The Stories that Lie Between Book and Reader

Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob:

“It’s hard not to wish that everyone – my friends, my family members, writers I know and don’t know – would keep a Book of Books. What better way to get to know them? You could find out so much if you could get a read on where other people’s curiosities lie and where their knowledge is found: What are you reading? And what have you read? And what do you want to read next? Not knowing the answers to these questions means you miss a vital part of a persona, the real story, the other stories – not the ones in their books, but the stories that lie between book and reader, the connections that bind the two together.”

I’ve tracked my reading publicly for nearly 20 years, on Goodreads since 2008 and before that on a hand-coded HTML page on my personal website. I can’t imagine not tracking the books I read now. It’s second nature to record what I’m reading, when I started and when I finished. And to look back on what I’ve read and look forward to what I might read next.

Between book and reader

For Pamela Paul, her Book of Books (aka Bob) is meaningful and private because that’s what reading was for her. “Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules. … What you read revealed what you cared about and feared, what you hoped for because you didn’t have it, what questions you wanted answered without publicly unmasking your ignorance. I guarded this information fiercely.”

When she first wrote about Bob in the New York Times Book Review along with a photo of Bob’s first page, “I had revealed my inner life in a very public way,” she writes, “but at least, I reasoned, I’d done so in a safe place, among fellow readers.”

There is an element of intimacy to my Goodreads page (which is a very safe space, especially compared to many other social media), but it’s the kind of intimacy which I’ve long been comfortable with online. The exposure is indirect. It’s an easier, more obscure way to show what I’m interested in, how I’m feeling, what I’m concerned with. It lets me avoid saying something outright in a blog post, Facebook status, or Instagram caption. But it’s also true that some books I read have nothing to do with my life or have no impact on me.

A fuzzy kind of picture emerges from the sum of the books I read. My reading says something about me, but only as much as, say, photos do. What my home looks like, what kind of clothes I wear, how I wear my hair. These are ways to reveal a portion of my identity, but not any deep truths. They aren’t enough to tell whether we’d get along, whether I’d be a good friend, or what I believe in.

There might be such a thing as knowing too much about what other people read. It’s possible to place too much importance on books. Many very wonderful people read one type of book or only the most popular books or no books at all. Books are special, but there are so many things we consume that help make us who we are. I have the privilege and luxury of making reading a priority in my life. What you read or don’t read doesn’t define you or reveal some deep truth about you. It’s just one aspect of every complicated human being.