What could be more consoling than to know you weren’t the only writer out there plagued with doubt, envy, hard-to-articulate yearnings, and plain old nerves? I was never going to leave the Invisible Institute, ever. But once I became editor of the Book Review, I had to. I’d joined the other side and could not in good conscience or without conflict of interest continue on their team. The Invisibles threw me one last dinner party and then went on without me; no doubt I am now held accountable for any negative or nonexistent reviews among their members.
Basically, this made me a traitor. At least, I feel like one. As the editor of the New York Times Book Review, I now know whether my friends’ books are being reviewed before they do, and whether the review will make them cry. Having cried over reviews myself, I also know exactly how that feels. Yet here, on the other side, my priorities have to be different, no matter how much I appreciate an author as a reader or as a human being. I can’t help when a less than favorable review comes in, nor can I ensure that the editors handling books written by my friends will find them worthy of assignment. At the Book Review, we can cover only about 1 percent of those books published in a given year. It’s often a very tough call. Like all book-review editors, I necessarily have to view books as something to be sifted through and sorted, wheat separated from chaff, galleys tossed into dumpsters, unreviewed books sold to booksellers.
The process echoes those painful inventory nights, tossing stripped books into the garbage at B. Dalton, only now I’m the one ordering the books dumped. And so it goes. The Book Review is meant to serve readers, to point them to the most important and best-written books of the season, and to preserve the opinions of our critics. While worthy books are overlooked all the time, I have to keep my sympathies and sorrys to myself.
That’s not my only betrayal. Sometimes it is now I who “strip” books out of my life. I finally own so many that on occasion I turn to my collection and, as if on Tinder, scan my eyes over the shelves, swiping left on books that I then peel away from their companions and set aside for donation—to a library, a school, a friend. Getting rid of books, harshly brushing them away in favor of other titles, something I never thought I’d do. Where is my loyalty? My devotion to the book, to all books?
It’s jarring to remember a time, not so long ago, when all I wanted was to own those books, to be among the writers who wrote them, to be a part of this world, a hope so inarticulable, so fundamental, so all-important that I could barely admit it to myself, let alone to other people. For a long time, I tried to content myself with reading other writers; I didn’t quite realize I’d become one.
Now that I’m a writer as much as a reader, I realize the two aren’t so different after all. This isn’t to say that there aren’t exceptional writers or that being a writer isn’t an achievement, but rather that the achievement is more common than I’d once supposed. Aren’t we all writers these days? We live through text. With our status updates and our e-mails, many of us spend our days writing down more words than we speak aloud. Anyone can write a book or post a story and find readers. Even those whose book reviews live exclusively on Amazon or Goodreads or in diaries or in the text of e-mails are still active creators of the written word.
All of us are writers reading other people’s writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people’s words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn’t, but thank goodness someone else has.
Ultimately, the line between writer and reader blurs. Where, after all, does the story one person puts on a page end and the person who reads those pages and makes them her own begin? To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They’re also theirs.
This makes all of us spies among friends. When we read, we are spying on someone else’s imagination and inhabiting it; the authors and their characters are momentarily our friends, even if they betray us, or we them. Even if we dislike the book or give it a negative review or give the book away when we’re done. We peer into the lives they lived and the lives they conjured out of observation and inventiveness, dipping into them and then departing from their pages, taking with us what we will.
Epilogue
The Lives We Read
Because what people read says so much about them, I can’t help wanting to know what other people are reading. Most of us do this. We crane our necks into our neighbor’s personal space on the subway and pretend to tie our shoes so we can see the title that person is holding while standing in line. We try to decipher what’s happening on someone else’s tablet and iPhone. E-readers are especially noxious in their opacity. You want to blurt out, “Can you please just show me the cover? I need to know.”
This results in a lot of what-are-you-looking-at looks. Mind your own business. But in my case, at least, this is my business and I can’t. The moment someone lets me into his or her home, my gaze veers to the bookshelves, forming impressions of people I don’t know and discovering unknown aspects of people I thought I knew well. Is the person an alphabetizer? Does she have a thing for historical novels? Do the books appear suspiciously on display for show—distinguished spines and ornamental jackets, artfully selected for the color of the binding, nary a bad movie guide in their midst?
It’s hard not to wish that everyone—my friends, my family members, writers I know and don’t know—would keep a Book of Books. What better way to get to know them? You could find out so much if you could get a read on where other people’s curiosities lie and where their knowledge is found: What are you reading? And what have you read? And what do you want to read next? Not knowing the answers to these questions means you miss a vital part of a person, the real story, the other stories—not the ones in their books, but the stories that lie between book and reader, the connections that bind the two together.