Reading

 

Reading is a solitary activity that offers a sure guide to navigating society and our many relationships. 

In The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Queen Elizabeth, while chasing after her corgis, discovers a mobile library in a courtyard where she meets the librarian and the sole patron, a member of her kitchen staff. She welcomes a book suggestion from the young servant, Norman, and takes a liking to him while anticipating pushback from senior staff about her decision to read a book. “Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people…. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself.” Indeed, the senior advisors assure that they can brief her on any subject, but the Queen bristles: “briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point… Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.” 

Elizabeth promotes Norman to assist her in procuring books and regrets not reading more in her early years: “for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed.” She describes herself as an opsimath, “one who learns only late in life.” Reading absorbs her, instigating new thinking and ideas. She loses enthusiasm for routines and duties – “what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.” 

Of course, palace staff terminate Norman, suggesting the queen has lost interest and arrange to fund his  college education. The staff then deceive the queen by explaining that Norman resigned to pursue his studies. While happy for him, Elizabeth sadly reflects how “sudden absences and abrupt departures had always been a feature of her life…. ‘We mustn’t worry Her Majesty’ was a guiding principle for all her servants.”

As the queen reads more, she shows a more human side. She finds herself caring more about other people. While reading Henry James, she retorts “Oh, do get on” to the book, and her maid apologizes and the Queen is compelled to explain. “Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and … she wondered why.” More highly placed staff – many who are poorly read themselves – fret that the Queen is not herself, with some even assuming dementia. 

Relishing the revelations found in books, the Queen tries to share her enthusiasm and recommendations. The prime minister’s special advisor complains to her chief of staff: “your employer has been giving my employer a hard time …. Lending him books to read.” Rather than be direct, the Queen’s advisor arranges for her books to be misplaced during an overseas trip. 

Staff machinations backfire as the Queen’s interest turns to keeping a notebook and taking more control of her life, no longer content to simply read: “A reader was next door to being a spectator, whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty.”

At one point she jots a note to herself, “You don’t put our life into your books. You find it there.” 

The novella is sweet and light, celebrating literacy with an ending reminiscent of Royal Escape, published just nine months before The Uncommon Reader in January 2008. The protagonists, the Princess of Wales in the first novel and Queen Elizabeth in the second, reach the same conclusion about the trap that ensnares the British royal family. 

Free thought

In The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman, Ivy Jacob grows up in Boston, beautiful and wild, spoiled yet neglected. An unintended pregnancy prompts her to rebel against her parents' plan to send her away and put the child up for adoption. Instead, Ivy runs away with an acquaintance to a farming commune in rural Western Massachusetts, where she gives birth to a daughter, Mia, and marries the cult leader, Joel. The cult separates mother and daughter and Ivy’s life becomes small, hard and contained. Members of the secretive Community keep close watch on one another to prevent escapes or infractions. “Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn and all of it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to.” 

The commune educates the children just enough to follow Joel's directions and produce goods sold in the nearby town. Joel forbids contact with the outside world, whether chatting with strangers or reading books. While selling goods at a community farmstand, Mia discovers the library and begins removing books, including a first edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. 

Of course, cult leaders resent and fear free thought. Ivy warns her daughter to be careful, while the librarian pities anyone living in a place that outlaws reading, musing “In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.” The librarian’s philosophy: “Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around.” And reading enthralls Mia. “Take one risk and you’ll soon take more. It’s an addiction, or it’s bravery, it’s foolishness or it’s desperation.”

After her mother’s death, Mia understands she has lost her only ally in the world. Ivy had long warned the girl to avoid picking a fight with Joel due to his unwillingness to back down. Mia tries to fade into the background, recalling a line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.” Invisibility was the only way to control her life and resist the Community’s rules: “Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.” 

She considers running away, the night before Joel plans to brand her as punishment. “Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do.” The librarian assists, delivering Mia to a close friend who lives in Concord, where Mia attends school and thrives, even as Joel continues to follow and threaten her.

