Reading and Life — Reading for Life

Reading and Life — Reading for Life

Reading for Life is a book about reading and life. It is a work that fuses the author’s personal experience and life journey with a recommended reading list. In a sense, this also reflects the important place reading holds in the author’s life. The books recommended in it are deeply infused with the author’s own experience: every title on the list is accompanied by a person or a story connected to the author, and these are narrated together with the content of the books themselves. The books being recommended are not necessarily the ones that rank high on bestseller lists or canonical classics lists either. As for me, I had probably read only about five of the books listed in the table of contents. So selecting a few from this list and adding them to my future reading plans can certainly be counted as one of the values of this book.

In today’s world, publishing and distribution have become easier and easier. The reading materials available on the market are vast beyond measure, and there may now be more authors than readers. As a result, choosing a book truly worth reading has become increasingly difficult. The New York Times recently listed the ten most popular works of fiction of 2018, but for those of us outside the English-speaking world, some of them may be titles we have never even heard of. The ten books were Asymmetry, The Great Believers, The Perfect Nanny, There There, Washington Black, American Prison, Educated, Frederick Douglass, How to Change Your Mind, and Small Fry. Even after seeing the titles and summaries, I still could not be sure whether any of them would especially capture my interest. That is how reading is: unless you experience a book for yourself, it is hard to know whether it truly suits you.

And yet reading cannot be like the random wandering of a Markov chain. Faced with this immense sea of publications, every reader has a starting point from which to begin roaming. Perhaps it begins with assigned reading lists at school; perhaps with a book from one’s parents’ shelf at home; or perhaps with what is popular and recommended among one’s peers. For me, the course of reading can be sharply divided into two stages: first, the broad and indiscriminate reading of adolescence; second, the chain of reading in adulthood that began with Haruki Murakami. Before the internet era arrived, having access to a small library in a remote village was already a stroke of great luck for me. And with little else to choose from, all I could do was read through every book there without discrimination. My interest in Murakami began with a complete collection of his works that Xiao bought; after that, we read together all the Murakami books we could get our hands on at the time. Much of my reading trajectory since then seems to have been related to that beginning. Of course, I often have all kinds of books at hand, but whenever I feel I have nothing to read, I find myself unconsciously looking in Murakami’s books for the clue to the next one: The Great Gatsby, The Magic Mountain, The Brothers Karamazov, The Long Goodbye... Every book feels like a bridge to a new world, leading onward to one literary treasure after another. And ever since I read Nagasawa and Watanabe’s argument about “only reading authors who have been dead for more than thirty years,” I have often used that as a reference when choosing books. After all, books that can stand the test of time are unlikely to be of poor quality. Even so, when it comes to writers and works I truly love, I still find myself making the inward excuse that “such-and-such an outstanding writer can naturally be treated as an exception.”

If I were to make a recommended reading list myself, it would naturally be inseparable from this kind of reading experience. For the author of this book, the same is true. He places Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living first, and keeps returning to it throughout the book. On the one hand, this reveals how deeply he has been influenced by Lin Yutang; on the other, the author and we ourselves live in the same modern society surrounded by information, and when we feel crushed by information overload, this book by Lin Yutang may be the best antidote to the illnesses of modern life. The Importance of Living was written more than eighty years ago, when the world was still in the midst of industrialization and modernization, and the pace of life and quantity of information were nowhere near what they are today. Yet Lin Yutang’s attitudes and views in the book do not feel “outdated” in the slightest when placed in the present; if anything, they seem even more relevant. The strength of an individual can hardly contend with the trend of the times—nor is it necessary to resist it at every turn—but to keep a clear head amid any great surging tide is something truly rare and precious.

Every book that follows The Importance of Living is accompanied by a stage in the author’s growth: perhaps a process of self-recognition and personal development, perhaps a remembrance of some friend from whom he had to part. Yet this narration of his own life does not weaken his understanding and analysis of the books. On the contrary, it makes those analyses more penetrating and deepens the connection established with the reader. In the critical portions, the author displays a high degree of professionalism, using either the most concise language or the most distilled lines from the book itself to present the deepest part of each work, while at the same time carefully avoiding any damage to the later reader’s experience. His seamless way of connecting books with autobiography cannot help but remind me of What Matters Is Music, which I read before. Although one book’s table of contents is a list of recommended books and the other’s is a list of recommended pieces of music, in the end both authors are telling the story of their own lives. And in that telling, the author’s life merges with music or with reading; in the process of reading, the reader too is drawn into it almost without noticing.