Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. - book reviews

Edited by Laura Furman and Elinore Standard / Carroll & Graf, 1997, pp. 330, $13.95

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, me University of Texas at San Antonio

"Sometimes," wrote Virginia Woolf, "I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading." Dante Alighieri imagined that it could also be hell; aroused by a book to consummate illicit love, his Paolo and Francesca suffer eternal, infernal torment. While Oscar Wilde wrote rhymes about being imprisoned in Reading Gaol, reluctant pupils feel as if they experience a similar fate.

For those who indulge in the bizarre practice of gazing at and grazing through mottled sheets of paper, reading seems utterly natural. However, what Joseph Epstein calls"that lovely, anti-social, splendidly selfish habit known as reading" has a finite history. Developments in electronic technology challenge its future. After four centuries in which books were the instrument and embodiment of serious culture, printed texts are being displaced by alternative media. Aliteracy--the disinclination to read by those who can--is epidemic. Nevertheless, more volumes are being published than ever before, and many are self-conscious or defensive--histories of book culture and apologies for the medium. Bookworms is a very readable compendium that pays homage to the endangered habit. It is likely to delight readers, while others ignore it.

For the first of their collection's six sections, the editors offer passages in which Alan Bennett, Clarice Lispector, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Rodriguez, Tobias Wolff, VS. Pritchett, and others recall the childhood discovery of reading. In the second part, writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Lamb, Anthony Trollope, and W.H. Auden provide a taxonomy of readers--skimmers, omnivores, serialists, and amnesiacs, among them. The third section records mixed reactions by Jane Austen, Rachel Hadas, Franz Kafka, Giacomo Leopardi, and Eudora Welty to being read to aloud. In the fourth, Vartan Gregorian, Sven Birkerts, Kirkpatrick Sale, and others contemplate the fate of reading in a post-literate world. Section Five, assigned the odd title "Queen Lear," affirms the power of reading to transcend woe. The final section is a miscellany in praise of the perusing practice.

John Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," that eloquent account of the ineffable ecstasy of reading, finds a proper place here. Bookworms is subtitled Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading, demonstrated by contributions from Henry James, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. However, it is generous to apply the term "great" to Rex Stout, Emily Post, and oth ers in the volume. The book does not include such great authors as Miguel Cervantes, whose Don Quixote is deranged by reading; St. Augustine, who described astonishment over someone who read without moving his lips; or William Shakespeare, whose Malvolio, Shylock, and Romeo each run awry for lack of careful reading. This reader's anthology of readings on reading would have included Jack London's account of an avid autodidact in Martin Eden; Jean-Paul Sartre's of an absurd one in Nausea. and Elias Canetti's of a pathetic one in Auto-da-Fe. The first encounter between European letters and African eyes also might have been featured.

"Read if you want to live!," advised Gustave Flaubert. Readers die anyway, but Bookworms is a reminder of how much more lively reading makes the interval before death.

RELATED ARTICLE: MUSEUM MEMO

What's new in museums around the country? Among the more interesting exhibitions that will be on view are:

American Tonalism: Paintings, Drawings, Prints & Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through June 1.

Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through July 27.

The Streets and Beyond: New York Photographs, through June 8, and Performance in Miniature: Toy Theaters, Marionettes and the King-Coit Children's Costumes, through July 6, both at the Museum of the City of New York.

A Great Little City: Chicago Souvenir Buildings, The Art Institute of Chicago, through July 6.

Solid Bone and Luminous Flesh: Ch'ing Dynasty Ceramics (1644-1911), Philadelphia Museum of Art, through May 31.

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