Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading
This isn’t just true with reading. It is just as true with watching movies, listening to music or sitting through a Sunday morning sermon. Who we are and where we’ve been influences all of our experiences. How does this compare with that? What does it remind us of? How we respond now depends upon how we were impacted then.
Roy Peter Clark, however, is talking about what we read, so let’s stick with that subject. Specifically he is referring to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which has a more personal connection to him than it might to you or me. Thus he responds to the book differently.
Sometimes, as with Clark and Plath, our connections to what we read are obvious. In recent months I’ve read The Rhine by Ben Coates, which brought back memories of my cruise down the Rhine last summer; The Book Artist by Mark Pryor, which I read with my own two visits to Paris in mind; Life with Father by Clarence Day and Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo, both of which I was constantly comparing with the movies based on each; and Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons, which brought back memories of listening to Bob and Ray on the radio. In each case I brought my autobiography to the text.
Yet our autobiographies are there even when it is not so apparent. Certain characters in novels may remind us of people we have known. Plots may remind us of similar novels we’ve read. Reading one book may cause us to think about another book by the same author. And so on.
Not only do we bring our autobiography to what we read, but what we read immediately becomes a part of our autobiography, thereafter influencing our future reading
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