READING

I was an avid and precocious reader. To have read the classics was absolutely necessary for people like me. The downside is that I read many of the great books before I was 20 and now I realize I don't remember so much of what I read. And I'm sure my 18 year-old reader's mind grasped only a part of what I'd see now.
I remember I loved Alyosha in The Idiot, his innocence and kindness, but I don't remember much else in the book. Or, staying with Dostoevsky, I barely remember the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov and for that matter much else, but some names - Ivan, Dmitri, Grushenka. In truth, I can say the same for most of the great 19th century novels - Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontes, Dickens. And I confess that what specific memories I have of those books may have come from the many movie and tv productions I've seen. Even more, my memories have come down to plot - style, language, metaphor, whatever I perceived of them at twenty, are completely lost.
     Like many people I know, I read books less and less as I get older. I've lost interest in most of current fiction, except for mostly Nordic mysteries,       also I do spend time reading but it's mostly online - newspapers, magazine "long form", it's the problem of having so much instantly available. There was a time when I would have finished the morning nrespaper over breakfast, gone to my work and still had time to pick up a novel. I follow many of the links to "interesting" articles on facebook; I spend a ridiculous amount of time looking at animal videos. 
     I find myself want to spend my reading time only with books that seem - at least to me - world class. I mean the difference between 100 Years of Solitude and, for instance, The Goon Squad. That book got such good reviews, I felt duty-bound to read it. I liked it but when I finished it I didn't feel it was worth my time. It seemed another in a long line of stylish, up to the moment inventions, several grades above chick or gent lit, but not something that leaves you touched in the way that stops time while you contemplate the deepest mysteries of our very human lives. The books that do that are still being written - Don Delillo, Orfan Pamuck, Edna O'Brian and many others. 

     Delillo is a good example of a writer who is "up to the minute" but is also concerned with what in shorthand I'll call the deeper things. White Noise was so prescient about our current moment  that future readers won't feel that special wonder I felt reading it when it was new - that he crystallized something only sensed - that a time would come, was already here, when rolling toxic events would barely register, when sons would tell their fathers it couldn't be raining (when it clearly was) because the radio said it wouldn't rain, when in all seriousness one academic would say to another, "I want to do for Elvis what you did for Hitler." But there is an additonal layer to the book that will always claim readers - the fear of death and the desire to find a magic pill that would make us immune to it.  (Compare Good Squad death with WN.) 
    When I want to read fiction now, I mostly go back to the classics, the ones I've already read.