Thursday, December 20, 2018

Writing A Book About Books

I've never given much serious consideration to those "1000 _______ To _______ Before You Die" books. However, this Literary Hub conversation with James Mustich, who spent 14 years researching and writing the recently-published 1000 Books To Read Before You Die, makes me want to track down his book. Completing a project like this properly requires a ton of time and effort, and it sounds like Mustich took his job extremely seriously.

Thomas DePietro has known Mustich since they were "high-school poets together over forty years ago" and he states that Mustich "walks a fine line between literary critic and enthusiast" and has created "a book that ... exults in the sheer joy of reading, and sharing those pleasures with others".

From Mustich's comments:
It's almost a thousand pages, nearly 900 pages of text and then various indexes to help people navigate through the list that I've made. For each of the thousand books I've written a brief essay, and added endnotes with relevant information and lots of recommendations for further reading. Altogether, there are more than 5,000 books referenced in it. ... I signed the contract for this book 14 years ago. It's been quite some time in the making. ...

The idea is: What about books speaks to people? In general and then specifically. What has spoken to me in particular? There's everything in here from, in terms of a reader's lifetime, from Goodnight, Moon, to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's book about grief. And chronologically it ranges from the Epic of Gilgamesh up to a book published last year called Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman. ...

[T]here's probably, say, 250 of the 1,000 that are what are generally considered classics, so you can trace in what I've done a kind of course, if you wanted to, in literary history. ... Toward the end of the project, I begin to realize something that was motivating me, somewhat unwittingly. I have two daughters, who are both adults, in their twenties. They have always been readers, and they couldn't walk out of their rooms in our house without tripping over a pile of books. But they don't have the constant sense of the continuum of literature that was so important to me when I was growing up, which, frankly, I absorbed from spending so much time in bookstores in my formative years—not enough fresh air! So I've been reconstructing all of that by my own lights as a kind of record for them, I think. Again, that wasn't a conscious thing, but I think it's certainly part of what gives my book its shape. ...

I framed it for myself like this: what if I had a bookstore, and I could only have 1,000 books in it? I'd want to have classics, yes, but I'd also want to have something for anybody who walked in, and said, "I want a good mystery," or "I feel like reading something about golf." Or medicine. Or theology. Or true crime. One of the things I write about in my introduction is that inveterate readers read the way they eat: hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next. ... [R]eading isn't all high-mindedness. ...

[F]or a long time, 1,000 seemed like so many. But then when I got towards the end, it was too few, by half at least! There are just so many good books. And closing in on the 1,000 put a fine point on what, of course, had haunted me all along: there is so much I haven't read. Through all the years I worked on the book, I tried to be thoughtful about it, but every week turned up books or authors I'd missed. And every conversation I had with a fellow reader seemed to add to that pile. ... But sooner or later, I had to draw a line. ...

One of the things that takes so long is that you not only need to know enough about the book to have something to say, but you also need to know enough about a subject or an author to know what not to say. ... If you're going to write 500, 600 words about Darwin, or about Madame de Staël, or about Ishmael Reed, you want to know enough about the extent of their work to be able to judge what's important, what to share with someone who may not have any context, and also know enough about the breadth and depth of their thinking to represent it credibly, especially if you're dealing with someone outside one's own tradition or one's own education. You want to be respectful of what you're reading and you want to make sure that you have enough sensitivity and sensibility—or just enough sense with no suffix—to recognize that the work has its own existence whether you read it or not, no matter what you say about it, and to represent that in some way. ...

What I tried to do, especially with those authors whom readers might assume they know about, or assume they're not interested in, or whose work they've always been daunted by, is to give an invitation to their books that is engaging but still robust enough give a sense of the landscapes they create. To suggest that this is what you'll be thinking about if you read this author. For most of us, too much of our reading of serious literature is when we're very young, and they're school assignments. And we approach books a certain way because of that—like they're homework. ... This is a book which I hope people will keep on their shelves and pull off when they want to read Conrad, or they want to read Virginia Woolf, or they're looking for a good mystery. It's meant to be used as a resource. ...

[T]here is a sensibility that runs through my book that I hope readers will find congenial, and come to trust. I don't mean trust as in "agree with," but respect and react to in considered ways. ... [R]eading, and the kind of interior life it presupposes, is really important to one's mental health, and I would also venture to say, to one's moral health and to the mental and moral health of society at large. And that when you pick up a book you are also acknowledging others, because you're reading someone else's words, and you're learning about new worlds. That dialogue that books encourage is critically important. ... I think books have receded from the frontlines of the cultural conversation in a way that's not healthy for the culture.
The Washington Post praised the "scope and diversity" of Mustich's choices. The book "invites rapturous browsing even while eliciting, and expecting, argument. ... It's hard to imagine that such a massive compendium could have been done better or demonstrate a more supple and catholic taste."

 And a look at some sample pages reveals a gorgeous layout.

1 comment:

laura k said...

I have a review category "books on books". This one sounds good, I'll add it to my list.
https://awood.blogspot.com/2018/12/writing-book-about-books.html
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