The Book Reads Me

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was a prominent literary critic and well-known professor at Columbia University. Among many of his quotations, maxims and aphorisms is this statement: "The book reads you" or some such sentence. (I have not been able to document where this statement comes from even though every one who uses it attributes it to Trilling. If you know the exact reference, let me know.)

As a person who deals with books both professionally and personally, I have many opportunities to advise friends and customers at the bookstore where I work which books should be read. I usually tailor these suggestions around my own reading as well as the needs and interests of the customer.

It seems obvious, doesn't it, that books are objects that we read? We belong to a consumer culture and, for many, books are objects--maybe not so different from hamburgers, clothes, cars, etc.--that we buy and consume. Very rarely do the objects that we purchase speak back to us or argue with us. They are passive things, meant to be acquired. Marketing of books by the mega-book chains would seem to encourage this attitude: Get this book, get that book, get, get, get.

Yet, Trilling turns all of this around. By stating that books read us, he is saying--I think--that books speak to the deepest and most intimate parts of our being. They evoke and awaken in us much that we need to know about. They read us by bringing us face-to-face with other experiences or our own. In that way, books read or elucidate who we are.

I can offer two examples of what I think Trilling is getting at out of my own reading from this past year. First, is the experience of hearing the reading of the Gospel each week at Christ Church. It seems to me that as I hear the story of the betrayal of Christ by the disciples, I am somehow hearing my own story. In fact, in the face of death, I would probably betray him too. Or, I might follow him if called to leave my nets, if the call were done under the right circumstances. In other words, when I hear the proclamation of the Gospel, I feel as though it is reading me and scanning my innermost life.

The second example comes from my engagement with one of the past year's most important literary offerings: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In this unrelentingly intense memoir, Didion chronicles her thoughts and memories following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, just after Christmas several years ago. Without any sentimentality, she writes of her ups and downs, grief, shock that went on, in one way or another, for at least a year after her husband's death. The book "reads you" because as you follow Didion's journey, you start measuring your own possible reactions and responses to the sudden death of a loved one. In fact, sometimes as I was reading this book I was more embedded in my own fears and my own projection of grief than I was inside the author's.

As I have reflected on Trilling's quotation, I have begun to think that one of the characteristic of a literary classic is its ability to "read you." For example, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov's existential journey into evil and its consequences force the reader to ask "Would I, too, be capable of bludgeoning an old person to death for no reason whatsoever?" Or, in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past,the dreamy unhurried remembrance causes the reader to engage in a similar exercise based on his or her own life.

Do you accept Trilling's notion that books read us? What examples can you point to that would support this notion? Or, is Trilling's notion no more than a reversal of that books are meant to be read? Have I gotten the possible meaning of Trilling's quotation right? Share your thoughts, if you wish, in this posting's comment box.