Reading writers

Rather than read a book, I read a writer.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

Most of us "read writers" to some extent. We find a writer we like, then try to read all we can by that writer. Paul Theroux goes so far as to try to read a biography of that writer as well.

I do something similar, but over a long period of time because I rarely read more than one or two books by the same author in a single year. I have yet to read all the Hardy, all the Dickens or all the Hemingway I want to read. Reading Harper Lee is easy. Reading any prolific writer can take a lifetime, for there are so many books to read and so many other writers deserving the same attention.

Reading a writer gets easier not just when writers write few books, like Lee, but also when they write similar books each time, such as most authors of mysteries and thrillers. Other authors write a different book each time, meaning that some of them are better than others, or more interesting than others to any particular reader. There are some Hemingway books I have no interest in reading. I love some Thomas Berger novels, while others bore me. Some people have written many books, but only one or two of them worth reading.

Theroux recalls mentioning his interest in reading writers to a literature professor, who replied, "That's all right for you, we don't have as much free time as you civilians." Theroux adds, "Tact prevented me from telling him he had a salary, which I lacked, and that he was a lazy and philistine fathead."

One would think that if anyone read writers it would be literature professors, who teach and write about these authors. Apparently at least some of them think that if they teach Bleak House that means they don't have to read Little Dorrit. Those of us who read for pleasure tend to think that if we enjoy one, we just might enjoy the other.