The Reading Queue Revisited

Essays Notable Articles
June 27, 2005 | 8 2 min read

I created my reading queue about a year and half ago because I decided I needed a system to help me work through my big to be read pile. The main problem, as I wrote at the time, was that there were a number of books in my TBR pile that I was interested in reading but never seemed to get around to. A newer, more exciting book would come along and it would vault to the top of the pile and other books would languish, unread.

Part of the problem is how I read. I read fairly quickly, but I don’t spend a lot of my day reading books. I spend a lot of time on this here computer, for one thing. Plus, every day I read the newspaper and every week I read the New Yorker from cover to cover. I’ll probably read about 30 books this year, not a lot when you consider my TBR pile is more than 40 books tall. Though I’d love to be able to read two or three books a week, I don’t really mind my slower pace. Still, I didn’t like the idea of books staring at me year after year unread, so I created the reading queue.

As you can see if you check out the queue near the bottom of the right hand column, I alphabetize my TBR pile by author and then assign each book a number. When the time comes to pick my next book to read, I use a random number generator to decide for me. I know, it’s impossibly nerdy, but I’ve decided I like handling my reading decisions this way.

For one thing, it is in keeping with certain compulsive tendencies I have about organizing things (although, sadly, those tendencies don’t cause me to clean off my desk with any regularity, for example), and each new book I pick to read is a little surprise rather than an agonizing decision (well, maybe it’s not that bad). The only time I read a book out of order is if a publisher or author has sent me an advance copy and I want to make sure I read and review it when it comes out. Those I bump right to the top of the list. But if I go buy a book or get one as a gift, it goes into the queue. Maybe I’ll read it next week, maybe I’ll read it in five years; the reading queue will decide.

I’m probably the only odd bird out there who feels a need to organize their reading this way, but if anyone else has a reading queue of their own, I’d love to hear about it.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

Essays

Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading

Essays
March 17, 2011 | 20 8 min read

1.
During a recent semester spent studying abroad in the UK, I had the opportunity to take an undergraduate course on Henry James. I seized the chance, having never taken a class devoted to a single author before. Previously, Henry James had existed in my mind as a hazy legend in Anglo-American letters who wrote hefty novels and dense stories in an ominously opaque prose. The only thing I had ever read of his was “The Middle Years”, a short story about an aging writer resting in Bournemouth, who befriends a doctor who also happens to be a fervent admirer of his work. It sounds awfully boring but I was impressed by the story, which reveals a great deal about reader-writer relations, although of course I found the writing itself a little impenetrable at times (the number of commas in the first sentence alone would send a good number of readers packing). It’s easy to lose your way in a James story if you’re not careful. Your eyes keep scanning the words, but your thoughts tend to wander off. Often what’s literally happening is buried beneath endless looping sentences, words that lap like waves, eddies of thoughts and counter-thoughts. It all sounds beautiful, but the reader is left wondering: what does it actually mean?

It’s obvious that Henry James is ill suited for a text-heavy undergraduate course, which requires extensive reading in a very short time. It’s not so bad when you’re studying earlier James, which tends to be more straightforward (although with the novels the length can sometimes get to you) — but things get an awful lot worse with later James. The prose becomes denser, the metaphors extend into page-long emotional parables, the grammar is impossibly convoluted, and numerous adverbs cling to and clutter the sentences.

James’ prose is notorious for becoming more elusive and complex and he grew older (it may be in part due to the fact that he started dictating to a typist in 1897, just before the advent of his “late phase”). In a letter to the Duchess of Sutherland, dated 1903, James gave his correspondent a few tips on how to read one of his novels:

Take, meanwhile, pray The Ambassadors very easily & gently: read five pages a day — be even as deliberate as that — but don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step — & the full charm will come out.

It may have been that the Duchess was a particularly obtuse reader, but I do think it’s true that James is much better appreciated with lots of time to take him in slowly, a few pages at a time, to let his magic quietly come through. But James’ own recommendations, of course, are impossible to follow when you have to rifle through a whole novel in a few days for a seminar.

