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ShareMy favorite description of spring comes from the Andre Gide novella “The Pastoral Symphony” (1931), in which a young, blind woman hears birdsong and assumes it is “simply the effect of light, like the gentle warmth which she felt on her cheeks and hands, and ... without precisely thinking about it, it seemed to her quite natural that the warm air should begin to sing, just as the water begins to boil on the fire.”
Spring is the season of renewal, the time for fresh starts and bold manifestos. That makes it the ideal moment to reorganize the bookshelves. But by what criteria? Subject? Genre? Author?
Date of publication? Size? Spine color?
Dorothy Parker suffered no such agony of indecision. The poet and short-story writer divided her books into two categories: “Good” and “Crap.”
When I first read that anecdote in a Parker biography, I was aghast. No conscientious reader, I thought, would cull so crudely.
Why, what about nuance? Shades of gray?
The more I read, however, the more Parker’s ruthlessness makes a perverse sort of sense to me. These days, I find my assessment of most books arrives in a flash: Yea or nay. Delight or disgust. Thumbs up or down.
My latest literary snap decision came apropos of Jude Morgan’s “Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes” (St. Martin’s), a fictional biography of the sisters who wrote “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” It was published in Britain last year, but had its American debut this month. The novel opens with the death of poor Maria, mother of Charlotte and Emily and a passel of other big-eyed urchins as well.
Morgan makes it excruciating, painting the scene with pain and dread, noting “the recurring cry that rises to a scream, just as the dry, loutish wind idles and grumbles about the house and then assaults it suddenly with a gust and a shriek.” Sold. The rest of the novel fully justified my instant capitulation.
It was also a love-at-first-page affair between me and a very different kind of book, the new Winston Churchill biography by British historian Max Hastings that comes out this week from Knopf. “Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945” is a fresh look at how Churchill willed his country to victory over Hitler’s Germany, using a one-two punch of golden rhetoric and single-minded, unyielding belief. There was no nuance in Churchill, no impulse to compromise, no resorting to half-measures. He bullied and bellowed his way to the saving of civilization.
Maybe that’s it, then. I’ve become positively Churchillian in my reaction to books. I wield my opinion like a blunt instrument.
Down it plummets, separating reading matter into two distinct halves like a ripe melon: good or crap.
Critics, I know, are bred to reject this sort of thinking. Like U.S. senators, we’re supposed to stubbornly resist up-or-down votes, preferring to hide amid the comforting murk of hedges and subsections, all to provide dense deniability should our view prove incorrect. Lately, though, I’ve been drawn to clear statements and crisp pronouncements: I like this. I don’t like that.
All of which leads to a new rule: When it comes to books, trust first impressions.
That’s just one of several freshly minted personal edicts.
Inspired by spring and its mood of leaping brio, I jotted down a few others. It’s an evolving list.
Let’s call it Rules for Readers:
—Buy at least one book in the next month that will make your friends say, “You’re reading that?”
—Read a classic — but put a strip of black electrical tape over the word “classic” if it appears anywhere on the cover or title page.
—Avoid any book with an exclamation point in the title.
—Mark in your books. Underline passages you love or hate. Argue in the margins.
—Re-read.
