I’m a book man, not a beach reader
Joseph Epstein
More than 20 years ago, David Brooks, in a review of one of my own books, Snobbery: The American Version, remarked that “the book is one that intelligent people will be reading on the beach this summer.” Pleasing though this review was, in writing the book I was also hoping to find some readers for it in autumn, winter, and spring. Does reading, like baseball or football, have a season? One might think so when confronted with the various newspaper and magazine sections annually devoted to Summer Reading, Summer Books, Best Beach Reads, and the rest. They make reading seem the mental equivalent of a summer sport.
Why summer is thought to be the preferred time for reading is unclear, apart from the notion that summer offers a wider margin of leisure than other seasons. But if a preferred season for serious reading exists, surely it is winter, when, unless one lives in the Sun Belt, one is most likely to remain indoors. Yet the assumption of summer as the reading season par excellence endures. For many years now, the New York Times has published a list of books for its subscribers to read over the summer. This year’s list leads off with a novel by one Andrew Lipstein “about a Brooklyn hedge funder who, after a fateful dinner party, decides to go vegan.” From this brief summary of the novel, I’ve made a mental note never to accept a dinner invitation from Mr. Lipstein.
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Another common ideal is reading in bed — reading oneself, in effect, to sleep. This, too, is far from my ideal. I do not read in search of somnolence but in search of wisdom. Reading in bed, if what one reads has any power, is more likely to stimulate, and thereby arouse wakefulness rather than sleep. Besides, I read with a pencil to sideline noteworthy passages, and if they are truly worthy of notes, I write them out, with a fountain pen, on paper I use as a bookmark. A fountain pen in bed at the end of a long day cannot go easy on sheets.
The notion of reading either on the beach or in bed, it seems to me, demotes the importance of reading to little more than a form of relaxation. For me, reading has always been much more than that. I enjoy watching detective movies, but with only a few exceptions — Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler — I have never had much interest in reading them. Reading is, for me, too serious an activity to waste on whodunits, books by or about celebrities, or lengthy biographies of modern politicians.
The idea implicit in the summer reading list is that of an ideal reading experience. On that, I have some thoughts. Like most writers, I am a slow reader. I read slowly because I am interested to learn how superior writers achieve what they do in prose. A book described as “a real page turner” is no enticement to me. I prefer a book that is a persistent “page stopper,” causing one to stop to contemplate a brilliant passage, an arresting phrase, a surprising point of view.
Nor have I had much luck listening to audio versions of books. Some years ago, I had a few of my own books put on Books on Tape. What a pleasing prospect, I thought at the time. I shall drive about the city listening to my own writing. Turns out I never got through the beginning of the first tape. The voice of the no doubt otherwise unemployed actor reading my book wasn’t my own; he, the reader, didn’t grasp my rhythm nor understand my emphases, and ignored my punctuation, not to mention his mispronouncing a word or two. No, listening to even my own writing gave no pleasure, and I have never attempted to listen to myself or any other writers on an audio device since.
Nor do I care to read on a Kindle or tablet or computer. I grasp the utility of reading on Kindles or tablets: print on them can be made larger for people with eyesight difficulties, many books can be put on them making one’s luggage during travel less cumbersome. I, however, have a pixel problem. I much prefer print over pixels. Pixels are for information, I have come to conclude, print for knowledge. Pixels make me want to skim, which print rarely does. Send me via email an article or essay of more than twenty or so paragraphs, and my right (my mouse) hand begins to twitch roughly around the tenth paragraph down, wanting to scroll to the end and be done with it. Not so with books, whose look, feel, even smell are to me a comfort to have and to hold.
I have never timed what portion of my waking day is given over to reading, but I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it is more than half. I read with my breakfast; I read away the better part of most afternoons. I read in the bathroom. My current bathroom book is A Clerk of Oxenford, a collection of essays by Gilbert Highet. (I cannot just now recall the name of the 18th century wit who wrote to a writer who sent him his recent book that he was reading it on the toilet and it would soon be behind him.) If I have a baseball game on the television, I keep a book by my side to read during the breaks for commercials and pitching changes. My apartment is littered with books, including nine nicely stuffed bookcases.
From this brief account of my days, you will have correctly gathered that I do not go to an office. Luck of all good luck, I haven’t had to work in an office since 1970, which may be one definition of the good life. This, of course, gives me more time for reading than everyone who has a regular job.
Many jobs allow no time for reading, such as those in politics, at the head of large corporations, or as presidents of universities. Nor does a family with two or more young children in it. No one, I have come to conclude, is finally well-read; it is only that some people have been privileged to read more than others. I, lucky fellow, have turned out to be among the latter.
Though not office-bound, I haven’t been to the beach in many a moon. As a younger man I went in the hope of obtaining a Cary Grant-like tan, but the fear of skin cancer from too much sun soon kept me away. As a distinctly older gent now, I steer clear of beaches, having no desire to display what time, that cruel sculptor, has done in the way of decrepitude to my body. As for reading on the beach, I don’t believe a more inconvenient place to read can be found. The beach has too many distractions — the passing cavalcade of bikinis, Frisbees flying about, now the cellphone conversations everywhere being carried on — for a serious reader.
By a serious reader, I mean someone who reads for more than entertainment merely. Thomas Jefferson advised that one should read books that are both useful and give pleasure. Many are the motives for reading, but a main one, surely, is the hope of getting a touch or two smarter about the world in which we are all sentenced to live out our days. One way of doing this is to read books by writers more intelligent than oneself. Marcel Proust called reading “the noblest of distractions, the most ennobling one of all for only reading and knowledge produce the ‘good manners of the mind.’” What might these good manners be Proust, alas, does not specify. My own sense is that these manners widen one’s perspective, deepen one’s understanding, enlarge one’s experience in a way neither the most extensive travel nor life in the highest of high places can hope to do. You might want to think about this over the summer, and on into the autumn and winter. And I would advise that, whenever possible, you do so with a book in your hand.
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Joseph Epstein is the author of, most recently, The Novel, Who Needs It?, out July 2023.