Books for Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life - Softcover

WILL SCHWALBE has worked in publishing; digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications, including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is the author of the New York Times best seller The End of Your Life Book Club and coauthor, with David Shipley, of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better.
From the Hardcover edition.

Introduction 

From time to time I have a terrifying dream. I call it the Reader’s Nightmare. 

I’m in a busy airport, and they’ve announced my flight. There is an epic walk to the gate, and I know I have only a few minutes before they will close the door to the jetway and my plane will leave without me. Suddenly, I realize that I don’t have a book to read on the flight. Not one single book. I spin around, my eyes searching frantically for a bookstore. I see none. I run through the airport, past the duty-free counters selling liquor and perfume, past the luggage stores and fashion boutiques, past the place that offers neck massage. Still, I can’t find an airport bookstore. Now, over the loudspeakers, comes the final call for my flight. “Flight ninety-seven to Perth is ready for departure. All passengers must be on board at this time.” They even call me by name. Panic sets in as I realize that I am almost certainly going to miss my flight. But the idea of hours on a plane without a book? Intolerable. So I run and run, searching for that bookstore—or at least a newsstand with a rack of paperbacks. I can’t find a single book anywhere in the airport. I start to scream. 

Then I wake up. 

I don’t have this dream about food or television or movies or music. My unconscious is largely untroubled by the idea of spending hours in a metal tube hurtling through the sky without something to eat or a program to watch or tunes in my ears. It’s the thought of being bookless for hours that jolts me awake in a cold sweat. 

Throughout my life I’ve looked to books for all sorts of reasons: to comfort me, to amuse me, to distract me, and to educate me. But just because you know that you can find anything you need in a book doesn’t mean you can easily find your way to the right book at the right time, the one that tells you what you need to know or feel when you need to know or feel it. 

A few years ago, I wrote a book about the books I read with my mother when she was dying of pancreatic cancer. During this time we read casually, promiscuously, and whimsically, allowing one book to lead us to the next. We read books we were given and books that had sat on our shelves for decades, waiting to be noticed; books we had stumbled across, and books we had chosen to reread simply because we felt like it. Were we looking for anything in particular? Usually not. At times, the books gave us something to talk about when we wanted to talk about anything rather than her illness. But they also gave us a way to talk about subjects that were too painful to address directly. They helped guide and prompt our conversations, so that I could learn as much as I could from my mother while she was still here to teach me. 

At other times throughout my life, though, I’ve felt a very specific need and have searched for a book to answer it. It hasn’t always been easy to find the right book. Sure, when that burning need was to learn how to make a pineapple upside-down cake, I turned to The Cake Bible. Or when it was a need to find a place to eat in Chicago, the Zagat guide. Or when I wanted to self-diagnose that angry rash, to the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book. More and more, when I need this kind of information, my first line of attack isn’t a book at all—it’s the Internet, or social media, where I quiz the ubiquitous “hive mind” to find, say, good Malaysian food near Union Square. 

There are, however, questions that the Internet and the hive mind are spectacularly unable to answer to my satisfaction. These are the big ones, the ones that writers have been tackling for thousands of years: the problem of pain, meaning, purpose, happiness. Questions about how to live your life. Yes, the Internet tries to help—inasmuch as any inanimate thing can be said to try to do anything. There are digital video channels devoted to streaming inspirational speeches from conferences in which people package insight into brief uplifting lectures—many with a compelling hook and some memorable stories. But the best of these are often simply digests of— or advertisements for—a book that the presenter has written or is currently working on. Authors have always given lectures: there’s nothing new in that. And readers, after hearing such speeches, have craved the books that go with them, so that they could explore the topics in greater depth and engage with them more fully—working through the arguments at their own pace, skipping, savoring, and pondering. 

Unlike most of these inspirational speeches, even the best of which tend to be largely self-referential, most good books are not tackling big questions in isolation. Great authors have been engaged in a dialogue with one another that stretches back for millennia. People who write books generally read books, and most books carry with them traces of some of the hundreds or thousands of books the writer read before attempting the one at hand. 

And that’s also why books can echo for centuries into the future. Even a book read by only a dozen people can have a massive effect if one of those readers goes on to write a book read by millions. British writer Henry Green (real name: Henry Vincent Yorke) never sold more than a few thousand copies of any of his novels, and most of his books sold far fewer than that. But the writers influenced by Green include Sebastian Faulks (whose Birdsong is one of the bestselling and most beloved British novels of all time), Eudora Welty, and Anthony Burgess (best known for A Clockwork Orange, which remains as shocking today as it was in 1962, when it was first published). John Updike wrote that Green’s novels made “more of a stylistic impact on me than those of any writer living or dead.” 

