Map Quest
When there is enough of anything, a cluster pattern will appear. This is the case even if the anything is randomly distributed. Cows, clouds and coffee drinkers cluster or clump, depending on how many there are and how wet it is. So do books. Dewey knew this and figured there was a future for his notion of decimals.
People who read enough will find a clustering emerge in their reading patterns. This gives rise to reading challenges like, say, 10 Literary Thrillers or 20 Historical Fiction titles, or my own daughter’s absurd quest to read 50 classics in one year. The nature of this last challenge put what would ostensibly be a broad range of readings – Ovid’s The Aenid, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Lawrence’s Sons & Lovers, The Voyages of Marco Polo – under one umbrella.
What I have found is not that my reading clumps per se, but that it goes off on tangents. And then, apparently, clumps anyway. For example, I listened to the Teaching Company’s 18-CD History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev. That led, naturally, to The Giants of Russian Literature, this one part of the Modern Scholar lecture series. In the latter, Professor Liza Knapp of Columbia University discusses the themes of love and death in Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. How broadly love is defined and how uniquely it is handled is a topic worth pursuing. It is interesting, for example, to compare societal and personal impacts of adultery on Anna Karenina, Anna Sergeevna (Chekhov’s lady with a dog), Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. To do that, you have to read the books, or in the case of Chekhov, short story.
I’ve had my Chinese kick as well, listening to Kenneth Hammond’s mammoth undertaking, From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History and then reading novels like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin leads naturally to reading the polemics of Thomas Paine.
I loved Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (on CD), so I just had to listen to A Spot of Bother. Ditto Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, which necessitated, for me at least, Wickett’s Remedy. If you like Robertson Davies and read Fifth Business, clearly you have to complete the Deptford trilogy. And if you like Robertson Davies and the Scot’s accent on life, then you should read Andrew O’Hagan and James Meek.
Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip is a natural companion to Great Expectations. As is Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its original Bronte classic progenitor.
And so it goes, from here to there until, eventually, a series of clusters are created. Tracking the paths you take - genre or author, place or period, or any combination of these - creates what my daughter, a librarian, would call a ‘reading roadmap’. If you think your reading is completely random, check it out. There is reason behind the madness.
