Famous Bookworms Reveal Joys, Thrills Experienced in Reading

Once upon a time, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. found himself stranded in the Virgin Islands with nothing to read. This was unsettling.

“Then I noticed a page stuck in a shrub,” said the author of a dozen novels, including “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Galapagos.” Vonnegut retrieved the weathered scrap. Then another bush caught his eye. More pages.

“It was like an Easter egg hunt,” he said. “I found other pages in a pool. I fished them out and dried them and began patching it all together.”

No Cultural Clout?

Not everyone will understand why Vonnegut was “relieved and delighted” by the discovery of that literary litter. Predictions that the video revolution will be reading’s coup de grace date back at least to Marshall McLuhan, and in some circles books have already lost all cultural clout.

As comedian Jay Leno explained: “Here in L.A. we don’t call them books. We call them cordless miniseries.” Like Vonnegut, however, Leno, his wife, Mavis, and an eclectic assortment of other bookworms contacted for this article, contend that reading is still worthwhile and pleasurable. They even argue that it’s possible to spend a whole weekend comfortably absorbed in a good book.

Some Novelistic License

These die-hards offered their comments on the joys of reading mainly by telephone. But for the sake of a good read, let’s exercise some novelistic license. Let’s imagine they ran into each other one dark and stormy weekend at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park and sat there by the fire, favorite books in hand, talking and reading into the night.

“One of my wife’s big complaints is that people will see you reading a book and come over and sit down to talk, just assuming that you’re lonely,” said Leno. “Obviously you must be bored or shy. ‘Why aren’t you out playing tennis?’ ”

“It’s not a very popular way to spend time,” Vonnegut conceded. “But an awful lot of archaic pastimes are still practiced--people still play musical instruments and get a lot of pleasure out of it.”

In Vonnegut’s novel “Jailbird,” a character is described as reading “the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers.”

Vonnegut himself views reading as “a form of meditation.” And it’s “far superior to the Oriental scheme” of meditation, in which people use their own consciousness, he said.

“We meditate with the minds of others--with brains that are often better than our own, and surely brains that have seen more than we’ll ever see.”

That day in the Virgin Islands, the pages Vonnegut pieced together turned out to be a memoir by author Andre Gide.

“So I sat there, with nobody else around, and I was meditating with the brain of a Frenchman. . . .

“The printed book is a wonderful science-fiction invention. It’s so portable, needs no batteries and fits into a coat pocket.”

At this point in the weekend interlude, people who had been sitting on the lodge’s sofas and chairs began drifting toward the fire to join the conversation.

“A book is a time machine,” said Jim Trelease, who wrote the “Read Aloud Handbook,” and is now on a crusade to instill a love of reading in children. “If a travel agency offered travel back or ahead in time, the line would be around the corner. Yet the public library offers that trip every day.”

“The library is not a serious place,” announced Ray Bradbury, whose fiction has whisked readers off to all sorts of futures--including one in which society so fears the power of books that it burns them.

Libraries Are Playgrounds

In fact, “the library is a maelstrom. When I talk to students, I tell them, plunge into it like a bunch of apes; like you were climbing Kilimanjaro or going to Alpha Centauri. Libraries are joyful, explosive, hysterical! They’re playgrounds!”

The wind lowed in the Ahwahnee’s rock chimney, and everyone stared into the fire, thinking back on their own childhoods and the books that transported and transformed them when they were young.

We’ll say that Richard Rodriguez, author of the autobiography “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” was the first to speak.

“There are all kinds of sensations one experiences in picking up a book--the smell and the feel, the quality of the silence when one is reading,” he said in a very soft voice, absently thumbing through a volume of poetry perhaps.

This past Christmas, some small thing reminded Rodriguez of the first time he read the “Grapes of Wrath.” Instantly his mind filled not only with the sensuous richness of Steinbeck’s vineyards, but also with the memory of sitting in his bedroom with the book in hand as the first scent of dinner wafted up the stairway.

“You hear your brothers and sisters playing outside. The vague yells of childhood. And you are plunged back into that . . ., “ he said.

Jim Trelease would have picked up the thought.

Most adults read a certain book as a child and then measure all later reading experiences against that book, Trelease contends. For Trelease that book was Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” which he read in one weekend, while seated in a soft chair in the small bedroom he shared with two brothers.

More Than Just Print

“I don’t think I ever hit the first snow of any year without thinking of the bitter cold of that book,” he said. “That book was probably the farthest I ever got away from home. . . . I think I knew immediately that I had in my hands something that was more than just print on pages; that this was as close to something being alive as you can get in a product that comes out of a factory--a publishing house in this case.”

Even now, said novelist Alice Adams (“Superior Women,” “Listening to Billie” among others), images of fictional characters linger in her mind much as images of real people do. As an example, she mentioned the folks she recently encountered in Robert Stone’s “Children of Light,” a novel set on the coast of Mexico.

“I believed the characters. They lived for me absolutely,” she said.

Now Stone’s creations have joined characters from other novels--Lambert Strether from Henry James’ “The Ambassadors,” for instance. “They become almost indistinguishable in my mind from people I actually have known. They come to inhabit my consciousness . . . They’re around.”

Several people who had returned to their reading looked up. Gazing through the frosted window at photographer Ansel Adams’ favorite landscape, they thought of the real and the fictional people they’d known, and lamented, perhaps, that the two categories couldn’t be interchanged.

We’ll say Ann Lamott, a writer from Sausalito whose novels include “Joe Jones” and “Hard Laughter,” leaned forward here and spoke.