The second half the book takes a strange and surreal turn as Mia travels into the past for an encounter with Nathanial Hawthorne. The writer is handsome, philosophical and ambitious, coddled by his two sisters yet he also anxious about failure, injustice, and his struggle to write. Nathanial and Mia first meet in the forest and he wonders if she she is dream, perhaps even a ghost, a witch or an angel. “In his writings, women were often principal characters, independent, with minds of their own, often truer to their emotions and to the natural world than the men around them.” 

Mia carries her copy of The Scarlet Letter, a book that Nathanial has yet to write, and she becomes both lover and muse for the author.  Mia is forthright about her journey while recognizing the danger of becoming too close, thinking “how one person could save another’s life or ruin it without meaning to. She had already said too much….” Mia returns from the past, suggesting that an unmarried Hawthorne writes his famous novel soon afterward. Such details do not mesh with Hawthorne's biography, considering that Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. As a scholar, Mia describes a loving, supportive relationship between Hawthorne and his wife, Sophie, yet the woman does not enter Hoffman's plot. The actual couple married in 1842 after a long courtship. Oddly enough, Hawthorne spent time on a farm run by the Transcendentalists, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He took a political job soon after marrying and, after being fired in1849, only then did he have time to write The Scarlet Letter. 

The transition between modern and 19th century settings is rough and not just because the historical issues. The ending is abrupt, rushed and confusing much like the end of a strange dream. An inscription in the first-edition cherished by Mia reinforces this notion: “To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.” Readers are justified in wondering if everything about Mia’s life is a figment of her imagination, that she is free only because of the books she had read.

Secret judges

Our choices and assessments of books expose us as much as those whom we judge.

Not so long ago, these pages noted: "If  readers are candid and thorough, public reading lists like Goodreads - simply admitting what we like and don't like and why - can expose our personalities, levels of socialization, character traits, fears, choices, and more. Of course, many readers do not list every book they read, and others tame their criticism. A book that provokes strong, negative reactions can be as influential and powerful as one that invites our praise."

The author Salman Rushdie has learned this the hard way.

"Sir Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize-winning author, has accidentally shared his book tastes with the world, after reviewing books on a public forum he believed was private," reports Hannah Furness for the Telegraph. "According to a Sunday newspaper, the author had been rating novels on Goodreads, the popular review forum, under the assumption his settings were private."

He claims now that he was "fooling around."  That he did not understand the workings of social media.

He could have remained quiet. Most onlookers would have doubted that the account was really his. And he should stand by his assessments unless they were motivated by envy or meanness.

Authors have many friends in the industry, and their candid judgments would decrease those numbers. Some authors solve this dilemma by refusing to participate in Goodreads but pleading with readers to post reviews. Others use their own two-tier system, doling out either four or five stars to the books they read. Most authors decline to review books they did not enjoy. Some will review old favorites from years ago without a re-read. Others may not read the books in its entirety.

It takes courage to take a public stance by writing a book or to express an opinion about others' books. It takes imagination to discover new authors and styles on one's own, without relying on the masses who spin in circles, chasing down a few authors.

 The consequences of ranking books on social media poses big consequence for the book publishing industry. Authors are lucky if readers finish 20 books in a year. Praise on social media - and the lack of courage - ensures that more global readers are drawn to a shrinking and cliquey group of authors like moths to a flame.

Photo of flame courtesy of MarcusObal and Wikimedia Commons. 

Happiness

Practiced in making choices, readers may be more content than non-readers, as suggested by David Hume in 1742:

The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep. Philosophers have endeavoured to render happiness entirely independent of every thing external. That degree of perfection is impossible to be attained: But every wise man will endeavour to place his happiness on such objects chiefly as depend upon himself: and that is not to be attained so much by any other means as by this delicacy of sentiment. When a man is possessed of that talent, he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem or a piece of reasoning than the most expensive luxury can afford.

Our choices in what we read and with whom we converse influence our level of happiness to some measure. Circumstances and attempts by others to restrict such choices and literary capabilities constrain happiness, too. That does not mean all poems or books or scientific rationales provide such enjoyment, but no one should limit a reader's search. In a globalized world, the challenge is finding balance between selectivity and openness to new ideas.

Readers should remember, too, that a work's value in this area may not be immediately apparent.

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian.  Photo of sculpture of David Hume in Edinburgh, courtesy of David M. Jensen, Storkk and Wikimedia Commons. 

