This summer I'm taking a Maga approach to reading: self-serving and isolationist

Irish Times

4 days ago

July means one certain thing. Summer reading lists are upon us – magazine and newspaper editors sit around and, with some effort, dash together a 20-or-so long list of the books you should bring on holiday.
The lists usually look like some combination of the following: an obscure new novel, authored by a friend in need of a favour; the second book of the most recently zeitgeisty novelist – quality of these vary; something from the 'smart thinking' or popular science category (designed to make you feel clever, actually makes you dumber); a history tome so dense and unfriendly it is hard to imagine any normal person wanting to read it, let alone on a beach; a blandly feminist pamphlet titled something glib such as Women Are Powerful; a crime thriller, ordained to be on every popular reading list by some unknown force of the universe.
The publishing houses are happy, the featured writers too. Meanwhile, the newspaper believes it has paid a service to its reader – but of course it has done the opposite. Because it is abjectly implausible that even five of the books on these lists will stand any kind of longevity test, let alone all 20 (how many books are there are in total from, say, 2002 that have had lasting impact on the culture?).
The summer reading list necessarily emphasises the new. This comes at the cost of recommending the quality. And so the likelihood that these lists are stuffed with duds and wastes-of-times is so strong it is approaching inevitability.
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In a bid to avoid gutting but predictable disappointment, this summer – with the exception of the books I am lucky enough to read for work – I have committed myself to the act of rereading. Why risk something untested when I know for sure that most of
Hemingway
's are pretty good? I will have a good time with
Cormac McCarthy
, I always do. If you're an Austen fan, check out Pride and Prejudice again, you'll love it.
This is an obvious and dishonourably parochial instinct. There is a whole world out there I am cutting off from myself: what about the great Malay playwrights (I assume there are some); or Danish masters of genre fiction (Danes, enlighten me); or Afrikaans poets; or the next VS Naipaul surely hovering somewhere on the horizon waiting to be plucked from obscurity and rocketed to fame one summer reading list at a time? What secrets of the universe am I wilfully keeping from myself?
Well, I'm contented with not knowing for now. This is the ultra-Maga approach to reading: self-serving, isolationist, retreating from all those cosmopolitan obligations somehow acquired over the years, harking after an imagined halcyon past when books were good (and jobs were American!). Hell, I might even buy a red hat.
Or maybe we needn't be so cynical. The art of rereading is a romantic pursuit, too. The Italian writer Italo Calvino describes 'a classic' as a book that never finishes saying what it has to say. Twee, maybe. But it's a good test. Every reread of your favourite story will bring you something new. I am not the same person as I was at 24, mid-pandemic, reading
The Secret History
for the first time. I should try it again – there may be as many more secrets of the universe to discover in that activity as there will be in an attempt to develop a hinterland with those Danish genre-fiction writers. 'You can't step in the same river twice,' said some zany Presocratic philosopher a very long time ago. I suspect this is true of reading books too.
Time for a hard-pivot to the doldrums of low culture (where I am, to be frank, more comfortable dwelling), because this is not a feature limited to the written word. I suppose it was on my fourth rewatch of Gossip Girl that I truly came to understand myself; the monorail episode of The Simpsons on the fifth go taught me something ineffable about humanity's unquenchable optimism; and that same tomato pasta I have been making for 15 years now is not boring, thank you very much, it's a paean to nostalgia and memory, or something like that.
In search of a truly balanced life, I should teach myself how to do both. But for now, which is more important? Possessing the bravery to face the new, so we don't confine ourselves unnecessarily? It is perhaps too obvious to point out the virtue in that. But what of being too insecure to sit with the familiar? Could that be just as limiting? What's left of that instinct is a Sisyphean project of casting around the artistic realm trying to keep up with every trend and development, never satisfied because the work will never be done. And all the while there are expansive universes still undiscovered in whatever your favourite novel was when you were 26.
I am not sure of the answer. Let me consult Gossip Girl, or Cormac McCarthy, just one more time.