You Are What You Read

Not long ago I went out for a long, luxurious evening with a friend. We migrated from a group party to supper at a cosy restaurant, closing out the night at a European bar. Over the course of several hours, we covered personal heroes, the best way to cut cheese, sibling relations, the Balkans, and the canon of his ex-girlfriends. I was at my social best; drink in hand, I steered us along a frank and humorous exchange that cast both of us in a flattering light. It was in the taxi home, however, that I made my fatal error: I stumbled onto the subject of books, and probed for his favorite title. As of that moment, the evening lost its innocence.

Discussion of literary taste has all the pleasantness of walking onto a minefield. One false step in any direction - too commercial? too stuffy? too stylized? - and you cease to matter. I'm sure this partly stems from the tendency of any bibliophile to anxiously tally up all the books they haven't read, to wonder when they can - if ever - declare preference for a genre or author, even a single book. Martin Amis, for one, identifies Ian McEwan's greatest achievement as "the first two hundred pages of Atonement."

Of course music and film share the book's ability to nuance our impressions of one another. You can tell from someone's Netflix queue and playlists what their taste runs to: whether they are experimental, Romantic, bloodthirsty, escapist, etc. It's not as though the bookshelf alone reveals character.

What book choices do contain, however, are clues to our literary past and our intellectual limits. Unlike songs or movies, books are prescribed the world over as bearers of wisdom both ancient and modern. You could get through 14 years of school without watching a documentary or learning the difference between requiem and rhapsody. But you can't get away without knowing what Romeo said to Juliet and why it mattered, without having thumbed even halfheartedly through Gatsby and Malcolm X.

What changes over time is whether and what we continue to read. It's unlikely, in a developed society, for us to avoid watching movies or listening to music--they can become so habitual as to form a pleasant soundtrack to our consciousness. "Lite" reading material has a similar effect. Literature, on the other hand, could not be more different. It demands pure concentration. It creates a vacuum in which we are fundamentally focused and present, a space that no one - not even our partners - can intrude upon. As a result, the only people who read without a mandate are those who've learned how vital literature is to the human experience.

It's this segregation that often prohibits me from discussing books. I don't want to discover, as I did with my friend, that people fail to sustain their intellectual development, that they've put Shakespeare back on the shelf and picked up Sophie Kinsella or nothing at all. Because to me it means that they've quit the process of frequenting new ideas, of divining subtler means of expression and exploring diverse authorial voices. The effect, in dramatic - but nonetheless real - terms, is a mind imprisoned by stale conceptions.

I admit that in this case I'm a partisan player. One of my greatest joys as a reader is the moment in a book when the surface layers of plot and theme yield to substrata such as style, form and language. By penetrating these depths I get to witness the writer's ingenuity and craftsmanship. I grow complicit in or antagonistic toward the book's agenda. I intuit that the same linguistic resources can produce wildly different tones. I discover that true to life, narrative doesn't have to move on a linear path. I learn what I consider precious knowledge: that words can be woven together so as to give each sentence has its own genetic code, its own quiet or raging pulse.

How could I bear not to share this with everyone?