Independence

An 1851 entry from the diary of Linka Preus of Norway, the night before her wedding: "A human being is a free and independent creature, and I would recommend that every woman consider this, and I insist that every maiden owes it to herself to do so . . . Rarely will it be to her disadvantage if she combines it with determination and self-confidence."

Another entry in the diary - about assisting a farmer girl who was alone, taking her on as a maid - inspired Preus's  great-great granddaughter, Margi Preus, to write West of the Moon, the story of Astri who runs away after being sold to a cruel goatman.  Preus describes her inspirations and ponders the influence of Norwegian folktales on children's character for Write All the Words! for International Women's Week.

The events that unfold from determination and self-confidence, escape and rescue, observation, assessment and transformation - are the building blocks to plots. Strength of character comes in many forms across cultures - and words like independence, agency, empowerment may not suit all women. We must test our assumptions, because "more often than not, it’s much easier to see and question the traps and obstacles awaiting women of another culture rather than our own," as suggested by another post in the same blog For some protagonists, the risk comes in testing accepted assumptions and new awareness, because as Honor McKitrick Wallace suggests: “Recognition and articulation of one’s desire can be a quest in and of itself."

And the discoveries that come from reading and writing are one of the ways to challenge our assumptions and routines.

By the way, the etymology of the word "assumption" is intriguing in relation to this topic. 

Image of the Assumption of Mary, oil on canvas, 1558, by Paolo Veronese, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Read all the posts for International Women's Week in E. Kristin Anderson's blog, Write All the Words!

How we read news

Anyone who loves newspapers hopes that Jeff Bezos can innovate and revive interest in the Washington Post, the newspaper industry and daily habits of reading news. Yet the motivation behind the purchase could be to protect the status quo of the internet rather than innovate. 

You see, it's in the interest of internet titans to protect newspapers. The loss of newspapers as a trusted source of news would eventually weaken most search engines, blogs, investment guidance and many other online offerings. Internet readers who devour news expect articles and opinion essays to be grounded in fact and research.

The news industry has ignored the demand side of the business and customer trends. Pricing models for digital news rely on old habits and not new ones. Newspapers like The New York Times continue to fund news reporting with targeted ads and digital subscriptions that offer access to the entire newspaper for a lump sum. 

But that's not how we read anymore, at least on the internet. Few internet users limit their reading to a single newspaper anymore. Few limit the activity to a half hour in the morning or evening, scanning headlines and then methodically reading most articles. Instead, we scan headlines throughout the day, bouncing about from newspaper to newspaper. And digital news services deliver indices based on our careers, political leanings, and geographic location - and we proceed to read a story from Hong Kong, then one from New York or London, before moving on to India. 

A digital subscription for the New York Times runs about 3.75 per week, or about 53 cents per day (and includes a Smartphone App - annoying for subscribers who don't own smartphones; internet customershave come to expect custom-tailored services and products, and refuse to pay for unwanted "extras," but that's another story ...)  Like many readers, I also want to read stories from the Washington Post, Asia Sentinel, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, New Haven Register, Telegraph, Daily Sentinel, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and many more. Of course, the cost of so many subscriptions - offering so few options would add up. Few readers will purchase more than several subscriptions, and a news hound who purchased three subscriptions would feel uninformed.

In the meantime, most newspapers offer a selection of articles for free, and adequate summaries can be found on blogs. And many sites are a source of free opinion essays like Project Syndicate, YaleGlobal Online, Reuters, Bloomberg and more.  Publishers of the New York Times and other newspapers aren't clueless and recognize all this - they should also realize that most subscription offers are absolute turn-offs. Circulation analysts should know, too, how many articles readers actually click, the length of time spent per article, along with traffic sources. I'd guess that plenty of entry and exit sites are other newspapers. Finally, newspaper subscription sites that offer special prices for the first 12 weeks and do not explain long-term pricing are not encouraging or expecting customer loyalty.

If anything, newspapers should find ways to reward loyal, long-time customers rather than gouge them. 

