed to be light and breezy just like you want your vacation to be. But for some reason, I had not fully internalized that this same line of thinking applies to all reading at all times. And thus it was that yesterday I decided that perhaps I should put Joseph Conrad down for a while. He is just not an author to be reading when you are already experiencing inklings of pessimism or aimlessness, unless of course you are a teenager who wants to confirm and wallow in the righteousness of your depression. Certainly I should not have been reading Conrad and Dickens side-by-side. It is just too much darkness to take, too depressing of a fictional world to be occupying when the real world is already getting you down.
No, I need to keep the proper balance in my leisure reading between intellectual and emotional challenge and the pleasures of escape. That is, after all, why I normally read two books at once. I try to read one great and/or difficult work of literature, and another book that takes less effort or at least operates on some other level. The second book has often been a history or biography, and has often been a work of science fiction. Today it is Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, which I believe is the only novel of his I have not read. All of his other work gave me great pleasure, and though this novel is so far a bit darker and harder to connect to, I was able to get through 100 pages in an hour and a half. It took me 4 days to get through the 100 pages of Heart of Darkness.
