Authors and Books: Intersections on the outside, drawing me in
Here’s my entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival. The topic proposed by Zachary Kai is intersecting interests. When I saw the topic, I immediately thought of my reading interests. Since my retirement, I suspect that I spend more time reading than I spend doing anything else, though I suppose if one bundles washing the clothes, washing the dishes, and paying the bills together under the heading of household management, I might spend more time there. But household management isn’t all that interesting. So when I think about intersecting interests, I think about the reading. And it’s not just the interests as reflected in my mind. It’s also the interests reflected in the books and essays that I’m reading.
So as I thought about the topic I decided to focus on intersections between the different books and their authors. I typically read several books at a time, usually representing different topics and genres. I appreciate the connections or intersections between books of similar topics or themes, but I appreciate even more the random and sometimes surprising connections that emerge when I’m reading apparently unrelated books. The intersections of authors and themes in the books create connections in my mind that shape my thinking and my future reading. Occasionally these connections build on each other, creating what might be called a reading trail through a variety of intersections. I’m writing now about a trail — or is it a set of trails? — that emerged over the last couple of weeks.
I’ll start with a visit to our local independent bookstore a couple of weeks ago. One of the books featured on their new arrivals table was George Scialabba’s The Sealed Envelope. It’s a collection of essays about a variety of cultural topics and thinkers. I knew nothing about Sicalabba’s work, but my skimming of a few pages led me to think I would find it interesting and even inspiring. So I brought it home. My wife and I also purchased Flesh by David Szalay, the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. She was the first to read Flesh; I began to read Scialabba’s essays. I was entranced. His writing about thinkers whose books I had read reminded me of what I appreciated (or didn’t appreciate) when I read them, some of them years ago. His writing about thinkers I knew nothing about opened up new interests and how they might intersect with existing interests. I sought to learn more about him, and discovered that he is (or at least was) a contributor to Crooked Timber, one of my favorite blogs. I didn’t expect that connection, and was pleasantly surprised that they even had an online seminar discussion of his What are Intellectuals Good For? back in 2009. Given the strength and focus of his writing, I suppose it’s no surprise that he wrote for Crooked Timber.
One of the authors Scialabba mentions is Sven Birkerts, and what I found most interesting about this is the reference to Birkerts’s discussion of “the ‘deep time’ of fully engaged reading” in his book The Gutenberg Elegies. I found Birkerts’s book in the local library and have now finished most of it. His discussion of reading and writing and the relationships between them, how each bleeds into the other as the reader collaborates with the writer to create a fictional world, shaped my reading of Szalay’s novel Flesh. Szalay only hints at the inner turmoil of István, his protagonist, as he is buffeted by events in his world, and yet I found myself stepping into what I imagined to be István’s mind as I read. I struggled to put István’s inner life, as I imagined it, together with and his understanding of his larger world. Things came together for me when I read Birkerts’s account of his reading of The Catcher in the Rye, and in particular of his coming to understand Holden Caulfield: “we must use what we know of our world to create his. His can only exist at the expense of ours, though — this is the law of fiction.” A connection that I hadn’t anticipated, and it helped me to understand why I felt myself identifying so strongly with István.
Such connections usually keep me going, almost as if I’m enjoying a journey that I don’t plan out in advance. But there are days — like yesterday — when I feel unfocused, bouncing from one book to the next, some on my reading list and others not. I managed to get through one of Chekhov’s short stories, which was on my list. But then I was distracted by another book, seemingly unrelated, that I started months ago but then set aside: The Genius of Trees, by Harriet Rix. It’s a fascinating account of how trees evolved and also about their intersections with other parts of the world. I don’t remember why I set it aside, but yesterday I couldn’t resist the urge to pick it up again. “It’s not on the list!” I said to myself (reminding myself of that Frog and Toad story we read to our son many years ago). But I picked it up anyway, and what did I encounter in Rix’s book? A reference to a short story by Anton Chekhov. The reading list that I had set aside for the moment was following me around.
Unfocused. Easily distracted. Reminded that I was avoiding what I said I would be reading. It was the end of the day, and I was wishing that I had had been more successful in my reading. But this wishing led me to wonder what counts as success. After all, I’m retired. No one tells me that I should be reading. Besides that, I had done the dishes and the laundry. I’d even paid a few bills. Doesn’t that count as a success? What would it mean to be successful?, I wondered. And this reminded me of an essay by Peter Handke that I’d read years ago called Who has ever experienced a successful day? That link will take you to an excerpt from the beginning of that essay, posted to the blog yesterday as a commonplace. “Well, at least I put something up on the blog,” I thought to myself.
Satisfied with my “accomplishment,” I put Handke’s book face down on my desk, and then happened to notice the blurb on the back:
[Peter Handke] is widening the frontier of personal narrative. Shuttling between fiction and essay, he is making what feels like a new form, a kind of associative philosophical meditation that both maps and manifests the movements of mind. … Each [essay] is a contained language event.
— Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book review
Birkerts again. This trail took me from Scialabba to Crooked Timber to Birkerts to Szalay, then a brief detour to Chekhov to Rix and back to Chekhov, then to Handke and back to Birkerts. At each stage, the intersecting interests of the authors brought new connections into my mind, some intersections through which I’ve already traveled and others laid out for future journeys. Something to look forward to.
