Call Me Ishmael, But Not Unless You're 30

First semester, first day, first class in graduate school. The professor walks in, and this is a hand-on-a-stack-of-Bibles Professor. Think Sean Connery. He doesn't look at anyone, just walks to the chalk board and starts writing. For the first twenty or so minutes he writes what I eventually find out is a bunch of Heidegerrian theory [read: nonsense] on "Being". I also eventually find out (weeks later and after I'd purchased a couple of Heidegger's books so as to try to make sense of the notes I had dutifully taken) that neither Heidegger nor "Being" has anything at all to do with our seminar on Hawthorne and Melville. Then the Professor hands out the syllabus. He still hasn't said a word. Asks us, he finally does, if we notice anything missing from the syllabus. We had no chance to respond: Moby Dick, he said with a scoff that let us know we were all but wasting his time. "It's not there because you aren't old enough to read it. [He's almost spitting at us by this point.] It's a thirty-year-old novel. [He's sighs and is just downright pitiful looking now--like a bassett hound with no teeth.] You have to be thirty years old before you can even begin to understand what Melville is trying to do in that book." He went on [and on] about how you have to have a few more disappointments in life, a few more failures and heartbreaks and come out of them on the other side before Moby Dick would do you any good.

You Crotchety. Old. BAStard, is what I ended up thinking. Don't you know who I am? My mother was an English teacher. My mother was MY High School English Teacher! I did a written AND oral report on Billy Budd when I was a Freshman! In High School! So we didn't read it. We read all of Melville's "lesser" works and everything Hawthorne even thought about writing, but there was this absolutely-nothing-short-of-an-actual itch inside me to read Moby, to see what the big deal was. I took the Professor's theory as a challenge. I would read it, and I would understand it. And I was only 24.

The next semester I read it. I didn't, in fact, "get" it, at least not on the level The Professor had meant. Other than a couple of scenes in the book (like when the sailors use whale penises as rain coats, and then there's this beautiful scene where the sailors are burning whale blubber and sparks are flying every which way and they [the sailors] are dancing and it's truly one of the best scenes I've ever read), I thought I'd pretty much wasted my time. I understood the book intellectually, but it didn't move me.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that there are several different ways to "get" a book (I know this is nothing new, but humor me). To understand Moby Dick on an intellectual level, you need to understand the context in which it was written: understand Transcendentalism, the American Renaissance, 19th Century American culture. But that's only one level on which to "get" a book. Over the years, I've begrudgingly come to accept The Proffessor's idea that there are some books that can move you on an emotional level when they are read at certain points in your life.

I'm less concerned with reading books too early. I mean, I can always go back and reread Moby and see if it moves me on an emotional level (I never will, but I could). I have had a few more heartbreaks and failures and disappointments. But looking back on my reading experiences, I've come up with a variation on The Professor's theory of reading. There are certain books that you can read too late in life if you really want to connect with them. A couple of examples that keep haunting me are The Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22 (oh, and On the Road). I read them in my late twenties, and I appreciated them. But I didn't have the same response to them as I think I would have if I'd read them when I was 19 or 20. I was too old. Don't get me wrong, I actually like those books a lot, I just really believe I would have loved them when I was younger. I would have been part of the cults that surround these books. I probably would have majored in English as an undergrad rather than Biology. I would probably compusively buy copies of them and hand them out to people on the street.

My point. I don't really have one. I guess this is just a way of introducing part of how or why I read books. I have a big stack of books next to my, well, actually, stacks all over my house, to be read. I usually just pick up whatever is next on one of the stacks, so my reading is somewhat random. Regardless of this randomness, the books that stick with me the most are the ones that I am able to connect with on several different levels. I like books that make me think (like Moby is, theoretically, supposed to do), but if that's all a book does, I'm disappointed. My favorite books are the ones that (and I hate this term, but I can't think of a better one) move me--to think, yes, but more importantly, to feel, to act, to talk about, to think: hey, that's exactly what I wanted to say in my gut but didn't know how. And the books that move me the most are ones that in some way mirror some ongoing experience in my life. Love in the Time of Cholera, for example. Read it when you're heartbroken and it will change your life [thank you, Leigh, for helping this book mean so much to me]. I don't think I'd have liked it as much had I been happily in love at the time. The Grapes of Wrath. If I hadn't been doing hard labor 60-ish hours a week for a millionaire who paid very little over minimum-wage and suspected all of us laborers as potential thieves or as though we were infants, I would have had much different experience reading that book.

My theory is flawed, and I know it. For some reason, I love some books written for children and adolescents. I'm not ashamed to admit that I like the Harry Potter series. Even more, I love Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. I'm a bit scared to analyze myself to find out why I like these books so much. Maybe it's because I'm still in school and feel like there are evil professors plotting against me? Maybe it's that I want school to turn into some big adventure rather than just being a boring exercise of sitting in the library. Whatever the case, I feel some connection with them, so I like them (and pluswise, the Pullman books are very, very smart, I think).

Most of the time in this column, I'll discuss a single book rather than general nonsense about reading. I just wanted to get it out in the open that I end up liking books that have the intangibles that don't necessarily make them "Great" books, and I love hearing why people like reading what they read [as long as it's not because the chapters are short]. And in the future, I'll try not to say that a book "moves" me unless it is an absolute necessity. Next week, I plan to discuss Nicole Krauss's novel: Man Walks Into a Room. It moves me.