Reading Books I Hate for 2010

I hate New Year Resolutions. How many do we actually keep? According to a 3,000-person survey by Brit psychologist Richard Wiseman, 88% of all resolutions end in failure. And who, I ask you, needs more reason to feel guilty? Not me. So, forget about running a marathon, giving up my secret stash of Kellogg Poptarts, calling my brother more than once a month, I am taking up just one resolution for 2010: I’m going to read a book I think I’ll hate (or that I’m afraid of) in 2010. In this I’m following Laura Winter, who writes in Salon.com:

We all have our little biases, and far be it from me to suggest that people force themselves to read books they don't like, but sometimes that's all these preferences are -- prejudices. Getting out of your rut can lead to unexpected and exhilarating rewards. I once had "ironclad" rules against novels about stage magicians or rabbis in Prague (you'd be surprised how many of these there are), but if I'd stuck to that, I'd have missed one of my favorite books from the 2000s, Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

Who can argue with that? And even though I consider myself a lover of literature, I admit an aversion of some genres. Included in my list is any novel that takes place in the American West (I couldn’t even watch “Lonesome Dove,” much less read it), memoirs longer than an essay, German novelists (OK, I lived in Munich for two years and perhaps I just had enough of Germany), and reading, all the way through, some of the great epic poetry. I did read Dante’s "The Inferno" last year. Until then, I admit my reading was basically a case of Canto I and random sampling. I think I’m a little bit afraid of those ancient epics even in modern day vernacular, but the "The Inferno” was fabulous and I feel a better person for reading it.

But, bad habits are hard to break--and they're impossible to break if we try to break them all at once. So, I’m not adding Larry McMurtry or Jack Schaefer to my reading list (and for those of you who don’t know who these guys are, well, according to some polls, they are the top novelists of our great mythological ‘West’) and I just don’t see myself suddenly interested in most people’s true life stories. Fiction is usually so much better!

However, I am going to try and read two novels by German writers (perhaps Thomas Mann and our latest Nobel winner Herta Muller). I am also going to read, not skim, not read critiques, and definitely not (just) listen to on audiobook, “The Aeneid,” Robert Fagles translation. Anyway, after "The Inferno,” I just want more Virgil. It doesn’t seem a lot and certainly easier than giving up Strawberry Frosted Poptarts.

Exile as Inspiration

For poets as diverse as Ovid and Dante to Brodsky and Milosz, exile has often been their lot. The pain can be excruciating as the exiled, cut off from familiar culture and landscape, as well as from families and associates, lives in a state of dislocation and dispossession. Dante writes in “Paradiso” from The Divine Comedy:

. . . You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another’s bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another’s stairs . . .

At the same time, the discomfort of living in, even visiting, another land or culture can become an imaginative action that liberates the creative mind. This proved true not only for those poets forced into exile like those listed above, but also for a number of our most revered poets who chose, yes chose, to leave their birthplaces and set up house in foreign lands. Think of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Seamus Heaney. Moreover, exile does not have to be permanent, but can be temporary and even illusory, as is the case for the traveler, who, who, because of curiosity and or deep interest in other worlds, ventures out of his or her homeland into other lands. The strange lens, held up to the eye, dislocates the familiar, no matter the reason.

For me, a non-Jewish American woman, now living in Israel married to a Jewish Israeli with four children, such has been the case. Integration seems impossible. Assimilation seems impossible. Conformity is impossible. It is only through poetry, my own and perhaps more importantly, others, that have I managed to gain insight into this country and its many political and religious issues. It is only through writing and reading poetry that I have managed to find some compromise and accommodation. It is only through poetry that I have grown to love and appreciate the myriad peoples that populate and provoke this troubled part of the world.

Agha Shahid Ali, the fabulous Kashmiri-American poet wrote in his poem “Stationery,”

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.

I love that: "The world is full of paper. / Write to me.".