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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
On the Life-Changing Joy of Re-Reading Books
I hardly ever re-read books. It’s not that I am against it of course. It is only that there are so many books that I have not yet read, combined with the need (felt or real or some hazy admixture of the two) to keep up as best I can with new releases. And I haven’t ever really felt a loss in this, but a line in this piece on taking time to re-read stopped my eye for a moment: “Books are miraculous to me because unlike other pleasures involving tangible places, people and things, books can be re-experienced precisely the same way over and over again. You can go back and step into rich remembered landscapes and precisely nothing has changed.
This isn’t true in the absolute sense. Half (at least?) of the equation has changed: you, the reader. But that is even more interesting to me: the fixed text of the book colliding again with my consciousness/mind/soul/neural network and producing, inevitably, a different reading experience offers perspective on oneself more than on any book. This can be done with movies or books or any other mechanically reproducible experience, but the cognitive richness of a book, the required effort to imagine, remember, interpret, and otherwise inhabit a book asks more of you than a movie or a TV show or album. In this way, there is probably no better way to mark not that book hasn’t changed, but the distance you have traveled from that earlier version of yourself that first read it.
What do you notice now that you didn’t then? What moments or lines or actions are not only remembered but reconsidered? Can you even recall what you thought and felt and believed about the book then? It is a terrifying and exhilarating prospect.
Literature Without Literature
In a wide-ranging attempted takedown of the emergent critical practice of taking the publishing-industrial complex into account in our understanding of books and reading, Christian Lorentzen isn’t just dismissive, but “disgusted” by scholarship, or even mere acknowledgment it would seem, that how books are made might matter:
“To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign. Falling ‘for the romance of individual genius’, in Sinykin’s schema, is akin to thinking there’s something special in the soda aisle when you see the Sprite insignia but fail to comprehend that it’s just another product of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company.”
He is referencing Dan Sinykin’s recent book, Big Fiction, which has received unusual attention outside of the academy for an academic book, including in this newsletter and on the Book Riot Podcast from me.
I came to the digital media world Lorentzen loathes from the academy. It has been a crash-course in the overwhelming, inarguable, and still largely underappreciated ways in which the business of books influences what we understand literature to be. And I can tell you firsthand that advertising budgets matter. The personalities and goals and foibles and taste of acquiring editors matter. The cold-pitching and relationship-building of publicists matter.
Like most botched dismissals, Lorentzen overreaches by dismissing an entire area of understanding by exaggerating the claims of those practicing it. Sinykin, to my recollection and reading, does not dismiss that direct interpretation of a novel or poem is now obsolete. Rather, Sinykin (and McGurl and So and others) recognize that there is a world of untapped understanding in exploring what paper that novel was printed on, both literally and figuratively. To my mind, this does not impoverish the richness of literature but pulls back a curtain to reveal an unexplored maze of possibility. A disinclination to explore this new maze is fine, but it is no real argument for it not existing.
Building The New York Times’ List of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
In completely unrelated (ahem) book content, Gilbert Cruz joined Rebecca Schinsky and me to talk about the logistics, design, philosophy, and goals of The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. We have gotten way more (positive!) feedback on this episode than of any I can recall, so if you haven’t ever given the show a listen, this is a great one to give a go. Here is a nugget from the episode to entice you: 503 people submitted lists to the NYT, but 1200 (!) invites were sent. Even for The New York Times, email is rough.