Reading at Whim: Beyond Moby-Dick

For a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing "at whim."

—Randall Jarrell

Everyone has heard about, read about, or visited in dreams a small room crammed with artifacts and curiosities, a museum of the history of whatever came to hand. A moth-eaten owl perches over a display case filled with arrowheads and musket balls. Atop the case lie a playbill signed by Calvin Coolidge and a Bible that might have belonged to Julia Ward Howe. On the wall hang a regimental flag, a tattered circus poster, a map of the Oklahoma Indian Territory, an unsigned moonlit landscape. The inevitable moose head, aloof, overlooks the collection. Some items bear neatly typed labels. Some do not. The viewer shuffles from one discovery to the next, looking closely at each object.

Modern museums, including those devoted to art, offer a more managed, less haphazard experience. Famous paintings are exhibited in reverent isolation or in carefully categorized rooms, accompanied by long printed texts supplying background and commentary. Lesser works—an early Eakins, a minor Holbein—occupy out-of-the-way corners and dimly lit passageways, where a visitor's glance might fall on them for a moment, if at all. "Feel free to look at whatever you like," the curators' selections and promptings seem to say, "but since, let's face it, you're here for only an hour or two, you might want to follow our lead."

Classic literary works find their way into readers' hands in much the same fashion. While the Internet and tv offer entertainment in a seemingly endless variety, the same few great books show up in stores, on recommended lists, and on public library shelves. One or two books per author apparently suffice. More than these, the nonprofessional simply doesn't have time for and, it's implied, probably isn't qualified to read. An important author's other books—those deemed minor, difficult, eccentric, atypical—are best left to specialists.

For the nonspecializing but nonetheless serious reader, the experience of skipping from one acclaimed work to the next couldn't be more remote from browsing through that old-time museum. Instead of serendipity and discovery, there are expectations duly fulfilled. Instead of small obscure joys there are authorized appreciations. Every high point of every prescribed author gets faithfully touched upon, but at the cost of many a lower yet nevertheless inviting point. Swooping from peak to peak of literary achievement— and the peaks are magnificent, there's no denying that—means neglecting the foothills of youthful apprenticeship, the thickets of experimentation, the riotous jungles of the playful, and the just plain odd. Like travelers with their innate preferences for cities or wilderness, cool grottoes or baking beaches, different readers find their happiest surprises in different locales. The main thing is to linger a while on the unexplored slopes.

The checklist approach to reading keeps one's eye on the clock and the actuarial reports, hitting the "essential" books before time runs out. As an alternative, consider a program—except it isn't a program at all—that might be called single-author reading. If, say, you're moved by the vision and poetry of To the Lighthouse, why not dawdle over Woolf for another few weeks and read Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves, and The Years? Why quit after Sister Carrie when you can plow ahead through Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and An American Tragedy? Nor need single-author reading be confined to long-dead writers. You can always veer into the earlier work of that short-story writer whose latest book you admired, or hunt down in magazines a rising poet's uncollected verse. Single-author reading, like the single-sleuth reading that mystery fans enjoy, can become a lifelong habit like reading book reviews and browsing secondhand stores. It's a comfortable habit based on the premise that we can get to know an author's charms and failings the way...