The Only Way to Read a Book
“Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Seven years ago, my brother (who isn’t a big reader) and my wife (who is) were looking at a book that had been sitting unread on one of my shelves for the previous seven years. It was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. They were flipping through its 709 pages of upside-down text, mirror writing, chapter-long footnotes, various typefaces and font colours and storylines, and my brother said, “I wouldn’t know how to read this.”
My wife said, “Where would you even begin?”
“Page one,” I said, facetious yet irrefutable. I remembered the King’s advice in Alice in Wonderland:
“Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
There’s no other way to read a book (to read it well), but even that can stump a person. For all my glibness, I still hadn’t read the thing, because of some anxiety that I’d find myself not up to the task of reading such a strange book. So I decided to just sit down and read it. I started — you guessed it — at page one.
A few days ago, I finally read something else I’d been putting off: “Revolution Man” by
, a deep-dive into Danielewski’s unfinished literary boxset, The Familiar, and also the demise of Borders, and also the second Golden Age of TV, and also Danielewski’s father and his relationship with Nobel-winning writer Pearl Buck, and also...This is form suiting function — a playfully discursive spinning-top circling a playfully discursive writer — even if it sounds like an overstuffed closet you’re too scared to open because all the stuff inside will avalanche out and bury you beneath it. But Sorondo’s a magician: he shows you everything he’s putting inside the magic wardrobe, closes the door to do his abracadabra on the page, then opens it up to show you a tightly controlled, yet loosely gripped, story.
Like I said, I’d been putting it off, but not for the reason it took me so long to get to House of Leaves. This time it was for two boringly basic reasons:
I knew I’d enjoy it, so I was deferring the gratification, waiting for the perfect morning with a great cup of coffee and nothing to distract me from the experience.
It’s incredibly long for something I was going to read on a screen.
That second one is not, obviously, a creative fault; the piece is precisely as long as it needs to be, to the paragraph. It’s a flaw in my ability to pay attention to word-shaped pixels. I need the flow of writing on physical paper. A strange ocular stigmatism sets in after about fifteen minutes of sustained reading on a screen, so I came up with a solution.
Here’s how Sorondo describes Danielewski’s second book, Only Revolutions:
“It’s 360 pages long, with 360 words to a page, across 36 lines, and after the 18th line, you have to rotate the book 180 degrees to read the bottom 18 lines, written from the perspective of the other one of the book’s two allegorical young-lover narrators. Thus you’re handling the book like a steering wheel. Turning and turning. Hence its themes, too, of cyclicality: in nature, in culture, in history.”
The physicality of Danielewski’s work is a feature not only of his novels’ intelligence but of their heart. I can’t imagine reading House of Leaves without coming away with the smell of paper on my fingertips.
There’s a similar reading experience, much less serious though no less fun, in S. by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams. The book is annotated by two of its own characters and stuffed with diagrams scribbled on postcards, maps sketched on napkins, and handwritten letters (real items that can be removed from the book, played with, explored, the same way the book’s characters do in the story).
In an author’s note added to the e-version of S., they write:
“The digital version attempts to work with platform limitations to replicate the experience of the physical book. [...] But please know that the experience of looking at the digital reproductions of these items is decidedly different from that of reading and holding the physical book of S.; of flipping through the novel within it; of holding and examining the ephemeral clues throughout it.”
This is what I decided to bring to reading Sorondo’s essay. I printed it out, stapled it together across the right angle of the top left corner, and finally stopped waiting to read it.
Sorondo’s essay was published in , an online publication near the heart of what many see as a revitalised book scene in the digital pages of Substack.
One of the things I most appreciate about The Met Review (besides — cards on the table — their having published me earlier this year) is that they take a much longer-than-usual view of what deserves reviewing or writing about. The novel I reviewed for them came out a year-and-a-half earlier, and many of the books you can read about there have been out for longer. This gives books greater lifespans than they ordinarily get, by keeping a novel in the public’s consciousness or bringing it back to life. Not all books that fade quickly deserve to; sometimes it’s not a problem with the literature but with our cultural attention span.
There’s an article in (also a player in the resurgence of something like a literary culture on Substack) that shows how a more patient model of criticism defies “hot take” culture. The piece is called “Why Viral Literary Criticism is Very Very Bad” and its author (
) writes about how online virality teaches some very very bad ideas:“[My] upbringing on the internet has instilled in me some core tenets: my opinions need to form quickly (lest I lose the chance to benefit from the cultural conversation), and my thoughts need to be punchy and digestible (even if it means reducing a work to some key takeaways).”
What’s at stake in all of this?
“What lies at stake, then, is our own capacity for consideration: how do we sit with art and let it enrich our lives — how do we find meaning in literature beyond whether it is Good or Bad?”
Because of what I do with turning reading into writing, I’m occasionally gripped by the well-dressed yet ultimately insubstantial idea that I should be reading The Latest Thing, the novel that’s still warm from the press and bound to be kept warm by the hottest takes. So I pre-ordered a Very New Novel, had it delivered on publication day, read it that evening, and spent the next few days bleaching it out of my head with other, better, older books.
The Very New Novel was a rogue’s gallery of all the worst contemporary literary fads. Nothings happens, except for the tediously documented introspection of its characters for whom nothing exists but their own feelings. This kind of thing is the outcome of a culture obsessed with self-improvement, whose dialect is built out of jargon straight from the therapist’s office. At a thematic and conceptual level, the Very New Novel ran out of steam about a third of the way in. Then came this try-hard line (which even gets the forced-profundity of a single-sentence paragraph):
“Discover was one letter away from divorce.”
This is the kind of half-observation leading nowhere for which Ocean Vuong has recently been called out. (See: “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”) For the rest of the book, I kept sighing so hard it sounded like my soul leaving my body. And here’s the kicker: that Very New Novel generated zero discussion anywhere I hang out online or among any of the people who I read for their thoughts on books.
But nothing close to that happened when I read House of Leaves, twenty years after it was published. After two decades, people were still talking about it, still writing long, wonderful essays about this Not New Novel. My advice is to read that old book you’ve been putting off reading, and let the new stuff wait a little longer.
Out of curiosity, how do you annotate a book that you're reading for review on here? Personally, I tend to highlight long passages and underline key phrases. But before I had the nerve to actively engage with books, I just bookmarked pages with torn up post-it notes. Now, I see the beauty in joining the conversation.
Thanks for writing this, Matthew. I was reminded whilst reading your piece of the character Martin Amis calls Judge Time. He separates the good from the bad because he’s the only one with any lasting authority. It’s also why rereading matters, I think. Good books don’t just last over time. They survive a few rereadings over that time.