Welcome; also, How to Lie About What You've Read
I've had several people tell me over the years that they would like to be able to follow along with what I'm reading, and that I should make a goodreads. My reading is too haphazard and partial, and the thought of tracking it on an app too boring, to make such a project worthwhile for me. So I thought instead, I'll make a blog. I can tell you all what I've been reading, and what I've been getting out of it, and if you appreciate my effort, you can subscribe.
There's another reason to avoid tracking precisely what I've read, and that's to avoid being too specific or definite about what exactly I have or haven't finished. Infinite Jest? In Search of Lost Time? Brothers Karamazov? The Sisters of Dorley Hall? All tomes I've started. Which have I finished? It's impolite to ask.
Several years ago I picked up a slight volume of essays called Strangers by the British poet Rebecca Tamás. I definitely recommend it by the way, I think about essays in there all the time. The theme of the book is the border between human and nonhuman, and how our activism, how our ethics and how our world would be changed if we didn't police the border quite so heavily. One of the essays is about Clarice Lispector's masterpiece novel The Passion According to G.H.. As this novel is about a woman who learns to see through that border by forgetting how to see it at all it is obviously relevant. I was intrigued by her description and decided to read it for myself.
For about a year I could only find it on audiobook. I could have ordered it, but for whatever reason I just kept searching bookstores and didn't ever find it. I couldn't really focus on the audiobook, the prose always lulled me into a kind of trance. Or else some turn of phrase would distract me and I would think about it for a minute and then realize I hadn't heard anything for the last few pages. Eventually I found it in a bookstore, but by then I had sort of forgotten why I was so keen to read it, and I didn't end up reading more than a chapter or two. That didn't stop me from telling everyone it was my favorite book.
It helps when pretending you've read a book that you haven't read if the book doesn't have such a well-defined plot. here is the plot of The Passion According to GH: a woman is alone in her apartment, her maid having left. She goes into her maid's room to clean it, and finds it completely spotless save for a large cockroach in the wardrobe. She tries to smash the cockroach and is only partially successful. As she watches it die, she has an epiphany about the illusion of subjectivity. I knew all that before I had read a word of it.
It's not enough to know the plot of a book if you want to pretend you've read it. You need a take. And here's where you need to really be careful. There are a lot of bad takes floating around online. You need to make sure you aren't just parroting some lukewarm sparknotes theme summary. You need a take which establishes you as having read the book as opposed to all those who are merely pretending to have read it. So there's a little trick I like to use here. What you really need is two takes. And they need to contradict each other. You need to present one of them as the take most people have about the book who have heard of it and haven't read it, and one of them as the real take that you'd only get from reading it. It doesn't really matter which one you pick. If you know your listener well, you might be able to tailor this to flatter their own ego and sense of how things work. With The Passion According to GH I talked about going into it expecting a much more essayistic work, one which explores panpsychism in a sort of abstract way, and then being completely suprised by the way the book is totally immersed in experience. It's phenomenological. It's not an essay about panpsychism, rather it fully immerses you in a panpsychist world. This isn't a deep take at all. In fact, it's covered by the first page of the introduction of the New Directions Press printing of the book that sits on my bookshelf. Introductions are often the right place to get this sort of take, because you can see what someone who has read, and usually loved, the book has to say. If the book has translator's notes, that's also a good source of material, as someone who has translated the book will often have observations about the prose that you can easily pass off as your own.
Unfortunately the astute reader may have picked up on the fact that the art of pretending to have read something usually relies on having read a lot of other things. This is one of the fundamental secrets to the game. If you read a lot, you can just pretend you've read everything.
After a few years of telling people that my favorite book was The Passion According to GH in order to seem interesting, I made the mistake of telling a woman who I desperately wanted to impress that my favorite book was The Passion According to GH so that I might appear more interesting. It turns out that she was impressed enough that she picked the book for her book club. The night before their meeting, she messaged me and said that they were all a little mystified by the book and wanted someone there who had not only read it before but really gotten a lot out of it and maybe could help decode it a little bit and would I like to join the club to talk about it. There was only one thing left to do. The next day I cleared my plans and sat down and read the book. I was right, by the way, about the book being amazing. And had I not read it I would never have gotten so much of what makes the book truly brilliant. The way Lispector situates the character politically and ideologically, the way she deconstructs the narrator's conscious subjectivity, and understands that this is in particular a deconstruction of European subjectivity. But enough of that. This is an essay about the pleasures of pretending to read, not of actually having read. Which of course has its own pleasures.
It helps when you are pretending to have read a book if the analysis you give lets the listener in on some secret about the book. Lets them feel too that they have joined the exclusive club of those who have read the book without having to do the arduous work of actually reading. People want to feel that they are in on it with you. There is a temptation to think that a book is something you get something out of. That a piece of art has some content, and you just have to puzzle out what that is and then get it for yourself. This is of course nonsense, but you can play on that wish. You give them something you claim to have gotten out of the book, and then they feel relief that they don't have to read it, and in that relief they won't even bother to wonder if you read it either. You just have to watch out because if you make it sound too interesting, they might actually read it, and then you might be in trouble.
