To read, to live; to live, perhaps to dream

I stared at the computer for some time before beginning to write this.  Decompression time.  Sometimes coming out of a book really is like rising out of deep water, isn’t it—bends and all.

Today the book is Orson Scott Card‘s The Worthing Saga. Other days it may be Anne Perry‘s Tathea, or David Brin‘s Kiln People, or Guy Gavriel Kay‘s Fionavar Tapestry.

And there’s no need even to get me started on Martha Cooley‘s The Archivist–I am quite sure I have already written more about it than anyone else wants to know.

Part of the agreement I made in beginning to post to this weblog was to write about what I’m reading. I suppose I’ll start by writing about how I read.

I read many works in parallel, because my tastes change with mercurial alacrity (okay, so I just wanted to use the word “alacrity”), and more importantly because I frequently want time to digest a chapter or scene in a story. (This makes me the perfect kind of reader to adore the Amazon Kindle, and indeed I do. Mine is named “The Guide, Mark II.”) My philosophy of reading holds that I owe nothing to a book merely because I begin to read it. I will quite happily discard a book after 3 pages, 100, or 300, rarely looking back. However, if I do intend to finish a book, I shoulder the (occasionally awesome) responsibility of learning the characters on their own terms, of allowing them their full measure of existence.

I loaned The Archivist to a friend who reads entirely differently from me (who once as an escape read half of War and Peace in two days, and feels compelled to finish every book he starts). The next morning he handed it back with a simple, “It was good. Let’s talk later.” His major critique of the book was that Ms. Cooley should have let the ideas percolate another 20 years or so before writing the book: it seemed a “green” undertaking to him. Although he may have a point, I still feel I too had a point when I responded, “Who are you to say that? You didn’t even give her two days.”

I have a friend who for several intense months at age 11 or so went around murmuring scenes from Lord of the Rings under her breath, imagining herself tromping along as a tenth member of the Fellowship. Another who has spoken of planning lighting schemes and camera angles as if to stage and film favorite scenes from stories. My imagination works differently. I rarely see the characters of whom I read, though I sometimes see through their eyes. I hear them speak, but it always sounds like my own voice. I feel my body move their gestures. I suppose I try personally to experience the story.

Which is more or less how, in the world of The Worthing Saga, telepathy works. If they “look into the minds” of others, the telepaths experience those others’ memories as their own. This can cause all sorts of philosophical/psychological quandaries if the “viewee” is a very different sort of person from the telepath, who has done very different things, had (to the telepath) inconceivable reactions to the stimuli of life. Twice so far in Worthing there have been conversations where one character says to another, “Your life is more real to me than mine. How did you take my life from me?” But it’s not that anyone’s life is erased—just that the overwhelming force of someone else’s strongest memories may seem more evocative than one’s own “normal” life.

The more I read, especially in good speculative fiction, the more metaphors I find for the reading experience. I think this one, from Card, will last me for a while. And of course Card is the author who wrote, in a 1991 introduction to Ender’s Game, “The ‘true’ story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. … The story is the one that you and I will construct together in your memory.” I hope all my favorite authors have such faith in me. I hope I may live up to that faith.