FOUR ARTICLES FROM TIME
How and What to
Read
Time,
As attested by the popularity of speed-reading
courses, many people think that reading better means simply reading faster. To
Mortimer J. Adler, who for 32 years has been teaching Americans How to Read a
Book, great speed is of value "only if what you have to read is really not
worth reading." To keep serious readers from becoming "literate
ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well," he wrote his self-help
guide, which over the years has sold more than 420,000 copies. Now, for the
post-television generation, he has produced a new version of the book, which is
almost completely rewritten but still carries the old message: "If we are
disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books
teach us well."
At
69, Adler has spent much of his career pigeonholing books and, in one way or
another, teaching people how to read them. With Robert M. Hutchins, former
chancellor of the University of Chicago, he winnowed Western thought into Great
Books of the Western World, a 54-volume set of 443 works by 74 authors (from
Homer to Freud), which was published in 1952. To help readers explore those
works, he classified man's search for wisdom into 102 basic ideas (from
"Angel" to "World") and fashioned an index which he called
the Syntopicon, meaning "collection of topics." It directs a reader
exploring the ideas to every mention of them in the Great Books, plus the
Bible.
More
recently, he has directed his own Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago
Serious
Failure. Grasping such ideas requires skillful reading, but Adler finds that U.S.
Adler
recommends that a reader skim a book, deciding in an hour or less whether it is
worth reading. If so, he should read it quickly to gain an overall impression.
Then, if it is a book that will increase his understanding, he should reread it
slowly, applying 15 rules of analysis. (Sample: "Know the author's
arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of sequences of sentences.")
Adler's method also requires the reader to underline key statements, make
marginal notes and outline the main points on the end papers. Such notations
will not only help him get the most out of a book but make subsequent reading
more rewarding, for to Adler a great book is "endlessly rereadable."
Among
such books Adler counts Aristotle's Ethics and Plato's Republic. He has read
both at least 25 times. These, plus most of his other nominations for great
books are on the recommended list of How to Read a Book. However, 28 authors
that he recommended in 1940 have disappeared from the new edition. The missing
authors include Henry Adams and Trotsky, along with Quintilian and Maimonides.
They were banished because subsequent readings convinced Adler that they were
not really first-rate, or because they provoked too little discussion at his
seminars.
Meanwhile,
34 authors of merely "good" books, chosen from the 100 or so that
Adler reads each year, have been added, including works by Epicurus, Martin Luther
and six writers of the 20th century: Historian Arnold Toynbee, Physicist Max
Planck, Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Novelists Henry James, Franz Kafka and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Great Books for
Grown-Ups
Time,
The "100 Great Books" had long ago
scored a smash hit before the undergrads on the University of Chicago Chicago
To
speed its way, its students learn without paying, then teach new students
without pay. The man who runs Chicago 's
experiment in adult education is slim John Barden, 32, assistant dean of Chicago Chicago ; Tuesday he dittoes in Detroit ,
Wednesday in Cleveland , Thursday in Indianapolis
Each
class has two instructors. Explains Barden: "We want teachers to be like a
couple of synchronized spotlights. First one asks something, then the other
chimes in, keeping things going. You gang up on one guy, firing questions at
him as fast as you can. . . . Some people don't come well-prepared, but by the
time the two-hour discussion is over, they wish to hell they had."
Usually
around go sign up; after the first couple of lessons about a third drop out.
Those who survive the first shock of culture generally stay with it. Chicago Detroit , Indianapolis and Cleveland
Some
of the Great Books are hard to get, or expensive. The university has printed
50¢ paperbound editions of such titles as Rousseau's Social Contract.
Instead
of tackling all the 100 Great Books at once (actually a misnomer: there are
fewer than 100 authors, many more than 100 titles), the extension school has
picked out 15 authors to start with:
Plato:
Apology, Crito, Gorgias.
Thucydides:
History.
Aristophanes:
Lysistrata, Birds, Clouds.
Aristotle:
Ethics, Politics.
Plutarch:
Lives.
Machiavelli:
The Prince.
Montaigne:
Essays.
Shakespeare:
Hamlet.
Locke:
Of Civil Government.
Rousseau:
The Social Contract.
Madison
et al: Federalist Papers.
Smith:
The Wealth of Nations.
Marx:
Communist Manifesto.
Anybody
who gets through these will find five more lists waiting, each tougher than the
last. Says Barden: "The Great Books program ends only in desertion or
death."
