On writing about reading

                    Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive...
                    - William Wordsworth, "Lines completed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"

Emerging from a few days away from the internet I find, to my dismay, that the old book-blogging chestnut has reared its silly head again (this time in the form of challenges to Farm Lane Books and others): are negative reviews valid? And also, apparently: is it valid for a blogger to write about her own subjective experience of a book, rather than its objective "worth"?

My basic thought on this issue: You're joking, right? Who are we, Matthew Arnold? Who actually believes anymore that it's even possible, let alone desirable, to separate one's subjective reading experience from the book as an art object? I'm not advocating lazy reading or slipshod writing. But I believe, like Wordsworth, that in perceiving a piece of art we participate in its individualized creation, in creating its reality for us. As every readalong, college seminar or book club meeting emphasizes, twenty people can read the same novel and come away with vastly different impressions and experiences. This is not just a matter of people liking different things, but of every reader possessing a complex web of life experience, types of intelligence, moral priorities, sense of humor, rhythmic sensitivity, socioeconomic background, and a plethora of other factors that aren't leaping to mind at the moment. I believe anyone who professes to write about books - about anything, really - without acknowledging the vast subjectivity of human existence is dishonest or delusional. Is a book "objectively good" if nobody reads it? As many a Ray Bradbury short story points out, books are nothing without readers, just as there are no readers without written material. Not only that, but a given book is different to every reader who picks it up, each of whom reads in a different way. It's both futile and offensive to attempt to force one's own reading and writing style on others. And I think we should be celebrating that multiplicity, not fighting it.

Not only that, but I think all this emphasis on so-called "positive" and "negative" reviews misses the point. Sure, there are those books that strike me as so terrible that I want to throw them at the wall (and I defend anyone's right to write about those experiences). And there are books that are utterly breathtaking, and reading them transforms my world forever. But honestly, those two categories do not make up the bulk of my reading. For the most part, my reactions are complex and nuanced, and a big reason I write about books is to sort out those subtleties for myself and anyone else who might like to read along. Looking back over the past six months of writing about reading, I don't see many reviews that could be boiled down to "I loved it" or "I hated it." The "worst" book I read this year was also one I heartily enjoyed. I write a lot about what puzzles me in books, what intrigues me, how my expectations are subverted, books that remind me of other books and where those comparisons break down, how my mental state while reading affects my perception of the book. These are the questions that interest me, and they are much more complicated than a simple like or dislike.

And there is a long tradition of such writing about reading. In fact, essay-writing on the reading life is a much older and (in my opinion) richer tradition than the comparatively new discipline of the bottom-line, thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down newspaper review. As another example, here is Virginia Woolf on John Ruskin:

For if anyone is able to make his readers feel that he is alive, wrong headed, intemperate, interesting, and lovable, that writer is Ruskin. His eagerness about everything in the world is perhaps as valuable as the concentration which in another sphere produced the works of Darwin, or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It may be that, if we submitted his works on art to a modern art critic, or his works on economy to a modern economist, we should find that there is very little in them which is accepted by the present generation. Even an unprofessional reader, who picks up Modern Painters attracted very much by the bright patches of eloquence, is fairly startled by some of the statements concerning art and morality which are laid down with the usual air of infallibility and the usual array of polysyllables. Nor is it easy for one reading industriously in the six volumes of Fors Clavigera to find out precisely how it is that we are to save ourselves, though it is plain enough that we are all damned. Nevertheless, though his aesthetics may be wrong and his economics amateurish, you have to reckon with a force which is not to be suppressed by a whole pyramid of faults. That is why perhaps people in his life time got into the habit of calling him Master. He was possessed by a spirit of enthusiasm which compels those who are without it either to attack or to applaud; but beneath its influence they cannot remain merely passive.

Is this a "negative" review? Woolf calls Ruskin wrong-headed, intemperate and amateurish; she paints him as a pedant and a moralist, overly self-satisfied and long-winded in his mistaken opinions, and insufficiently clear in expressing them. She speaks with the slight condescension of a Modernist discussing a Victorian forebear. At the same time, her delight in him, in his unquenchable vitality and passion, is much more than a bone thrown to the dogs of public opinion. She believes in the magnetism of his personality, and his helpfully galvanizing effect on those around him; is this, then, a "positive" review? The truth is that it isn't a "review" at all, but a taut and insightful essay about the experience of reading, which is both subjective and universal, and incorporates the full range of human emotion.

To me, the great thing about book blogging is its flexibility: it needn't be the same thing to all people. Many book-bloggers follow the newspaper-review model, and that's great. Others cultivate a less formal, more personal vibe, something akin to sitting with friends in a virtual living room, and having a conversation about the books one has been reading. Some professor-types use book-blogging as an erudite but casual arena in which to prepare for the more polished forum of academic papers. Still others, like me, aim to continue the tradition of book-based essay-writing: more formal than a fireside chat, more personal than an academic thesis, educated but not comprehensively so, following whichever threads intrigue me rather than the ones I consider most Important-with-a-capital-I. And the great thing about the internet is, there's room for everybody. We can all do the type of book-blogging we enjoy! There is no compulsion to fit our square selves into round holes. But, as in any heterogeneous group, I think we need to be careful not to judge each other by the standards we apply to ourselves. After all, depending on what a given blogger is trying to do, my standards may be totally irrelevant to her, and hers to me.

I'm not saying that the reading world must descend into a morass of unmitigated "I'm okay, you're okay" relativism. I think there are things that would be dishonest in any form of writing for public consumption: plagiarism, for example, or claiming to have read or finished a book when you really haven't, or falsifying your account of your own experience because you feel pressured to give one kind of review or another ("positive" or "negative"). And there is certainly an objective reality to any story: if a novel concerns a young African-American girl witnessing the race riots of the 1960's, few people will extract from that book the tale of an 18th-century Dutch farmer. My point is simply that there's no way for humans to experience this objective reality except through the lens of our subjective perception, so it's an exercise in futility to try to edit one's subjectivity out of a response piece. Not to mention, one would probably be excising exactly the material that many readers would find most interesting.

And now, to the couch. I have some reading to do.