“When the great good book comes into your house, and you start getting into it a little bit and suddenly realize you’re going to be completely absorbed and stoked during the reading, it’s like a miracle,” she said.

Turn to ‘This Miracle’

“I experience it as a profound relief to know that no matter how poorly my own work goes, or how cruelly and unjustly the world treats me, no matter how the day shakes down, I’ve got this miracle I can return to, these bound pages I can recline with . . . “

Lamott remembered a now-defunct bookstore by the name of “Paper Ships”--a great name, because books do take people on voyages, she said. They take readers to another time or another place, but they also “take you into the inner reaches--the scary, red, bloody places in your heart.”

“It’s thrilling to be lost in a book,” said best-selling author Irving Wallace, who probably stirred up envy at this imaginary gathering by mentioning the 55,000-volume library he and his son possess between them. “Besides sex, I can think of nothing more stimulating.”

By now, some folks were sipping hot buttered rum, the aroma of which mixed with the pine smoke.

Beginning to pace a bit, perhaps, Jim Trelease said that whenever he addresses parents and teachers on the subject of reading, he mentions Mildred Thayer’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”

“Through that book I took (my children) to spend a summer with a black family in Mississippi in the middle of the Depression,” he said.

A Greater Threat

“One of the great dangers facing our children today is not so much the threat of tomorrow--of a nuclear holocaust. I think the greater threat is that they will forget or never know about yesterday.

“The child who doesn’t know about yesterday in Mississippi is not going to understand what Martin Luther King was all about or what Jesse Jackson is all about, or about what’s happening in South Africa.”

And what’s read about the past “stays in the memory bank much longer and goes much deeper” than images absorbed from a film or television screen, Trelease said. “After all, you’ve created your own pictures. You’ve created every one of the facial expressions. You’ve created the house and the school and the muddy road in your imagination.”

“Reading is extremely difficult,” agreed Vonnegut. “It always has been an elitist art form. It’s the only one that requires the consumer to be a performer. Unlike patrons of fine art or music, the reader has to create. . . . It’s miraculous anyone can do it.”

Writer Ntozake Shange, whose plays include “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” entered the conversation at this point, perhaps.

Shange was the proverbial under-the-bedsheets-with-a-flashlight reader as a child. When she lived in Los Angeles, she even read while inching along in traffic jams. Two books in particular left vivid impressions on her mind, she said.

One was “God’s Bits of Wood,” by Ousmane Sembene; the other Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”

Places in the Mind

“I read both of those without being able to move,” she said. “Everything stopped. Somehow I was very connected to the sense of smell and touch and vision of those two particular novels. I didn’t want to leave those places. I didn’t want to be away from them.”

Although she read it eight or 10 years ago, Shange can still take a mental stroll through “Song of Solomon.” She can still see the hair of the women in the old kitchen, and smell the odor of men’s gabardine trousers being ironed. She can see “the old table, with the chrome around the edges and the linoleum top. The linoleum was clean, but it was worn. And there was a big, old-fashioned sink that looked into someone else’s backyard, where clothes were hanging. It was all very familiar and good to me. . . .

“I’ve had occasion to be very isolated at different times in my life, and I feel that if I hadn’t been able to read about different characters, in fiction and history, I would have become a very strange person,” Shange said.

By now it’s late. Snow is flying outside the lodge. We’ll say a couple people have dozed off by the hearth, their noses pressed into the spines of open books. Others continue the discussion.

“Both my parents were European immigrants, and I grew up in a ghetto where there were never many books around,” said Los Angeles artist John Baldessari. “Books were pretty mysterious to me as a child. That was the initial attraction.

“Now I look to books, like I look to people. To get ideas from them. I read almost like a burglar, trying to pilfer ideas. . . . I keep on reading until I encounter an insight or a phrase in such a way that it engages my mind and sets it to work. That’s what all good art should do, I think.”

Escaping Into the ‘Now’

Even as the mind labors, however, it also escapes in a sense, Ann Lamott said. “While you’re reading, while you’re absorbed, you’re not obsessing about why you didn’t pay the bills. . . . It stops that self-centerness, that obsessive, whiny, pinball-machine way that our brain can become. You feel really alive, you get really excited--words pull you into the now.

” . . . Even when you thought you couldn’t laugh again, you find the right book and that little ice shell that’s about your heart melts. . . .”

Everyone smiled sympathetically when Jay and Mavis Leno told how the decline of literacy is reflected in their current search for a new house.

“The funniest thing about living in L.A. is, you’ll go into someone’s house, and the guy will say: ‘This was the library, but you’ll be glad to see we took all the shelves out and put a video room in.’ Or, ‘We put linoleum down and made a disco.’ ”

In their present home, the Lenos have shelves and shelves of books. “People come in and see them and think, oh they’re those fake things, those empty book jackets you stack videocassettes in,” Leno said.

“We’re told we live in this audio-visual age,” said author and oral historian Studs Terkel, stomping into the lodge late in the evening, coated with snow, blowing on his hands--wondering why he bothered to leave Chicago.

“But you see people reading all the time. People read on buses, in parks, everywhere.

“People are hungry for stories. Real storytelling. And that’s something television doesn’t do.”

Books Get Some Respect

And, Jay Leno jokes, at least in some ways books still get more respect than other mediums.

“Films get remade, and they put anyone they want in them and change them however they want,” he said. “But nobody is going to ask Stephen King to rewrite ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and put monsters in it.”

With that comforting thought, everyone said good night and went off to spend the rest of the weekend in the company of people who exist only on paper.

We’ll say that those with televisions pulled the plugs--even though Jay Leno and a couple of the authors were appearing on a Carson rerun that night.