Newspapers must develop pricing models based on customer perceptions of value. Publishers could charge a small fee for each story, perhaps a penny or two, perhaps more for must-read stories. And eventually publishers might even charge a small fee for scanning all headlines. For the most loyal readers, publishers could offer package deals, say 20 articles a month, again for a small fee. Smart publishers would cap the weekly fee at $5 or so, giving those willing to pay that much complete access. 

Yes, each reader will likely read a few articles, but more readers overall will click. With more tailored pricing models, title and content would become more powerful. The number of popular journalists would become more concentrated as some stories are irresistible and many readers would pay.
 
In setting prices, newspaper publishers focus too much on supply and not enough on customer demand. "The theory of price says that the point at which the benefit gained from those who demand the entity meets the seller's marginal costs is the most optimal market price for the good/service."  John Naughton of the Observer touches on this basic economic principal and transaction costs in an article that remembers economist Ronald Coase: 

"If the costs of making an exchange are greater than the gains which that exchange would bring," Coase wrote, "that exchange would not take place and the greater production that would flow from specialisation would not be realised. In this way, transaction costs affect not only contractual arrangements, but also what goods and services are produced. Not to include transaction costs in the theory leaves many aspects of the workings of the economic system unexplained, including the emergence of the firm, but much else besides."

- An online newspaper could distribute work from individual journalists or beats as blogs. Front pages and section content of newspapers are in constant flux, updated minute by minute, defeating the notion of a single newspaper edition. Deadlines come with every passing minute.

-  Editors may invite more readers to contribute articles and opinions, earn and interact – much like Kindle Publishing Platform.

- Advertisers could be given more choice on ad placement, not just with sections but specific articles or journalists. The publisher could also pass along detailed metrics on reader behavior. Online ad sales must offer paying customers more for their money.

- Expect more partnerships. Newspapers already collaborate with Reuters or Associated Press. They could also could collaborate and bundle online delivery services, similar to the distribution of cable television shows.

- The Post may distribute Kindles or other devices to subscribers at a low fee, which would increase dependence on the hardware and expand the market for other services from companies like Amazon. The company's model has foreshadowed such connections, suggested analyst Ben Bajarin in Tech.pinions before the purchase, “Namely, how hardware as an extension of a service may represent the ideal way to consume said service.” 

The best content online depends on newspapers and their journalists. Most stories in broadcasting start out from a newspaper report, and the most informed analysis in television discussions and blogs often relies on the solid, original reporting provided by print publications. Regular, organized delivery of information informs cultural, government, business and social trends, too, often percolating from grassroots reporting. Strong communities are well informed with the help of strong, independent newspapers that are in the business of observing communities, making decisions about what to cover, and pushing readers to venture into new territory and react and think on their own. People who read their local newspapers are smarter consumers. 

The online titans - and citizens - cannot afford for newspapers to go down.
 
The 1891 painting of Woman Reading a Newspaper, courtesy of Norman Garstin and Wikimedia Commons.Garstin was born in Ireland and raised by grandparents. "He first set out to be an engineer, then an architect, and then sought his fortune prospecting for diamonds in South Africa n the company of Cecil Rhodes," notes the bio from Penlee House Gallery and Museum. 

Susan Froetschel is a journalist and author of the novel Fear of Beauty. 

On literacy

Illiteracy weakens societies:

"it’s a mistake to think we can glide through modern life unaffected by others’ struggles with literacy. Consider the manufacturing employee who can’t read warnings on labels, mixing the wrong chemicals and releasing a gas that injures co-workers or home health aides earning minimum wage who can’t follow directions on medication packages or equipment. Too many legislators and citizens don’t read bills before the votes are cast. And then there was the subprime mortgage debacle, with thousands of home buyers trusting loan officers on unrealistic and unaffordable terms, signing toxic contracts that eventually threatened the global economy.... Reading and writing, early steps to seducing the hearts and minds of others through the arts, are tools of power, suggests Robert Greene in The 48 Laws of Power ... Those who belittle education and reading would deny others power." 

 

Photo: US Army Sgt. Terrance Ray of the Paktika Provincial Reconstruction Team reads a book to children in Orgun, Afghanistan; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and US Army.

Old books

A stack of old books from the library wait in the corner of my bedroom. I wonder how many people have read them before me. Did the books change others and will the books change me?