MY READING HABIT

3 6 Y M Y R E A D I N G H A B I T P A U L A M A R A N T Z C O H E N I was a great childhood reader. Between the ages of seven and seventeen, my nose was always in a book. This was viewed as a sign of unusual precocity, and I received much acclaim for it from my parents and teachers. Looking back, however, I realize that I began reading by default and continued doing so out of habit. The philosopher William James wrote insightfully about the role of habits in our lives. He explained that we form habits through practice but that they eventually become embedded in our character: ‘‘So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves,’’ he wrote. Our habits, in short, are us, and my reading habit helped make me who I am. Habits form for many reasons, but often because they are useful in some immediate, often primitive, context. Was my childhood reading habit the result of my being hungry for knowledge? No. I read because I was a self-conscious and anxious child; books were soothing forms of escape. As a teenager, I lacked athletic acumen and had problems with my skin, not to mention my hair; it seemed safer to stay inside with a book than to display my imperfections to the world and be picked last for the team. 3 7 R My parents, children of Jewish immigrants, had jettisoned the old-world Bible in favor of secular literature. They saw my reading as what James would call a ‘‘moral habit,’’ and allowed me to skip meals and bypass chores when I was engaged in it. ‘‘Lower your voice; Paula is reading,’’ I would hear my mother whisper as I lay stretched out on the couch engrossed in, say, The Old Curiosity Shop or the third volume of The Forsythe Saga. I was applauded if I finished a book, especially if the book was long and a classic. Such reverence for what felt like a pleasure, if not an indulgence, was an incentive for me to read more. The books that fed my reading habit fell within the tradition of the English domestic novel – those nineteenth-century tripledeckers that ended with the hero and heroine united in perfect harmony. The promise of a final clinch (not always represented, but all the more satisfying in being left to the imagination) was what kept me reading. These books were romances in the narrow definition of the word – love stories. The term romance has a broad as well as a narrow definition. The Romance languages – French, Spanish, and Italian – are derived from Latin, the language of the Church and of erudition, but used for everyday life and for popular story and folklore. As the novel emerged as a genre in the eighteenth century, romance became a≈xed to a combination of the mundane colloquial and the idealized make-believe (the word for novel in French is roman and in Italian romanzo). Henry James (William’s younger, novelwriting brother) explained the amalgam in his preface to The American: ‘‘The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know sooner or later. . . . The romantic stands . . . for the things that . . . only reach us through the beautiful subterfuge of our thoughts and our desire.’’ Novels are the place where the real and the romantic meet and are interwoven. The books that constituted my reading habit were, as I said, love stories, but they were also romantic in the sense James described : they drew on a world that was recognizable in its broad outlines but arranged to produce an idealized, emotionally satisfying conclusion. In this sense, they were not so di√erent from the romantic adventure stories that fed my husband’s reading habit. He, like me, had read voraciously growing up, but where my favored stories culminated in the heroine’s marriage, his led to the 3 8 C O H E N Y hero’s triumph over physical obstacles and fierce adversaries. Our respective tastes conformed to...