Quickening

"Working all day for a mean little man
With a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan
He's got me running 'round the office
Like a dog around a track
But when I get back home
You're always there to rub my back."

-- Fountains of Wayne, "Hey Julie"

--

"Finished with this one," she says, slamming the book shut. She is sitting in the front seat, and I can see, above the bumpy blue title printed and embossed on the front cover, the words, "National Bestseller."

This is the second NB I've seen her finish, with similar ceremony and casual pride. Completing the reading of a book is as ordinary as finishing a day of work or class. When the book is done, so is the meal, but there is little to no digestion. She reads like little children eat candy: With speed, with ease, with greedy grins and shallow delight.

This is good taste, the tasting of what already tastes good.

--

I tell her I like to savor words, sometimes reading a single page and shutting the book, and my remark is followed by an awkward silence, as if I've said I like books about baby genitals.

Everyone else says they like to speed-read. Two of them boast having read the entirety of the Harry Potter series several times over, which is the page-number equivalent of breezing through the Bible--twice.

"But I have to read with a piece of paper under each line, because I catch myself going so fast that I just skip over whole paragraphs just to get to the good parts. I look for dialogue."

Good parts. The sum of which can declare the whole good.

(And of course, selling lots of copies makes a book good, too.)

--

A quick digression:

The used car my parents just bought in my stead (it is in Nebraska, away from my eyes and hands) needs several repairs to make it roadtrip-ready. They will drive it across the country in a few weeks when they come to visit, and they want it in tip-top shape. My dad told me today that the mechanic thought he had fixed the clunking near the forward wheels, but upon hearing more noises, they took it back and he found something else wrong. The motor mounts were failing and the motor, the center within the frame, was jostling too freely in the engine chamber.

"Either Dodge just installed bad mounts, or someone, at some point, put this car through some really rough stuff," my dad said. "Bad parts, I guess. But once those are taken care of, the car should be solid."

Bad parts, and yet the whole is good.

--

Now for some pretentious contrast. I was serious about how I read: The last book I consciously sped-read was John Grisham's A Time to Kill, which I blew through in tenth grade in one night. I reread it two years later and was appalled at what I had missed, entire sections of story that were lost in the muddy haze of four in the morning. With bleary eyes, I had continued to read, blind.

I have refused to speed-read ever since. And even when it came to classes, I found it more honest not to read something than to scan for buzz parts and pass it off as knowledge of the book. Thoughtful, guilty silence beats preened, proud words, any day. For me, books that are meant to be read quickly are not really meant to be read at all, not if your definition of the word is to look past what the author says to what he/she whispers. If your definition of reading is mere comprehension of words and a disregard of subtlety, I wonder how much you've read.

When was the last time you read a passage that begged for a rereading? that halted your mere interest in story and wrung your soul to sob in your chest? that seemed the opposite of a "passage," and instead blocked you from moving on?

I'm not saying that every book has to be clunky and difficult. Such books often become bestsellers because they boggle critics.

Still, reading should be a challenge, not a cinch.

--

She has read two books in the time it has taken me to get through one-third of mine. And when pressed as to the quality of her quantity of text, she quickly (oh, so sad, a person for whom all things must pass quickly!) answers, "Oh, it's so good."

The question comes back to me. Well, what do I say? That the book I'm reading comes with (re)commendations from almost a dozen close friends, most whose good taste includes the unsavory and complex, and now, ninety pages and two weeks in, I can't decide whether it's good or not? That I mistrust my own enjoyment? That I appreciate its philosophies but find the arguments a bit prosaic, its logic sensible but expected, its structure competent but a little too familiar?

I remember why books breed worms.