If this were Facebook, you’d read that “Rebecca Martin is happy Agatha Christie was so prolific.” Summer is for detective stories. Every year, just about the same time, the air gets hot, the trees turn green, this college town gets quiet, and Arthur Conan Doyle comes through. Dorothy Sayers as well. And, thanks to the productive industriousness of one Agatha Christie, Poirot and Miss Marple for many summers to come.
Reading is seasonal for me, intensely seasonal.
I’m in a book club here in Blacksburg, Virginia, and I sometimes find it difficult. I have always, actually, found book clubs difficult — though also deeply satisfying, all that communing around literature, thought, and friendship. I’ve even initiated a few of the book clubs I’ve been in. But what’s hard for me is the reading on-demand. Yes, I may want to read The Catcher in the Rye sometime, but not right now, and not in December. Don’t you know December is for dark fantasy and Victorian novels? The likes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Jane Eyre, Bleak House. Fall is for The Fellowship of the Ring — at least the pre-Bree bit, every year. Spring is for landscape prose: Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry. Mostly stuff about Appalachia, farming, and the local hills, including that long, straight laundry-line that is Dillard’s Tinker Mountain thirty minutes up the road. Late winter and mid-summer and all the gaps between are for Young Adult fiction . . . so really, there may never be a time for Catcher. I am selective. Selective and seasonal.
Does anyone else read this way, too? And why?
There’s the association component, for sure. The vestige of a memory when I first experienced The Hobbit on the way to an autumn art class. I held open that small, black trade paperback brick with Gollum leering creepily over curly-headed Bilbo’s shoulder. My mom drove and talked; I sat silent in the passenger’s seat of the old ’83 station wagon, engrossed in my first exposure to dwarves, dragons, and Gandalf. Each fall I repeat the impulse of that seventh-grade self and crack open my favorite part of Fellowship, reading the hobbit-friends through from the Shire to Bree. And then one winter a few years back, in the wonderful still of those post-holiday months, I filled the gray quiet with Dickens’s Bleak House. I have read something by Dickens every winter since.
The actual landscape of the book plays a part, too. Frodo and Company set out on their heroic journey on the humble beginnings of September 23rd. Mr. Norrell is discovered in the drear cold of January, and before the book has gone too deep, the magician has blanketed York Cathedral in a still mid-winter snow. In fact, Susanna Clarke explains that she wrote most of her fantasy tome in winter months, and her actual seasons became the imagined: it seems that the magic of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is always at a cold time, in a chill place. It’s almost as appropriately, enticingly dreary as the misty moors of Jane Eyre (read every Christmas break since high school freshman English class). Bleak House is more complicated, inside and out. Neither house nor story are so bleak as the title suggests. Still, the story is all Dickens, London is miry, and so winter is the time.
But then this past January, I stepped out of bounds and steeped myself, an infant on my shoulder, in the lyrical landscape of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Wouldn’t that, now, be a book for spring? All her talk of Fingerbone lake and its mountains, that western place the protagonist Ruth is so deeply rooted in? Ah, but the landscape this stunning book contains: it’s all chill, all frosty lake, all winter or else cold, early spring. The time was right. I have a feeling it will be every January to come.
And of course there are the sentimentally-timed reads, the explanation clearer at hand: at the beach, it’s always Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch. I first read it on a Fourth of July Florida trip with grad school friends. Seven years later, I can still smell the salt water and sunscreen on the pages. And the story itself tells of a school vacation and the Cornwall seaside. What else would I want each trip to the Atlantic coast?
So this is how I read: by emotion, by memory, by my seasonal history with the book, by the book’s own inner climate. Not everyone approaches their books this way, I’m sure — and I would like to understand more about what that means for other books and other readers. But for me, reading at its most poignant is more than mere enjoyment, more than momentary appreciation of plot racing toward a whodunit end. (Though, boy howdy, can I ever lose myself in a good plot. Give me The Hunger Games! In November, that is.) A book — a great book — is a place that’s in my world as much as I am in its, unifying my experience with its own feel and yes, its own weather.
A friend recently asked if I’d read Cynthia Voight’s Homecoming. I had. (In middle school, on late-spring doctor visits for allergy shots, imagining Voight’s New England coast while waiting for the nurse to call me back.) Oh, had I. I excitedly tried to tell her, “Yes, yes, it was amazing,” and the words that came out were — oh emotional me — “It was . . . it was . . . it was formative!”
So it was. So these annual rereads are. My husband, an engineer who could do more math half-asleep in the middle of the night than I could ever do with a fresh mind and a calculator in front of me, does not reread. He confesses unapologetically: he reads for plot. Once he knows what’s happened, he’s through. But I read for the experience. And if it’s an experience I like the first time around, I come back for more. But I come back when it’s appropriate, which has a lot to do with when I first read the book, and a whole lot to do with the “when” between the pages. I make up part of the reading experience with my own when and where, and the book makes me, too. It adds to my understanding of my when and gives me a new where to emote and to think in. Books are, indeed, formative. I form the read and the read forms me.
A wise person once gave me the advice that, since all the books in the world couldn’t ever be read by one person, what we’d be best advised to do is mostly reread the ones we like best.
It’s not for everyone, rereading, emotionally reading. Book clubs may do better with committed readers who can step outside how they feel to get through each text. Bills will get paid because the man I’m married to isn’t over in the corner on his fifth mid-summer read-through of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But that isn’t me. It’s not how I’m formed. The books I love best conduit fluidly between my real landscape and the imagined ones within. And so, in a sense, my reading is dictated by the book.
What does this mean for planning to read? Discipline is key, when it must be: I commit to the community that is my book club, and so I stretch myself to read J.D. Salinger when I must. When I return to school as-planned to be — what else? — a librarian, I’ll read the textbooks and articles as I’m told, and Susan Cooper will wait patiently for my next vacation. But when it’s bedtime and I’ve got a few more reading minutes in me yet, I’ll crack open my shabby-edged copy of The Hobbit. It’s coming on fall, after all.
And then I think, with excitement and some trepidation, how I might help develop an imaginative landscape for my daughter — the little girl who fits snugly on my shoulder right now, but who, after not too many seasons, will start to recognize words. Maybe she’ll end up doing math and one-time reads like her dad, and that will be fine. But perhaps some Christmas break she will come to me, fourteen, looking for something to read. I will offer her options, and she will choose. She will reach for Jane Eyre, knowing the time is right. She will feel it outside and in. Something in the weather will tell her.