Mood Reading

Why do some books impress the intellect but fail to stir the soul? And does Sylvia Plath understand how paragraphs work?

Last week, I was between books and grumpy, so I went looking for something to read. I wandered around the room I call my library, lost, like I’d been sent to a supermarket but left the list at home. I was sure there was a specific book I wanted to be reading, I just had to work out what it was.

This is the problem with being, as I am, a mood reader. Sometimes, I can’t find the book to match (or correct) how I’m feeling. It’s also why I avoid book clubs — a month might be plenty of time to read the novel, but it’s rarely the month in which I feel like reading that novel. I wince when someone lends me a book and says, “You should read this.” No, thanks. I’ll read it when I’m ready.

Being a mood reader feels like a failing, like an undeveloped sense of discipline. I see other writers announcing which books they’re going to read in the coming year, which ones they’ll read each month (each week, for the total psychopaths). I’ve tried that, but I get to the third book on the schedule and start to itch with boredom. My inner punk rebels against planning.

This is at odds with how I think about reading. Books should stretch my capabilities to better expand my mind. I believe readers owe something to books, that we should give them our attention even if we don’t feel like giving it — but then I treat them as vending machines of entertainment from which I take, take, take. I feel like George in Isherwood’s A Single Man:

“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly — despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public — to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”

I know that picking up the damned book will be worth it if I can push past my mood. Still, there’s always plenty of great books left to read, and deciding between them has a remarkable amount to do with whim. I listen to the critics to help me sort out my options, but I listen to my gut to choose between those. My mood decides between Moby Dick and Middlemarch.

My choices on this day when I couldn’t work out what to read were anything from the dozens of bookcases around my apartment. I tried to listen to my gut, which told me the book I wanted would be set in a city, an American city, an American east coast city. New York, obviously. It would be about writers. Something like The Bell Jar, but not The Bell Jar because a) I re-read that last year, and b) I didn’t love it. Truth is I barely even liked it.

Was it a shortcoming on my part? Entirely possible — I’d been in a pre-depressive funk for a few weeks, and there’s no accounting for how a mood disorder will affect your tastes. But I like to think I’m a little savvier as a reader, that I base my judgments on more than temper. There have been times when remarkable prose lifted a bad mood, and times when a great mood wasn’t enough to salvage a terrible book. There’s more to reading than feeling. That’s why I’m still thinking about The Bell Jar a year later, trying to figure out what went wrong in my reading: me or the book?

When I first read The Bell Jar some twenty years ago, I found it hard to divorce Plath’s fiction from her life. I noticed the obvious overlaps: the scholarship awarded to Esther (Plath’s narrator) and Plath’s own Fulbright Scholarship; Esther’s desire to write poetry and Plath’s posthumous status as an important poet; the mental anguish suffered by both creator and creation. That kind of Easter-egg hunt is fun but superficial. It’s just recognising details from the author’s life as they make cameo appearances in her book. So, this time reading The Bell Jar, I ignored those similarities.

My mind, being my original nemesis, started recognising different overlaps — this time with contemporary book trends. There’s the small-town girl goes to the big city storyline, and the self-reference rife in autofiction, but the most obvious (and irritating) thing that now litters a certain type of fiction is Plath’s proclivity for single-line paragraphs, the kind designed to shortcut profundity.

Because a line like this advertises its own importance.

It was reassuring to read Elisa Gabbert in The Paris Review feeling apprehensive about Plath’s characteristic melodrama in using the hard return, single-sentence paragraph right there on page one of The Bell Jar:

“Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work. Having read the whole novel, I can confirm that Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work.”

There was another unexpected comparison I kept making — between The Bell Jar and The Great Gatsby, which I’d re-read only a few weeks earlier. I went in remembering that I’d enjoyed Gatsby well enough but it hadn’t bowled me over, and I came out blown away by Fitzgerald’s prose, Carraway’s voice, the ingenuity of the plot, and the depth of its themes. I returned to The Bell Jar believing it to be a work of unadulterated genius, and I closed the book feeling largely unmoved. At an intellectual level, I could see that it’s a fine novel, that it deserves to be considered a modern classic, and I’d understand someone telling me it was their favourite book. I “got” it — I just didn’t feel it.

I haven’t been able to work out why I felt so apathetic about this novel. It’s a hell of a lot easier to explain what you love about a book or why you hate it. Both of those are active feelings about attributes that can be pointed at; articulating why a book fails to connect often means gesturing at absences, trying to name things that aren’t there.

One thing The Bell Jar showed me clearly: being a pure mood reader, only reading what suits a mood and abandoning books when they don’t, is a good way to miss out on greater riches. I didn’t love Plath’s novel as much as I’d hoped to, but it gave me a ton to think and write about. I got a whole essay (that you can read here) out of a book I didn’t enjoy.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering why the book didn’t work the second time, and at some later point in my life, I’ll read it again. Maybe then I’ll be in the right mood.

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