Reading Pleasures

What a sublime pleasure it is to read a good book. I simply cannot imagine a life without reading materials. There are people who will read just about anything, just for the sheer pleasure of reading. And it's true there is so much outstandingly good reading material to be had. Through a public library, through personal acquisition. A lifetime of reading has equipped me in many ways to understand the world better, appreciate it more, and in the process to be a better person.

For the fact is, a skilled writer can introduce a reader to worlds unknown, taking us to exotic places we can only imagine, not quite understood. Reading about far-off places brings us close to understanding what motivates people in surroundings unlike our own, what brings them satisfaction and pleasure, and it also teaches the reader that simple satisfactions and pleasures will suffice in a world where the excesses of opportunities that North Americans and Europeans are accustomed to, are not present.

With so many possibilities in reading materials by accomplished, sensitive and skilled writers available to us, we should never be in a position to lack reading material. Material from the classics to the present, in every category imaginable, although it is to novels that most people seem to gravitate. They bring drama into our lives; we're able to view the lives of others, feel compassion for them, and regret, and hope, because we're invested in them through the reading medium.

One can only wonder at the phenomenon of "best sellers", publications that receive wild acclaim from the reading public, titles that demand talk time on radio and television interviews; publicists and other "best selling" authors endorsing them as must-reads, incomparable adventures in literature. Which invariably turn out to be false leads, advertised trash, execrable writing in a soup of unrealized plot and value.

They are literature's failures; pop-culture writers, mediocre and miserable. These authors are incapable of that profound insight into human nature, the world that surrounds us. They are unable to devise the magic of a story well told, in settings pedestrian or unusual. Not for them is it possible to explain through insightful dialogue and descriptive settings insights into intimate relations between people.

Those runaway best sellers such as "The Da Vinci Code", and "The Celestine Prophecy", books that so captured the paltry and pathetic imagination of the public at large that copies flew off booksellers' shelves as fast as they could be stocked are exemplars of these failures. Publishers' advertising, talk show word-of-mouth endorsements, and cocktail party chit-chat to prove that one was au currant with the latest and the best "literature" that came on the market made their authors wealthy.

How to compare that transitory trash reliant not on excellence of imaginative drawing in of the reader, or exquisite prose and graceful plots with outstanding metaphors all drawn upon in the interests of sketching for readers' imaginations the drama that is life outlined by a skillful and talented writer. Books by acclaimed writers of outstanding creative ability whose prose withstands the test of time, whose realization of characters deftly drawn and situations in which their principals find themselves touching the wellspring of compassion in all of us.

Outstandingly enchanting novels like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, whose writing demands the reader's rapt attention, as he deftly fleshes out character and circumstance, history, drama, peoples' quirks, pettiness and self-absorption, their need for approbation and affection. Or Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, again a historical time piece of tender realization of our human foibles and failures, hopes and outcomes.

And then there is always Umberto Eco; his book The Island of the Day Before, a fantasist's dream, an introduction to life on so many planes of experience and growth of personality as the figures he introduces introduce themselves in turn and educate and entrance the reader, bringing us wholly into the legend of a time and place not here nor there.

This is literature of the highest order. Not the trash that passes off as good writing, that deflates the reader's expectations and disappoints in its empty premise and disappointed promise.