The great reader Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm, has passed away at 73. Silverblatt was a powerful influence on my development as an adult reader, and his approach to reading helped shape my own appreciation of fiction as I emerged from/recovered from academia. It’s been a few years since I listened to an episode; I think the last one I recall was with Robert Coover and Art Spiegelman together, maybe five or six years ago, by which point the show seemed to be initiating a slow winding down process. But for years, when blogging was still very much a real thing and social media wasn’t, Bookworm was one of the best outlets for literary discussion. Its archive remains impeccable.
Here are ten “rules” Silverblatt offered in a 1997 LA Times profile:
- Sit. If you’re lying down you’ll fall asleep.
- Read at least 100 pages in your first session with a new book. You must get well in.
- If you’re reading for pleasure, finish a book before starting a new one. Don’t keep three or four going.
- If your eyes get tired, try cotton compresses with witch hazel—they’re soothing and refreshing.
- Read a book about a country you’ve never visited.
- Ask close friends to name their favorite book, one that changed their life or one that accompanied a change in life. You will learn not just about the book, but about the person who recommended it.
- Don’t be embarrassed to keep a vocabulary list. Reading without understanding is not a virtue.
- Don’t torture yourself or read out of duty. A great book has an obligation to enrich and alter your life.
- There are certain books you’ll find you’re not ready for. Please suspend your judgment of them. It took me seven years and six tries to read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
- If you can’t discard preconceptions that come from bad classroom experiences—for example, A Tale of Two Cities and Silas Marner are not Dickens’ or Eliot’s best works—if you’ve X’d them out of your list, you’re missing something of pleasure. You’re ready now. Try them.
Biblioklept 