Dame Agatha: Queen of the Maze
Time,
Dame Agatha Christie made more profit out of
murder than any woman since Lucrezia Borgia. One estimate of her total earnings
from more than a half-century of writing is $20 million. But the exact amount
remains a mystery not likely to be solved even when her will is read. Her
royalty arrangements and trusts would tax the brains of her two famous
detectives, M. Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. In addition, Agatha
Christie had already given away millions to her family. Her only grandson,
Mathew Prichard, 32, was eight years old when she presented him with sole
rights to The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play.
It
has grossed nearly $3 million since its London Wallingford
The
Christie output was torrential: 83 books, including a half-dozen romances
written under the name Mary Westmacott; 17 plays, nine volumes of short
stories, and Come, Tell Me How You Live, in which she described her field
explorations with her second husband, British Archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan.
The number of printed copies of her books is conservatively put at 300 million.
New Guinea
Her
own characters were much less exotic: doctors, lawyers, army officers,
clergymen.
Her
stalking grounds were usually genteel English houses, and she rarely strayed.
"I could never manage miners talking in pubs," she once said,
"because I don't know what miners talk about in pubs." Dame Agatha
herself looked as if she had been raised on a good golf course, although her
main hobbies were gardening, and buying and redecorating houses.
Godlike
Genius. In a Christie murder mystery, neatness not only counts, it is
everything. As the genre's undisputed queen of the maze, she laid her
tantalizing plots so precisely and dropped her false leads so cunningly that
few—if any—readers could guess the identity of the villain. The reader
surrenders to an enigma in which the foul act of murder seems less a sin
against man or God than a breach of etiquette.
Yet,
as W.H. Auden observed, the British murder mystery, with its accent on clever
detection rather than violence, seems to provide an escape back into the Garden
of Eden. There innocence and order are restored, and readers "may know
love as love and not as the law." The Great Restorer is the godlike genius
detective. Christie's own genius resided in a mind of intimidating clarity. She
never allowed emotion or philosophical doubt to cloud her devious conceptions
or hinder the icy logic of their untanglings. Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
in Torquay, she was the daughter of a rich American and an English mother.
Although gifted with a good singing voice, she abandoned a stage career because
of her shyness. In 1914 she married a British airman, Colonel Archibald
Christie, and plunged into the war effort. Between volunteer nursing and
practicing pharmacy, she wrote her first detective story on a dare from her
sister. The Mysterious Affair at Styles introduced the 5-ft. 4-in. dandy and
retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot. His egoism, eccentricities and
the fact that for a time he had a Watsonian colleague called Hastings
Christie
was a well-established writer when her controversial The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd was published in 1926. Purists complained because she did what no
detective-story writer had done before. She revealed the killer as none other
than the book's narrator. Publication of the novel coincided with another first
in the author's otherwise scandal-free life. For two weeks in December 1926,
Agatha Christie, 36, was officially a missing person. A frenzied nationwide
search led to a Yorkshire hotel, where she was
found registered as Tessa Neele, the name of the woman Colonel Christie married
after his divorce from Agatha two years later. Doctors said the disappearance
was caused by amnesia.
Even
so, the episode was a uniquely devilish way of telling her husband that she
knew about his mischief.
Stoic
Brevity. Dame Agatha recalled that unhappy time with stoic brevity: "My
husband found a young woman." In 1930, on a trip to the Middle East, she
found Max Mallowan, 14 year her junior, who was excavating on the site of
ancient Ur
In
their 45-year marriage, the Mallowans shared an interest in travel and
properties. During one period, the couple owned eight houses.
World
War II found Christie again practicing pharmacy and brushing up on the latest
lethal drugs. Poison was a preferred method of dispatching a victim—frequently
"in quiet family surroundings." She continued to publish one or two
novels a year, often plotting them in a hot bath while eating apples. There was
scarcely a time when her work was not before the public, not only on book
jackets but in the credits of such stage and film works as Witness for the
Prosecution and Ten Little Indians.
The
last few years of Dame Agatha's life saw an upsurge in Christiemania. Murder on
the Orient Express, the film based on her novel Murder in the Calais Coach, was
a huge box office success that spurred even further the sales of her books.
Curtain, the novel in which Hercule Poirot predeceases his author (TIME, Sept.
15), is still No. 1 on U.S. bestseller lists, with over a quarter of a million
copies in print.
But
it was the elderly, frail spinster Jane Marple who remained her favorite
detective. Gifted with as many "little grey cells" as Poirot, Miss
Marple also possesses an unpretentious village wisdom and homey psychological
insight that make her Agatha Christie's alter ego. Although Poirot is gone,
Marple survives for at least a while longer An unpublished manuscript in which
she too passes on is locked in the Christie vault, along with the ultimate
whodunit, Dame Agatha's autobiography By refusing to publish it during her
lifetime, Dame Agatha has assured herself one last, suspenseful hurrah.
