I began my book journal in July,1978. Twenty years later I initiated a year end summary of my reading which I shared with family members and later, a few friends. That sharing evolved into BookMarks with the launch of www.EpsteinReads.com in August, 2018.
Each month nearly 500 of you open the monthly BookMarks update, and more than 100 click on one of the books, reviews, or poems, but I haven't done a year end summary for some time. Given COVID's isolation and anxiety, I decided to review the entire year of reading and to query that list for whatever thoughts those127 books might provoke.
I went back to January, 3, 2021 and read all 127 reviews of last year's books. I don't recommend that you take the several hours to do that, but if you are a lover of lists, you can find the summary of 2021's reading at https://epsteinreads.com/reading-list-2021/.
After revisiting those books, I was struck by two thoughts.. First, I was reminded of my initial motivation in starting the book journal, i.e. the ability to repeatedly experience books that had been important to me but which inevitably would have disappeared from memory as time passed. I re-discovered interesting plots, fascinating characters, provocative essays, inspiring poems, and memorable quotations. It was a grand journey.
Second, it stimulated me to rethink the basic question, "Why Read?".
Many authors have addressed that question over the years. Harold Bloom who died in 2019 was the Stirling Professor of English at Yale and a remarkably productive and prescient critic. His book "How to Read and Why" is on my Ideal Bookshelf and makes the case that reading is necessary to expand our world. One can only meet, talk with, travel to, and experience so much in one life-time, and reading enables one to expand that experience. Reading enriches one with wisdom, information, and the pleasure derived from the beauty of great writing.
Mary Oliver's essay collection 'Upstream' focuses on another reason to read, developing empathy. She says: "the second world---the world of literature offered me, besides, the pleasure of form, the sustentation of empathy....I stood willing and gladly in the characters of everything...and this is what I learned: that the world's otherness is an antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness...can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
Annie Dillard's 2016 essay collection 'The Abundance' speaks to reading's ability to evoke the mysteries of life, mysteries that infuse our lives with meaning and beauty. "Why are we reading if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed....Why are we reading if not in the hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning and will impress upon our minds the deepest mysteries so we may feel again this majesty and power."
The late Israeli novelist, Amos Oz when interviewed by By the Book noted that he is moved when a work of literature 'suddenly makes the very familiar unfamiliar to me or just the opposite, when a work of literature makes the unfamiliar almost intimately familiar."
And finally, from this year's book journal, Peter Mendelsund in 'What We See When We Read' observes that “Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world’s noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can—out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience.
And it is perhaps Mendelsund's book that is the best representative of this year of reading. Its creative and often zany graphics, its deep dive into Tolstoy, Dickens, and Joyce, and its ability to move the reader from the written page to our understanding of the world make this a fitting answer to "Why I Read."
.Good reading!
