Everything seems to be coming up reading lately.

A few days ago, I was talking with my mom about the book she just finished reading, The Mitfords, and she mentioned a passage in the book in which one of the Mitford sisters refers to reading as a “selfish” act at heart. On reflection, we both agreed that there’s something to that. Assuming you’re not reading aloud to someone, reading is certainly solitary, if not downright selfish. In burying your nose in a book, you are essentially rejecting the world around you—and the people in it—and choosing instead to immerse yourself in an imagined world which only you can experience.

Reading—well, good reading—takes you far away from your immediate surroundings. I suppose that’s why I would so often get utterly lost in books as a teenager. What shy, awkward 15-year-old wouldn’t want to escape the slings and arrows of adolescence and flee into—in my case—fabulous worlds of faraway kingdoms and brave princesses? Deep down, I am still that shy, awkward adolescent, and maybe that’s why I still like a good fantasy or SF romp. I’m a fan of escapism, I admit it. I hesitate to speculate on what that really says about me.

Speaking of which… The book review section in the New York Times today featured an essay entitled It’s Not You, It’s Your Books, which addresses the issue of judging people (specifically, potential romantic partners) by the books they read. Though judging someone by the contents of their bookshelves (or, indeed, the lack thereof) seems to be rather harsh, I can understand the impulse. When a guy I was dating in college said he “didn’t really read,” I have to admit that my opinion of him slipped several notches. But I was 18 at the time, and when you’re 18, your personal predilections play a much larger role in your relationships with other people than they do when you’re a bit more mature.

Nowadays, I like to think that I can separate the person from the chick-lit novel they’re reading. Nowadays, in fact, I’m friends with several people who “don’t really read,” or who never read fiction. I don’t share their tastes, but I don’t judge them for them either (just as I hope not to be judged for the fact that I can plow through trashy science fiction at an alarming rate).

While other people’s reading preferences might not matter as much to me these days, my interest is naturally instinctively piqued by people who read books which do resonate with me. I recently saw a guy on a plane reading Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, and I was immediately intrigued. Had he been sitting next to me, I may have even broken my rule of not conversing with seat-mates on a plane and asked him what he thought of the book. Reading may be selfish in that it takes people into separate worlds, but books themselves can bring people together.

The New York Times article concluded that “for most people, love conquers literary taste.” As a bibliophile, I count myself lucky in that, with Jeremy, love and literary taste have largely gone hand in hand. We don’t read exactly the same books—he reads a lot more about network theory than I do, and I read a lot more Margaret Atwood than he does—but for the most part, our bookshelves are overflowing with books we’ve both read and enjoyed. And, at the end of the day, when we’re sitting side by side in bed, with our noses buried in our respective books, it doesn’t really matter what we’re reading; though we’re in different worlds, we’re together in our mutual love of literature.

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite literary passages on the subject of reading. It’s from If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, perhaps the ultimate book about reading. I read it years ago in Germany (and in German, in fact), and though I got completely lost in its book-within-a-book-within-a-book structure and, in the end, wasn’t quite sure whether I had enjoyed it (or even understood it), this passage stayed with me, and it never fails to move me:

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light, returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set it against?”

Indeed.

Further reading…