Ruined by Reading - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

 

Ruined by Reading begins with an interesting hook, one that avid readers will find impossible to resist because it argues so directly against everything we believe about books and the benefits of reading them.  It seems that Lynne Sharon Schwartz was reading a New York Times  article one day when a quote attributed to a Chinese Buddhist scholar she identifies only as "Mr. Cha" said something outrageous (my characterization of his statement) that got her to thinking. Mr. Cha said this:

"To read more is a handicap. It is better to keep your own mind free and to not let the thinking of others interfere with your own free thinking."

This led Schwartz to "brood" on her own reading habits:

"What is it all about? What am I doing it for? And the classic addict's question, What is it doing for me? Mr. Cha's serenity and independence of mind are enviable. I would like to be equally independent, but I'm not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on it is properly termed 'interference.'"

That brooding resulted in Schwartz's Ruined by Reading, a book I sometimes found to go a little off-track, but one I could not put down for long. 

Ruined by Reading is not a long memoir, coming in at only 119 numbered pages, so rather than going on for too long about it, I want instead to display the flavor of the book and what to expect from it by sharing a few of my favorite quotes from what Schwartz has to say:

"It started - my reading that is - innocently enough, and then it infiltrated. It didn't replace living; it infused it, till the two became inextricable, like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen in a bead of water."

...

"The pressure to read the living is moral as well as social. We must know our own times, understand what is happening around us. But I know my own times. I am in them. It is the times of the dead I do not know. The dead are exciting precisely because they are not us. They are what we will never know except through their books...As writers, transmitters, the dead can be more alive than some of the living."

...

"...reading at random - letting desire lead - feels like the most faithful kind...Or perhaps randomness is not so random after all. Perhaps at every stage what we read is what we are, or what we are becoming, or desire."

...

"Reading gives a context for experience, a myriad of contexts. Not that we will know any better what to do when the time comes, but we will not be taken unawares or in a void."

And finally, one that just might be my favorite:

"Speed-reading is not actually reading at all but eye exercises."

I hope this gives a feel for what Lynne Sharon Schwartz has to say in rebuttal to the illustrious Mr. Cha. I think she did us proud. 

Lynne Sharon Schwartz