REDISCOVERING THE JOY OF TEXT
By Walter Kirn - Time
Reading is a lot like sex. People who rarely
read can feel abnormal. People who read all the time can feel abnormal. And
because so much reading is done in private, behind closed doors (often bedroom
doors), no one really knows what normal is. A book a day? A month? A year? Do
self-help books count, or only novels? What if they're on tape?
In
the absence of a Kinsey-style report on American reading habits, one can only
guess what's going on in the dormitories, airport lounges and on the porch
swings of the land. And yet there are signs of a kind of reading
renaissance--from the rise of espresso-serving superstores to the emergence, on
national TV and in countless living rooms, of book clubs and reading groups. At
the least, it appears, reading books (or listening to them in the Jeep) is to
the 1990s what gymgoing was to the '80s: something we plan to do, something we
want to do and, by all appearances, something everyone else is doing, even
Oprah viewers. Perhaps primarily Oprah viewers.
"There
has been a vast increase in the number of book outlets, in the number of
readers and in the ways that books get to consumers," says William
Phillips, editor in chief of Little, Brown. One new way books are making their
way into readers' hands is via the Internet. Amazon.com an online bookstore, is
experiencing soaring volume, while electronic literary journals, such as Salon salon1999.com) are increasingly popular. Random
House randomhouse.com) Time Warner Trade Publishing pathfinder.com/twep and Simon & Schuster simonsays.com are among the growing number of
publishers with their own Websites. Far from killing off the book, computers
seem to be reinforcing its dominance. The Internet is still overwhelmingly
text-based, promoting literacy in general, and yet the screen has not replaced
the page. Says Barnes & Noble vice president Lisa Herling: "I don't
think anyone would ever take a computer to bed or to the beach to read."
Someone
might take a tape, though. To listen is not to read (especially if the book is
abridged), but it's close enough for many. Audiobooks, long tainted by their
association with motivational infomercial gurus, got a sorely needed cultural
seal of approval when Hillary Clinton received a Grammy Award for her spoken
version of her book, It Takes a Village. The market for audiobooks is booming.
That may be, in part, because they are compact and convenient and offer pseudo
intimacy with sages and celebrities. The forthcoming John F. Kennedy: A Journey
to Camelot by Paul Werth will be read by Sidney Poitier and Caroline Kennedy.
Slightly less ritzy (intended, perhaps, to be played in Dodge pickups instead
of Lexuses) is Waylon Jennings' rendition of Waylon: An Autobiography. To those
who scoff at such books as "ear candy," Seth D. Gershel, publisher of
Simon & Schuster Audio, has a snappy answer: "If you'd rather be
counting from 1 to 10 over and over again while driving, that's your
preference."
Can videobooks be far behind? To promote her
latest novel, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood starred in a video intended for
distribution to book clubs, which are hot these days and getting hotter. Moving
into the social vacuum created by the decline of Tupperware parties while
appealing to some of the same higher yearnings as 12 Step groups, book clubs
are invading homes, apartments and even TV studios. It's ironic. Oprah Winfrey,
the woman once charged with debasing American culture through years of tacky
psychodramas, has become, in a flash, the torchbearer of literacy, promoting
such solidly challenging fare as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon along with
such worthy popular entertainments as Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Her
book-club selections are instant megasellers, even when, like The Book of Ruth
by Jane Hamilton, they have fallen into virtual obscurity. The result for
publishers has been happy confusion. The lucky books are rushed back to the
presses for multiple, emergency printings, and publicists are running in
circles trying to play the new game. "Authors of books on subjects like
libertarianism phone me up and say, 'Get me on Oprah!'" reports a frazzled
flack. "How do I tell them she's probably not interested?"
Most
book clubs, however, are informal, private affairs, chautauquas in a bottle.
Sometimes aided by bookstore "liaisons," who often sell them books at
a discount and may even provide a meeting space, these do-it-yourself salons
offer a literary booster shot for people nostalgic for dorm-room bull sessions.
Laura Srebnik, 42, is a New York City policy analyst whose group meets once a
month. "I love it," she says. "I believe you have to set up
situations where you can think about larger principles." A high-powered
book club in Washington, started by Kenneth Brody, the former president of the
U.S. Export-Import Bank and made up of lawyers, journalists and government
officials, hired a university professor to guide it through classics like The
Iliad that members may have, well, skimmed as undergraduates. Virginia
Valentine, a liaison for Denver's Tattered Cover stores, finds that the book
clubs' mainstays are women and that they are reading everything from Waller to
Wharton. "A lot of young women feel frustrated that there isn't the
intellectual outlet they had in college. I see young women when they're about
30."