2.

The reading list for the class in question included:

A selection of tales: “Daisy Miller”, “The Aspern Papers”, “The Pupil”, “The Real Thing”, “The Figure in the Carpet”, and “The Lesson of the Master”
Roderick Hudson
The Europeans
What Maisie Knew
The Portrait of a Lady
The Princess Casamassima
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl
The Wings of the Dove

I ended up quite liking most of the tales, especially “The Lesson of the Master”, about the relationship between a young, promising writer and an older one whose art is in decline. It has a certain ironic bite, which I found enjoyable — the “lesson” in question being that novelists shouldn’t marry, in order to concentrate on their art (James remained a bachelor all his life). It is apparent that there are quite a few gems in the tales of Henry James, which are often in the vein of the French nouvelles (Maupassant often comes to mind). Although writing many of these short stories was bread-and-butter work for James, they offer much insight into art and human expression.

Among the novels, I never finished The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, or The Princess Casamassima, one of James’ forays into more traditional social realism (with The Bostonians), which I found read like a bad imitation of Dickens. The Portrait of a Lady was by far the most readable and engaging of his novels, and Isabel Archer remains one of his most sympathetic characters — despite the famously unsatisfactory ending. The two later novels I read, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl — especially the latter, where so little happens for so long — initially put me off. They are demanding books, but in the end they proved more interesting to think and write about. The Ambassadors, for instance, through some intricate literary trick, manages to charm the reader into embracing the middle-aged protagonist’s point of view. Strether’s fascination for Paris, for Chad (whom he comes to Paris to save) and for Madame de Vionnet (with whom Chad is having an affair) becomes the fascination of the reader, while James masterfully pulls the strings behind the scenes. It’s a rewarding, beautiful reading experience; and there really is a kind of taut, charming thread running through it.

3.
A certain reputation precedes Henry James, I think — and it’s not a very good one. Another preconception I had about him was that he was rather passé, in both style and content. He already seemed outdated in his own time (at the turn of the century, who else was writing novels about adultery among the rich and beautiful in such wordy prose?), so how could he possibly be relevant today?

I was wrong, of course. Although James was never read by the masses, he still generates a fair deal of critical attention and admiration. Many authors today use James’ life and work to inspire their own fiction: Colm Tóibín’s Booker short-listed The Master is a fictionalized account of a part of James’ life (more on that later), while David Lodge’s Author, Author (published six months after Tóibín’s novel) does something similar. Joyce Carol Oates’ recent collection of stories Wild Nights! includes a moving story about James visiting a wounded soldier in a London hospital during World War I, and Cynthia Ozick’s 2010 novel Foreign Bodies is a retelling of The Ambassadors. In the last decade, Penguin Classics has reedited most of James’ novels and stories in a new series under the general editorship of one of the most prominent Jamesian critics, Philip Horne. NYRB Classics has also included many of James’ little known titles in their series, while Cambridge University Press is planning a new, multi-volume critical edition of James’ works, to be published by 2016 for the centenary of his death.

It is clear that James is not passé, and never was. He is, in fact, perhaps more relevant than ever; but his works lie in a strange place outside of time, and they were written that way. James was and remains a demanding author because he found something intensely true about the complexity of human nature and felt compelled to communicate this truth in the stories that took hold of his imagination. He was a careful writer, true to his art and craft, and a meticulous revisionist. His works are deep, long, airless dives into the complexities and multiplicities of the self. It’s not an easy subject to write about. His stories, lacking in plot, are simple accounts: mere turning points in the lives of characters or revelations of social organizations. Yet in their self-consciousness and ambiguities, and even in the circumlocutions of James’ language — which in truth is closer to the fragmented consciousness of modernism than to Victorian verbosity — they reveal something irresistibly true about life.

