The Booksmith

Last year I read the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Possession by A.S. Byatt and fell in love with the lush prose.  The mystery of two nineteenth century poets’ entanglement and the timid attraction between the modern-day academics who hope to make their name with their research was sprawling and gorgeous. And as I read, I was well aware that some not inconsiderable portion of Byatt’s ideas and arguments sailed over my head. I don’t know a thing about the British academic world of the late twentieth century, nor do I care enough about nineteenth century poetry and letters to appreciate the talent on display when Byatt creates poems, short stories, and epistolary fragments for her academics to discover and analyze. 

Still, the book’s invitation to become a sleuth was irresistible and I trusted that what I didn’t understand would not take away from the novel’s capacity to entertain. 

This comfortable attitude with reading without wholly understanding is a valuable skill to cultivate if you want to read literary fiction or books from the English canon that are usually taught in a college class with someone there to hold your hand. Even some contemporary sci-fi and fantasy requires comfort with confusion (I’m thinking of The Locked Tomb series, which is notoriously inexplicable on a first read). 

I suspect I came by the skill of being comfortably confused in childhood. Some blessed weeks, my aunt might give me two or three dollars at the thrift store to buy myself a few paperbacks. To maximize value, I needed fat, wordy books that promised at least two or three days’ pleasure. Thus, in middle school, I read John Grisham without knowing very much at all about jury selection or the American legal system; Pride and Prejudice without knowing what a cad Wickham truly was; and an abridged version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame without understanding, well, anything beyond the fact that the characters shared names and sometimes general circumstances with the characters from my favorite Disney movie. 

Being in the dark while reading a book–whether because the author is just plain smarter than you or because the narrative relies on close attention and patience–can make a reader feel stupid and resentful. It becomes easy to write a book off as pretentious or poorly written. In our current moment of violently unapologetic anti-intellectualism, books, art, and scientific studies that we do not easily and quickly understand are dismissed with pride: “DNF’d at 10%”, “I could paint that”, and “do your own research” have become short hand for “I don’t understand and I’m not willing to try.” 

I get it. We are short on free time and our hobbies do not need to be homework. But I invite the willing to take a beat when your animal brain rears up with anger and disgust at the confusion and opacity of a difficult book. Let your prefrontal cortex take charge and exercise patience with yourself and the author. Instead of writing a book off as pretentious because you have to keep a dictionary handy, because the allusions to movies you’ve never seen are too plentiful, because you still can’t keep the characters straight, keep a notebook of all the new words you’re learning, watch one of the movies that’s mentioned, make yourself a little chart to refer back to. You may not end up liking the book for other reasons, but you’ll know more words, you’ll have seen a movie you might otherwise have missed, you’ll engage with the author’s world more deeply (and maybe your character chart will be essential in the fandom when other people are throwing up their hands and asking which cavalier belongs to which necromancer in The Locked Tomb series). 

Not understanding a book right away is an opportunity. I’m currently reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt and she’s dropping untranslated French, alluding to historical events in Edwardian England I’ve never heard of, and letting her characters freely discuss political theories that make very little sense to me in a world so far removed. I researched the Boer War after it was mentioned enough times that I needed the background to understand the characters’ conversations; I read a few Wikipedia articles on Oscar Wilde and English socialism; I made myself a list of all the characters with more than passing mention (the cast is in the high twenties, if not thirties). And it was fun! The sidequests are fun.

Of course, reading difficult books precludes reading quickly, and in the Booktok, Bookstagram, BookTube world of stats, taking two weeks to read a book can feel like too much of a sacrifice. Last year, when my goal was to read a hundred books, I felt a lot of pressure to get through things quickly and I resented novels that took more than five days to get through. But that goal made me realize I don’t like giving up on a book because it will require more attention, more confusion, more time.

This year, my goal is to read fewer than fifty books precisely so I can take a ridiculously long time reading something challenging and delicious. Already this recalibration has yielded fruit. I am reading nonfiction again, I have William Faulkner and Shakespeare on my TBR, I let a fantasy book be incomprehensible for a hundred-odd pages and then it flowered like a rose. 

Imagine what worlds open to you when you’re willing to be perplexed and confused, challenged and resisted. When you’re willing to feel a little stupid, to be energized into doing some research, to fail your reading goal–and to read more richly, deeply, and satisfyingly than ever before.