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Privacies of Reading

  
 
Cavatina
15:20 / 11.10.01
I've been having a quick look at The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts (1994). At the beginning of Chapter 5 he states:

'I'm going to take it as an axiom that the act of reading plays a vital role in the forming and conditioning of sensibility in the life of the committed reader. What interests me is to try to puzzle out the nature of that role.'

He then discusses what he sees as the nature of reading, different sorts of reading, and the ways in which reading changes for individuals - including how it had changed for him - over time, beginning with the identifications and imaginative projections (in regard to novels) of childhood and adolescence. This led me to consider which books I'd felt to be most 'formative' in his sense.

Anyone else interested in sharing just what role specific books and characters have played for hir?

[ 11-10-2001: Message edited by: Cavatina ]
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
16:28 / 11.10.01
quote:Originally posted by Cavatina:

'I'm going to take it as an axiom that the act of reading plays a vital role in the forming and conditioning of sensibility in the life of the committed reader.'

Oooh, how terribly Augustan.

I have thought about this several times, actually. The books which were most influential for me during my childhood were Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, the Earthsea trilogy and various other books involving mythology and/or magic; usually with a loner as a hero. I do mean hero, as well - for some reason I never really identified with heroines or indeed female charcters (this despite a major obsession with the Chalet School series - don't know where that came from).

I had a big thing about boys' school stories as well - something to do with an obsession with homosociability, I think, as well as homoeroticism. That probably qualifies me as one of the paedophile masters of the universe, doesn't it?

I think it's a function of my having had a fairly solitary childhood (always in my bedroom with my nose in a book) and wishing that there was something special about me. End result: deep-seated feelings of inadequacy because I will never find the ring of Erreth-Akbe.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
17:12 / 11.10.01
Hmm. I think the books that made a big impact on me when I was young were Ian Fleming's novels. I started reading them when I was about nine. I don't know what it was that appealed to me - maybe it was because they were a media crossover for me? I mean, I'd loved the movies, but the books were really the first chance I'd ever had to compare between mediums in the presentation of the same thing. I dunno. Eventually, it weirded my parents out, and they wanted me to stop borrowing them from the library. The Orange City Library's staffers would look rather strangely at a kid who'd return Tintin and Fleming in the same batch.

Speaking of which, I think Tintin books also had a bit of an effect on me. It was a more-digestible form of Fleming, I guess, with the alcohol, but without the sex. And the bonus of inventions aplenty. That, coupled with my steady diet of occult literature (well, occult-lite; all those ghost tales guaranteed to be true in large collections edited by Peter Haining, or the supposedly factual productions that looked at things like SHC with photos and a little bit of research.) shaped my reading habits; they were about things beyond my ken, and usually, there was some kind of mechanical overtone; this fit in with the rest of the stuff I was reading about this time: copies of things like The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual and big books on Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci's inventions. As well as, repeatedly, a book celebrating a centenary of magic posters - the idea of prestidigitation and change at one's fingertips, though by dint of semi-scientific application (Mesmerism, etc) was important, I think.

This is, of course, at odds with my love of Poe and Lovecraft - two people who I discovered and cherished because of the mind-numbing way they could create senseless horror that would negate the very scientific/ordered world I'd been studying elsewhere. Maybe that's where the supernatural books come in, too.

Maybe this is it: the dichotomy between what's primal, unknowable and (super)natural versus the rigidly-defined, factual and precise? I guess my early reading set up that kind of inquisitive nature to my reading; a need to learn, but a need that's also in some kind of lion/tamer act with my fear of the darker sides of nature - the Gothic, if you will? I don't know; though the searching is something that is depressingly absent in the recent couple of years...

[ 12-10-2001: Message edited by: Rothkoid ]
 
 
Cavatina
22:55 / 11.10.01
quote:Oooh, how terribly Augustan

Macavity, his statement brought me up with a start, too. One of my criticisms of the book is that it unabashedly proffers a humanist view of consciousness of self, as if this hadn't been severely compromised by post-structuralism. While it is true that the form of consciousness of self to which he refers *is* grounded in personal reading history, he doesn't really consider that one's identity is interpreted or reconstructed within particular discursive configurations - and is not fixed or stable.

That said, like you, I was pretty bookish as a kid, perhaps because I was an only child until I was nearly 16. I read and re-read Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, and loved strange, haunting tales of all sorts - Grimm's and Hans Andersen's fairy tales, Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne etc. But I also liked historical novels, adventure stories, and narrative poems. I remember being very taken with 'Christabel' in high school, for instance.
 
  
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