4.
It’s easy, of course, to call binge reading Henry James a joy when the term is over and the essay is handed in and corrected. For most of the duration of the course, I would’ve probably called the process “Henry James and the Woes of Binge Reading”. Often times it felt like I was out of breath as I jumped from one work to the next, trying to catch up on my reading just before class, and then having to move on to the next book down the list without having finished the previous one.

But, as anyone who has taken a class like this (or anyone who has ever binge read from a single author in a short period of time) will know, this type of reading can also be highly rewarding. One passes from one book to the next almost seamlessly, without having to adapt to a new style, witnessing (if the works are read more or less chronologically) the progression of the writer’s art over time, the evolution of his concerns, and the development of his authorial voice.

James’ themes become richer and more multi-faceted when looked at across his entire oeuvre: things like the so-called international theme, problematic endings, his obsession with art and reality (or realism v. romance), and the self-consciousness of his fiction. For instance, I noticed that in nearly all of his novels, whenever fate intervenes in a way that seems exaggerated, a character usually declares something along the lines of: “I feel like we’re in a novel!”

The binge reader also starts to notice stock characters as they crop up from story to story. One of the most common, in James, is the young, empowered American heiress: for example the eponymous heroine of “Daisy Miller”, James’ first successful story; Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, who struggles between her freedom and her duty; and Maggie Verver (aka The Princess) in The Golden Bowl, who starts off as a meek wife and manages to get rid of her husband’s lover (also married to her father) by the end of the novel through the most skillful, subtle social maneuvering.

Theater is another recurring (although not always explicit) theme in Jamesian fiction. James uses a great deal of theatrical metaphor throughout his stories to describe the shifting nature of his characters and the multiplicity of their personalities, which they project out into the world like carefully constructed roles. Thus the adulterous women in his novels — another stock character — like Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors or Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady, are often described as actresses. They put on masks, makeup, and costumes and bury their identities beneath layers of constructed characteristics to manipulate their audiences.

Perhaps the great number of theatrical metaphors relates to James’ involvement with the theatre, which more or less ended with the failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895 (again, shortly before his “late phase” began). It was a deeply traumatic experience for James (both Tóibín and Lodge make it a central element in their novels). He described the humiliating premier in a letter to Henrietta Rendell as “the most horrible hours of my life.” Thus James was forced to return to the less lucrative — albeit probably more comfortable — business of writing for print only (“thank heaven there is another art”), but it is clear that his failure in the theater left its mark.

5.
It seems I didn’t want to get away from Henry James after the course was over because I continued to peruse his Life in Letters, brilliantly edited by Philip Horne, which has some really beautiful bits of writing in it. I also read The Master by Colm Tóibín, and I would like to end with a few words on this book. It walks the fine line between biography and novel, a tricky genre that Tóibín pulls off majestically. It proves an insightful way of writing and thinking about James, whose life and work are a complicated balance of fiction and reality.

Tóibín’s novel is a gripping, major work of literature, which I binge read with relish not because I had to, but because it offers a fascinating exploration of James as a character whose consciousness is revealed to be as complex and deeply moving as those of the characters he, in turn, created. Tóibín’s novel offers a prism through which many of James’ works are refracted, illuminating them with new meaning and a more directly human resonance. He also treats James’ probable homosexuality with subtlety and respect — no easy feat. The Master is a good read intrinsically, as well; intelligent, endearing, moving, and even funny at times (in a quiet, quaint, all too Jamesian way).

If you read nothing by Henry James or nothing else related to him, I urge you, at least, to read The Master. It seems almost disrespectful to the “master” in question to say so, but I am confident that if you do read Tóibín’s novel, you’ll be tempted to pick up one of James’ books afterward. I’m quite certain you won’t be disappointed by either.