Is
the book-club craze linked to the aging of the American mind? Bart Schneider,
who publishes the Minnesota-based Hungry Mind Review, is certain it is.
"There's this whole 'soul industry' springing up," he says.
"Baby boomers are awakening to the total emptiness of their lives, and
reading is something they know is important and haven't quite forgotten how to
do. Plus, a book club sure beats church and synagogue." In Los Angeles,
traditionally the land of rampant intellectual insecurity and social
transience, some book clubs fulfill a crucial dual role: they elevate members'
sensibilities while helping them put down roots. "I get a lot of calls
from newcomers in town," says Diane Leslie, an organizer of book clubs in
what is now the nation's No. 1 book market. "They don't want to take a
class because they don't want to be graded, but they've reached a point in
their lives where they're looking for a pastime that is deeper than a
movie."
Just how deep does the reading rage go? In the
superstores--Barnes & Noble, Borders, Crown--where busy workers are
sometimes more familiar with the inventory of flavored coffees than the
location of the new John Updike novel--reading can seem like a sideshow, not
the main event. Flutes play. Writers recite. Young singles munch bagels.
Toddlers look for Waldo. "The idea of the cafe and the couches," says
Steve Riggio, Barnes & Noble's chief operating officer, "is to make
the store a good place to spend leisure time." Riggio's concept appears to
be working. Superstores are expanding and multiplying (to the tune of 20% last
year) and even stores whose main business isn't bookselling are aping the
superstores' bibliophilic ambiance. In Manhattan's landmark Scribner's
bookstore, fabled haunt of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a Benetton branch has set
up shop and begun playing host to something called the Salon, a reading series featuring
such swank young writers as Daphne Merkin, whose books will be on sale amid the
turtlenecks.
"It's
the rise of the cappuccino machine," sniffs Princeton professor Anthony
Grafton, referring to the revolution in literary retailing. He teaches the history
of reading and says his students "are less widely read now than a
generation ago." Less widely, but perhaps more fashionably. Daisy Maryles,
executive editor of Publishers Weekly, notes that "people want to read
something they view as significant or trendy or that people are talking
about." Could books be the latest life-style accessories? The equivalent
of cigars for the brain? Several liquor firms have taken to sponsoring literary
evenings at which prospective single-malt-Scotch buyers clink glasses with
budding novelists. The association of booze and books is long, close and
infamously troubled (would a stumbling William Faulkner or Dylan Thomas be
welcome at such a gathering?), but the distilleries don't seem fazed. Nor
do the clubbable, complicit writers.
There
is one business, strangely, that is not making money off the reading craze:
publishing. Profits are eroding. Revenues are flat. At HarperCollins, profits
fell 66% in the second half of 1996, and it is rumored that Rupert Murdoch, the
owner, is looking to quit the book business. Other companies are cutting staff
and closing down divisions. Industry executives agree that more and more
readers are buying more and more books; a record 2.17 billion books were sold
in the U.S. last year, up about 20 million copies from the previous year and
100 million from 1993. But the action has not perked up publishers' balance
sheets. Publishers (who have as many excuses for failure as alcoholic novelists
do) blame high advances to authors, discounts to bookstore chains, a lack of
up-and-coming big-name writers and even the nonliterary mass spectacles of last
year's Olympics and elections.
But
publishing is not the same as reading; one can founder while the other thrives.
Go into a superstore at reading rush hour (weekday evenings and Saturday
afternoons) and gaze at the spectacle: crowded tables and sofas, string
quartets, a woman in horn-rims autographing a memoir about her childhood sexual
abuse. Surely something profound is going on. Surely a New Age of Literacy has
dawned. Or might it be that reading resembles sex in yet another way? Perhaps
the people who are always talking about it--hatching book clubs, debating on
the Internet, quoting from the latest New York Times review--are making up for
the fact that they're not doing it. Maybe the people who read the most (the
ones who always have and always will) don't feel any special need to say so.
Reading may indeed be hip now, but most readers I know aren't hipsters, though
many may long to be. They're too busy turning pages, scanning indexes and
burning the midnight oil.
--Reported
by William Dowell and Andrea Sachs/New York and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los
Angeles, with other bureau reports
With
reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL AND ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK AND JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS
ANGELES, WITH OTHER BUREAU REPORTS
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