According to Steve Jobs, I’m the exception.
While poo-pooing the Amazon Kindle in January, Mr. Jobs said, “…the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
I read 4 or 5 novels a year, a habit I’ve maintained for the past ten years. In fact, I can tell you where I was living or what my prevailing preoccupation was — other than the book itself — for nearly each one. That’s why I was intreigued by Coudal Partner’s Field Tested Books book. It’s a collection of brief descriptions of time, place and literature that examines the affect of setting on a person’s perception of a given book.
While browsing the book and compiling a reading list, I couldn’t help but remember some of my own experiences in “field testing.” Here are some highlights.
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, field tested in Scranton, Pennsylvania
As a student at a Catholic middle school in Scranton, an economically and culturally bankrupt city in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania, I wasn’t doing much reading. I had developed my very first — and very secret — crush on my best friend’s older sister, Christine.
My world was limited to the distance I could travel on my bike, specifically, my house, the enormous St. Ann’s Church at the top of the hill and Christine’s house at the end of the next block.
In essence, I was the moody 6th grader who kept to himself.
Fr. Bill, a family friend and theology teacher, gave both Christine and me a copy of Bridge to Terabithia, and we saw ourselves in the main characters immediately. She and I would meet on the church grounds, climb a tree and quietly read our books, back-to-back. Later, we’d talk about the passages we had read. Each time, the same tree.
Later that year, her family moved to Detroit. The last time I saw her we were standing in her driveway, a Mayflower moving truck rumbling exhaust into the night air. She hugged me, kissed my cheek (my first kiss) and whispered, just before she pulled away, “See you in Terabithia.” To this day, that book and that moment are inextricable.
The Cider House Rules by John Irving, field tested in Scranton, Pennsylvania
In 1989 I moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music. Music was my life throughout high school, and I didn’t do any reading that wasn’t required. That isn’t something I’m proud of, but literature just wasn’t on my radar back then.
The summer after my freshman year I returned to Scranton to work for the summer and catch up with old friends. One night, a buddy of mine introduced me to a writer who had graduated from a local college a year earlier. She and I were inseparable for the next three years.
Horrified by my bookless lifestyle, she handed me The Cider House Rules as a “starting point.” I read it quickly and we talked about it for hours, day after day. As the product of 12 years of Catholic school, I thought I knew where I stood on the abortion issue, which is a major theme of the book.
She was an atheist with a much different perspective. I can say in all confidence that time and location had a significant effect on my perception of and reaction to that book. Had I never left Scranton, I’d have had a very predictible reaction.
However, I had been living in Boston. For the first time in my life, I was not in a parochial school. I befriended people who were far outside the experiences I had up to that point. I was intrigued. I was eager for new perspectives, new experiences, new stories.
She shared with me The Love Poems of May Swensen, John Updike and more.
I owe my love of literature not to my schooling, but to the fact that I moved away from home, to my hunger for experienes other than my own, and to Heather. To this day, I can’t read Cider House without smelling the cheap, head shop incense that she always burned, seeing the record player and stack of LPs in the hallway or hearing the sounds of the plastic Big Wheel that belonged to the kid of the 2nd floor apartment’s tennants rumbling across the wooden porch.
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, field tested en route to Buffalo, New York
Last year my cousin got married in Buffalo. I decided to attend the wedding and bought a copy of Kafka on the Shore from the iTunes Store to listen to on my iPod for the 10 hour drive. Having previously read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase, I was eager for more Murakami. At nearly 20 hours, the audiobook would keep me company for the entire journey.
I enjoyed the book immensely, and when I listened to it again, I was surprised at how much of the trip was triggered in my memory. Stopping for lunch just as Kafka’s friend in the library revealed herself to be female; parking at Niagara Falls just after he saw the ghost in his room for the first time; crossing the Sagamore Bridge and looking at flashes of the Cape Cod Canal through the steel girders as Kafka’s mother explains the painting on the shore.
Coudal’s book is the culmination of a great idea. How do one’s experienes affect their reality? I’m glad to have been prompted to consider the answer.
I have started about 4 or 5 books that I haven’t finished. Currently on my bedside table:
Brene Brown
Daniel Pinchbeck
Elizabeth Gilbert
All three are easy enough to stop and start… and oddly I pick up at just the right place for what I need to hear (read) certain days…