Essays
| 20 8 min read
● ● ●
● ● ●
Essays Reviews

Naples and The Gallery

Essays Reviews
November 30, 2011 | 2 6 min read

1.
John Horne Burns’ The Gallery was his first book, a chronicle of the chaos and beauty and horror of occupied Naples in 1943 and 1944. It’s an interesting hybrid: a novel, or perhaps it’s better described as a short story collection in which the stories, all touching in some way upon a bombed-out arcade called the Galleria Umberto, alternate with an elegant travelogue in the first person. The travelogue appears to be the author’s memoir: I remember that at Casablanca it dawned on me that maybe I’d come overseas to die.

Burns did die in Italy, although not during the war. He served in Italy and North Africa, mostly in military intelligence. He returned to the United States after the war ended, but his experiences overseas had changed him forever. The behavior he’d witnessed in the army, the mistreatment of the Neapolitans at American hands, the buffoonery of officers, soldiers robbing one another blind—all of these things engendered in him a distaste for the United States, and he returned to Italy for good shortly after the war.

The Gallery was published in 1947, to considerable acclaim. Burns followed it with two more novels—Lucifer with a Book and A Cry of Children—but reviews of the first were mixed, reviews of the second disastrous. His British and American publishers declined to publish the book that followed, The Stranger’s Guise. Not only was The Stranger’s Guise rejected, but Paul Fussell’s introduction to The Gallery suggests that it was rejected in the kind of terms that authors routinely have nightmares about: Burns’ publishers apparently called the new book “trash.”

Burns—deeply shaken, alcoholic, depressed following the break-up of an affair—suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in Livorno at the age of 36. There were suggestions that he’d drank himself to death. The New York Times obituary devoted considerable space to dicussion of The Gallery, and mentioned his final two novels only in passing. He was buried in Rome.

2.
When the Allies arrived in Naples they found a bombed-out city, the harbor in ruins and rubble on the streets. Crime was epidemic. There was very little food. The Galleria Umberto was a collection of bars and black-market restaurants and shops that functioned as a sort of unofficial heart of the desperate city.

The stories that make up the book are called Portraits; the interludes of travelogue are called Promenades. Burns wrote a hard fine prose, although there were moments when he sank into sentimentality. Each Portrait is of an individual—usually American, occasionally Italian—in or around the Galleria Umberto, and Burns’s skills in character development were remarkable. The true nature of each one arises slowly, an image sharpening on a Polaroid; the staggering first Portrait is of a young soldier recovering from trenchfoot, a crass and alcoholic young man who’s nonetheless deeply sensitive, aware of his impending death, a man who’s never had a moment of transcendence in his life except in the presence of opera.

There’s Luella, a magnificently deluded Red Cross volunteer who dresses impeccably in her uniform in order to spend the day neglecting her duties and drinking; a suave and oddly blank second lieutenant who loses his mind after a conversation with a ghost; a virtuous Italian teenager driven to the brink of starvation when the inflation that followed the Allied invasion made food unaffordable. The prose is beautiful, the plotting expert, the moments of satire razor-sharp. It’s a command performance, but not without flaws.

The book’s largest problem concerns the author’s obvious prejudices. In the final Promenade, the thoughtful officer whose first-person travelogue we’ve been following arrives finally in Naples, whereupon the spell of the book begins to waver. “For in Naples,” he writes in the final Promenade, “I and other Americans learned by a simple application of synecdoche that no one, in himself and by himself, is much better or much worse than anybody else.” And yet one can’t help but notice that this sentiment seems not to extend to the novel’s Arabs, who are referred to as “Ayrabs” and given distasteful qualities throughout. There are moments when his disgust for the United States is palpable. He spends little time with the Allied forces of other nationalities, returning again and again to the American army. With only a few notable exceptions, his Americans tend to be morally and culturally bankrupt. They don’t know how to love. They don’t know how to live. They are limited people. His Italians, by contrast, are mostly saints; if they’re corrupt, it’s because the Americans ruined them.

