the reading habit

The only two times in my life I can remember setting a book aside not out of distaste but out of a sheer sense of irrelevance was during in the days following the births of my two daughters. Otherwise ‘the need to read’ - hey, there are worse escape routes – is always there. A mental reaching out for sustenance - the metaphor is telling. Yes, the reading habit is a sort of nourishment akin to food. (So when is reading ‘toxic’? And is this a value judgement amounting to censorship?) I don’t want to sound overly moralising on ‘the value’ of bookishness. I’ve lived with and loved non-readers all my life, just like I’m a non-skier, non-roller-blader, non-chess player and so on. Still it’s good to see this reading trait emerge in my first daughter to whom I have unwittingly handed on so much. She reads indiscriminately, with relish like a foodlover tucking into a meal when she goes to replenish her pile of books from the mediatheque around the corner from where we live. At the minute the she’s finishing ‘The Summer of the Sisterhood’ – what she calls ‘one of those chatty-girly books.’ She’s read all the ‘Twilight’ series, the gothic remake of Romeo and Juliet about a girl in love with a vampire. This Christmas she was caught up in ‘Jane Eyre’ which she liked (she said) because of the atmosphere. Jane is ‘passionate’ she said, (a judgement influenced by French language and culture - where you’re allowed to talk about ‘passion’ with the sort of detachment that would make pre-ados elsewhere cringe). Jane is a rebel too, so she liked that. The shrieking voice from the attic is ‘gothic’ – wild, anarchic and ‘cool’. I promised her the sequel’ to Jane Eyre in one of my favourite books ever – Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ written from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic. She also read ‘Girl with a Pearl Ear-ring.’ which she liked for its historical setting in Renaissance Amsterdam. She had never realised that Catholics and Protestants could be at war with each other (isn’t such innocence an achievement for the daughter of a woman who grew up in the sectarian atmosphere of northern Ireland a generation back). Nevertheless she thought the servant-girl heroine was “too lucky” – her adolescent heroines are always ugly or unlucky at the start. I don’t think she got the erotic tension between the painter and his model – or maybe she did but couldn’t/wouldn’t put words on it to me. I was a bit surprised that she chose this book from my bookshelf in the first place. It turned out that Vermeer’s painting had turned up in an American soap opera she and her sister watch on You-tube in their week-end ‘screen time’. A character had stolen the Vermeer painting.