Reading and self development

Note: This post lacks focus and didn't achieve want I wanted, but I'll leave it here for completion and because it's not without value. Henry, 17 April

I read a good book yesterday, which I'm happy to recommend: Erasure by Percival Everett. Currently available for 99p from Waterstones, in what looks to be a Faber promotion ('Try me for 99p').

I seem to be reading a fair amount of fiction these days which I'll come back to later. I've certainly read a lot in the past, and a lot of non-fiction too. In between I go for long periods without reading much. I fear becoming like Rimbaud's 'Sedentaries', who I always see as people who get too bound up in reading and don't take enough action. Of course Rimbaud gave up Poetry at the age of 19 and eventually became a gun runner and slave trader in Africa, which is maybe more action than was necessary (I have a private theory that he was Joseph Conrad's model for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and then later in Apocalypse Now!).

But as long as we don't get too lost in fiction, what happens to us when we read? Certainly for me yesterday, reading Erasure, I recognised a lot of things. I recognised people like me, and I recognised some of the challenges that were being faced (both in the novel and in the novel-within-the-novel, the race issues, the issues of creativity and self-creation, of work and place-in-the-world, and the references to continental philosophy). At the same time there were recognitions of difference. Of course I'm not an 'African-American' academic, but this is a banal observation: it is only through the initial recognition (I don't want to use the word 'identification') that we can begin to recognise the important subtle differences, and it is largely the subtle differences that are important...

So I come back to the idea of incorporeal transformations. Erasure is a book that made me think quite a lot, particularly through those subtle recognitions and differences. In part it made me see who I am, who I'm not, what I might be, and what I'd like to avoid, all in slightly different ways than I've seen before (which is what every book has the possibility of doing).

It's possibly changed me, or at least it gave me the possibility for change. So I may not be the same person I was two days ago, and the way I interact with other people could well also have changed.

This is what people say after they read books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (check out this link, it's excellent) or Stuart - A Life Backwards (even though Mark Haddon is so naive and annoying). Of course these are two examples of books for which big claims are made - they'll make you understand autistic or homeless people - which are quite ridiculous really.

Nevertheless, this is the reason why many books are worth reading: they give us access to other voices, which help us to understand other people, which help us to listen to other people with more open minds, which changes us as individuals.

It certainly seems to me that exploring other voices through literature is a very helpful way of opening up advocates ears and eyes to the experiences of their partners, and the possibilities of their own interventions.