He goes so far as to write, in reference to the disgraceful manner in which American soldiers treated the citizens of Naples, “I don’t think the Germans could have done any better in their concentration camps.” It’s hard to know what to say to this. Perhaps he was ignorant of the workings of the concentration camps. Perhaps he was so blinded by his anti-Americanism that he couldn’t perceive a difference between bullying a population and committing a systematic genocide.

He digresses into sweeping generalizations about American artists—unsurprisingly, he finds them spiritually inferior to their Italian counterparts—and about American culture. Here he manages to completely miss the same point that certain of my non-American friends and acquaintances seem to miss sometimes, at unguarded moments when I’m outside the United States, when they’re perhaps thinking of me as a Canadian—I hold dual citizenship between the U.S. and Canada—and the United States comes up in conversation, which is that the cultural life of the United States contains such multitudes, such variations of experience, that attempts at summarizing its national culture are largely meaningless.

And yet, for all this, I found The Gallery compelling. It’s beautifully written, and it’s a portrait of a time and a city that fascinates me. I have no particular connection to the city, except in the same way that I have a connection to every city bombed in that particular war: I’ve visited Naples twice and wondered, both times, if my grandfather trained the pilots who bombed this place.

3.
My grandfather was a flight instructor for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and his students flew above the theatres of the Second World War. Black-and-white photographs of a young man in a pilot’s uniform on the tarmac, smiling. My impression was always that he loved his work, but I did come across a notebook of his once wherein he’d recorded a list: names of his students, with killed or missing noted beside them, and I’ve thought ever since of the terrible burden of training combat pilots. He taught them how to fly the machines they disappeared in.

Impossible not to think of him when visiting an Axis country, when reading World War II narratives set in cities that were bombed. I first visited Naples ten years ago and fell in love with the city. I returned a few years later, at a vastly different point in my life, and was much less inclined to drop everything and move there, but there was a moment when I was in love with the city’s chaos. It’s a city charged with a dangerous electricity, a vivid kind of place. The drivers make New York cabbies seem sedate. The whole place functions on a razor’s edge, at moments seemingly just shy of anarchy, sordid and beautiful and terribly fast. There are buildings near the harbor that still show damage from the Second World War.

The first time, ten years ago, I descended with a guide into the underground city. It’s an immense system of ancient cisterns and waterways, began in Grecian times and expanded over the centuries, carved from the porous rock forty metres below the surface. Sections were converted into a bomb shelter during the Second World War. The steps down to the bottom are uneven, carved from stone. The air grows damper and colder as you leave the city above.

It’s hard to get a sense of the precise size of this place. There have been a couple of small internal avalanches over the centuries, and large sections are blocked off. The guide leads us through the narrowest imaginable passageways, rock pressing against my body on every side. It’s difficult to catch my breath. Passageways open into wide corridors, small rooms, and then into caverns that could house a hundred families, and once did. There is a rudimentary electrical system. Benches are carved into the walls of some rooms. A scrawled notation identifies a tiny dripping alcove as a wedding chamber.

Four thousand Neapolitans took refuge here during the bombing. Graffiti adorns the walls, a dark moment in history scratched into rock: caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill, pin-up girls smoking cigarettes in miniskirts, fighter planes and submarines, scraps of hopeful poetic sentiment: “A life without love is a desert.” There is longing pornography. I look at sketches of airplanes and think of my grandfather. I imagine 4,000 people down here in the shadows, scared and alive, hiding and scratching hopeful graffiti, holding hands and fighting and raising children and dying in half-darkness, bombs falling above.

The tour guide stops us in a particular cavern. Poetry and caricatures are scratched into the walls. It’s hard to say where we are; there is no sense of direction in this place, no feeling of a beginning or end. If the guide were to leave, we would be utterly lost. He motions for us to sit on a stone bench, and then, unexpectedly, he turns off his flashlight.

