Bookish lives: reader's memoirs

Christian Century, May 18, 2004 by Trudy Bush

An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland. By Michael Dirda. Norton, 320 pp., $24.95.

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading. By Sara Nelson. Putnam, 242 pp., $22.95.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. By Azar Nafisi. Random House, 347 pp., $2.3.95.

NOT ONLY HAVE book sales been rising in recent years, but those who love to read are speaking out. A subgenre of the memoir has appeared: the memoir of the reading life. That one of these Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, has topped both the New York Times and the Ainazon.com bestseller lists is astonishing in a culture that supposedly discourages serious reading. Michael Dirda's An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland and Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading have also been widely praised for their exploration of the interaction between the imagined life found in books and the everyday life of the reader.

Dirda traces a cultural journey with which I identify. Born into working-class families in rust-belt Ohio, both of us found our way out of the blue-collar world largely through the act of reading. Dirda's father was an embittered steel worker who had had to abandon his own education in order to support a widowed mother and younger siblings. His children suffered from his moodiness and anger, but after Dirda himself spent a summer during his teens working in the mills, "I forgave my father everything. He could be overbearing and worse, but his soul-deadening labor gave me time to read and to know that my life would be privileged compared to his. When writers talk about the 'dark, satanic mills,' I know that they're not just being poetical."

This father, who never himself read anything but the newspaper, introduced his children to the neighborhood library and installed bookshelves in the family's small living room. These shelves soon began to be filled with the first volumes of a variety of encyclopedias. His mother would purchase the first volume at the introductory price and then cancel the order. When the time comes to write reports, in geography or English or social studies, make sure your subject starts with the letter 'A'," she admonished her children.

Not a reader herself, Dirda's mother did find time to read to her son. As an adult, daydreaming about the perfect environment for reading, Dirda realizes that the images he conjures up are "all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap." His mother made reading "a sensual transport ... that I have yearned to feel each time I pick up a book." So even nonreading parents can sow the seeds of a love of reading.

Dirda's literary education, like mine, began with newspaper comics and drugstore comic books. It progressed haphazardly through whatever books chance put in his way. He remembers the excitement of the TAB Book Club in elementary school, and recalls the monthly "breathtaking joy of holding in my hands four bright new paperbacks." The family had little money, but Dirda discovered that Goodwill and other secondhand stores often sold dusty boxes of books for little more than the price of a candy bar. Often the boxes contained mysteries and adventure stories--genres for which he developed a deep affection. Sometimes treasures like H. C. Wells's Outline of History or the complete works of Sir Walter Scott lay buried in those boxes. "To be an indiscriminate reader--as the luckiest young often are--means that the right books are all around you," Dirda writes.

IT WAS a good era for the upwardly mobile reader. Terry Teachout, born like Dirda in the early 1950s, describes these growing-up years as the "Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of' the Month." TV programs like The Ed Sullivan Show moved between presenting schlock and great vocal artists; Life magazine might contain a full-color spread of Renoir's paintings followed, on the next page, by pictures of a roller-skating horse. This, writes Teachout, was all to the good. For 'all its flaws, middlebrow culture "nurtured at least two generations' worth of Americans who ... went on to become full-fledged highbrows--but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture" (The Terry Teachout Reader, Yale University- Press).

Dirda couldn't afford to join the subscription book clubs that flourished during his youth, but he could--and did--check their selections out of the library. He read his way through Mortimer Adler's Great Books series. With the help of his library card and a number of outstanding teachers he won a scholarship to Oberlin College. Eventually be became--what else?--a book reviewer and senior editor for the Washington Post Book World and a Pultizer Prize-winning critic.

Dirda writes his memoir as a middle-aged man who now prefers his art "cool, controlled and finely milled, witty instead of touching, artful or even artificial rather than realistic." He wishes that he "had sat down with pen and paper more often than with an old paperback, had tilted my days more toward being a Writer than a Reader."