Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

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On the other hand, a man is apt to know his nonreading habits only too well. In the eyes of the overworked businessman or scientist whose leisure-time intake during the past year has consisted of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and 94 pages of The Group, even the lip-moving fellow commuter who mumbles his way through a Leon Uris novel is someone to be regarded with awe. The nonreading executive often feels like an Edgar Allan Poe character who is slowly but surely being sealed off from the rest of the world by a wall of unread books. At the wall's foundation are the Pickwick Papers, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, Plato's Dialogues, Henry James, Boswell's Johnson, and countless other classics. At eye level are Paul Tillich and Samuel Eliot Morison, Barbara Tuchman and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, O'Hara, Mailer, Roth, Updike and Gunter Grass. "The multitude of books," as Voltaire observed, "is making us ignorant." Voltaire should be alive today.

The middle-aged shutin should first discard the summer reading list. He would never get around to all those titles anyway. Besides, as the old adage has it, a man who reads to improve himself is probably beyond hope of improvement. The catch-up reader should then resolve to shun all the authors he feels obliged to read. If his conscience impels him toward Marlowe, he should settle for Harlow; if his secret ambition is to get through all of Dumas, he should try a Du Maurier. For the habitual nonreader to leap into Finnegans Wake or Wittgenstein is almost as unseemly and possibly as dangerous as it is for a middle-aged stockbroker to demonstrate push-ups at a party. By the same token, the would-be title-dropper should stay firmly away from The Golden Bough, the Aeneid, Kierkegaard, The Wealth of Nations, Rousseau, Thucydides, The Origin of Species, Teilhard de Chardin, and any other reading that assistant professors of English call "seminal."

The initial aim of summer cramming for the neophyte, as Author Richard Armour cautions, should be to "learn something—and be able to hold forth at the dinner table about it." Armour adds sagely: "If you want to score points, you've got to get the conversation around to something you've read, and prove you're up on the subject." No one scores points by babbling about a novel that everyone else has forgotten for two years. For that matter, it is safe to skip all Major Novelists, since everyone else is presumed to have read them anyway. This narrows the field considerably, since all novelists published in the U.S. since World War II have been Major. The dinner companion who admits reading the soft-center bon-bon writers—Taylor Caldwell, Michener, Helen Maclnnes—actually loses points. History, on the other hand, is prestigious, but a sticky wicket for the novice, who by fall usually forgets which battle took place where and when, and just why General Thingummy lost it.

The Non-Bookworm Turns