The silence is immense. The darkness is absolute. There is a distant sound of dripping water, but there is no light. I am aware of my traveling companion sitting beside me on the bench, of the tour guide standing nearby. There are only the smallest possible sounds. Our breathing, the distant dripping of water, the sound of a shoe scuffed lightly in the dust. The silence fascinates me. I don’t want it to end. I can see absolutely nothing. There has never been any moment but this.

Some time passes before the tour guide speaks, and I hear his love for this place in his voice. He is reverent. My traveling companion, whose Italian is better than mine, whispers a translation through the darkness between us: “Absolute silence. Absolute darkness. Like death…”

And forty metres above us, the seething city, still beautifully and dangerously and chaotically alive.

Essays Reviews
| 2 6 min read
● ● ●

8 comments:

  1. I enjoy your web site and wanted to drop you a line to thank you for sharing the writing queue with your visitors.

    I recently started my own writing blog hoping that it will inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously.

    Keep up the great work. We enjoy it immensely!

  2. Hey, whaddayaknow – someone else uses random numbers to manage large to-be-read piles of books. I started about a year ago to randomly choose my next book. I love the not knowing aspect in that even though I bought the book, it seems like surprise or treat. Which is very nice compared to looking at a full bookshelf and despairing (not unlike Ozymandias…)

  3. Randomness is so much fun. I use it to decide what I will play on the piano, what I will wear, and like you, what books to read. I have about 400 books in my house that I want to read or reread sometime. I look them all over once in a while, just so I won't forget what they are. The top shelf of one bookcase is for current and next-in-line reading–six books each. If any book has a commentary, like the one I'm using for Ulysses, it can be beside it. I read my six current books in turn, a chapter or ten pages at a time, and alternating commentaries with the books they explain. When I finish a book, the first of the next-in-line books moves over, and I pick a new next-in-line book based on whatever book, author or subject I have recently read about in a journal. There are only two rules: each new book has to be as different as possible from the previous one(The Interpretation of Dreams follows Moby Dick) and there is always, these days, a Shakespeare play among the current reading. I pick those according to their order in Hazlitt's commentary. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone.

  4. Terrific blog,

    Regarding your to be read stack, have you thought of asking your readers to give a vote to a book they'd like to see further up your pile. Nothing like a little reader involvement. I may try this out myself.

  5. My strategy for what's on my to-be-read shelf is that I read the last book on each shelf going down the right side, then the first book on each shelf going up the left side. It manages to keep things mixed up reasonably well. At the moment, everything is shelved by color, but every few years, I rearrange by some odd criteria (height, author, title, order of purchase as best as I can remember, etc.). I've been toying with setting up a web page where people can vote on what I should read next, although that's some point in the future.

  6. For four years I read using a regime I created to deal with the enormous number of number of books I had. I decided to choose a number of random themes and read everything I had that could fit that theme, which meant I would read the poetry and criticism and heavy non-fiction I had instead of reading novels all the time. I started with the Romantic era, leading me to read Byron's Don Juan, Blake's Jerusalem, Shelly's Prometheus Unbound, as well as De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb and Howard Bloom and Frank Kermode's books on the Romantics. I went through Crime fiction, Central Europe, the Renaissance, London and History, and I was in the process of reading the Greeks and the Romans when David Foster Wallace died and I thought I really wanted to read the copy of Infinite Jest I had had sitting on my shelf for years. Then I abandoned my thematic reading and went back to reading randomly, which I have mixed fealings about. I just finished The Savage Detectives and when I googled Roberto Bolano your review came near the top, which is what led me here. Looks like a cool site.

  7. my reading queue sometimes reaches above 15 books, which pile up by the bedside. Then in a mad fit of tidiness I reduce it to three or four that I have read in the last week or so, the rest ' falling off the edge of the desk' so to speak. But then I run a second hand bookshop, so I'm in no real danger of not having something to read.

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ● ●
Essays

Read More Puritan Poetry

Essays
February 4, 2022 | 1 17 min read
Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey, for poets like Edward Taylor are not easy. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.
Essays
| 1 17 min read
● ● ●