Henry Green died at age sixty-eight in 1973 and is largely forgotten. The books he influenced continue to be read and themselves inspire new works. 
Sometimes books wear their influences loudly, mention- ing other books by name, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sometimes the lineage is subtler, and the careful reader must tease out or guess at the influences. (How much of J. K. Row- ling’s Harry Potter series was inspired by the classic 1857 boarding-school novel Tom Brown’s School Days, by Thomas Hughes?) And sometimes authors hint at influences that aren’t really influences at all but instead speak to the kind of book the author would have liked to have written. 

Whenever I read, I try to be aware of these echoes and associations and aspirations. How did this book come to be? What books does this book resemble, and what books does it bring to mind? 
Then, as the reader, I become influenced while I’m read- ing. I’m not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask: How is this book changing mine? 
At the trial in which he would be sentenced to death, Socrates (as quoted by Plato) said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone; it’s a solitary activity that connects you to others. 

At fifty-four, I’m now roughly the same age Dante was when he was putting the finishing touches on The Divine Comedy. I’m the same age as von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. (I realized only recently that the character in this novella who was pining for a youth and his own lost youth was squarely in middle age; not having read the open- ing very carefully, I had always assumed that the “old” man who allowed the hotel barber to dye his hair jet black and garishly paint his face was in his seventies at the very least.) Fifty-plus is a good age for big questions. Unless I’m that rare soul who makes it past one hundred, I probably have less time ahead of me than I’ve already lived. Now that my brother, sister, and I are all over fifty, my brother, using a golf analogy, refers to our lives as being played on the back nine—the first nine holes are behind us. Whatever score we’ve accumulated, we carry with us. Suddenly, finishing honorably and staying out of the sand traps and water hazards matters more than seeing our names on the leaderboard. 

On the other hand, I think any age is a good age for big questions. I asked some of my biggest and best when I was in high school and college—fittingly, as that’s what school is for. I asked other big questions at painful times in my life— no age is immune from misfortune or feels it less keenly. And I hope and expect to be asking big questions right up to the end. 
I know I’m not alone in my hunger for books to help me find the right questions to ask, and find answers to the ones that I have. Because I work in publishing and wrote a book about reading, I meet a lot of readers. Readers of all ages have shared with me their desire for a list of books to help guide them. I’ve heard from people who want classic novels to read; others just how-to books; others a list of titles from around the world. But most don’t care what type of book or when it was written or by whom—they just want books that will help them find their way in the world and give them pleasure while they are at it. 

On an endless and turbulent plane ride from New York to Las Vegas, I sat next to a nineteen-year-old West Point plebe. We started chatting, and he soon was telling me about some of his favorite books; The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was one. I told him I also loved that fable of the shepherd who travels to Egypt in search of treasure. Our conversation quickly moved from pleasantries to the meaning of life. (Maybe The Alchemist prompted that; maybe it was because the turbulence was increasingly extreme.) As the plane bounced around the sky, I began to babble about other books that had inspired me. The cadet said he would trade me a genuine West Point baseball cap for a list of my favorite titles. I can’t remember most of what I wrote down. I love the cap; I hope he liked the books. 

And then there’s my ninety-six-year-old friend Else, who is always ravenous for book recommendations. Recently, I told her about a book by Ruth Ozeki called A Tale for the Time Being. In this novel from 2013, a writer in the Pacific Northwest finds washed up on shore various items, including the diary of a sixteen-year-old girl in Tokyo who is being horribly bullied and is quite sure she doesn’t want to go on living. The novel moves between the story of the writer, passages from the girl’s diary, and a collection of letters that accompanied it. The most indelible character in the book is the girl’s hundred-and-four-year-old grandmother, a quietly charismatic Zen Buddhist nun with a fascinating past, who provides physical and emotional sanctuary when life becomes too awful for the girl to bear alone. 

Else also has enormous charisma, but of a more boisterous variety. (That is, she swears a lot.) And she too has lived a remarkable life: a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, she became a music editor for film. Else read A Tale for the Time Being with delight and had much to say about it. But more than anything she wanted to discuss the hundred-and-four-year-old Buddhist nun. Else hung on to her every word, and declared her one of the most astonishing characters she had ever encountered in fiction or nonfiction—or in real life, for that matter. “Now I know who I want to be when I grow up,” she announced to me gleefully, laughing and clapping her hands together. 
As for me, I’m on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I’m at it. 

I know that the West Point cadet, Else, and millions of others are on this search, too, a search that began long before I was born and that will continue long after I’m gone. 
I’m not a particularly disciplined or systematic seeker. I don’t give a great deal of thought to the books I choose—I’ll read anything that catches my eye. Most of the time when I choose what I’m going to read it has absolutely nothing to do with improving myself. Especially when I’m at my happiest, I’m unlikely to search for a book to make me happier. But it’s often during these periods of nonseeking that I’ve stumbled across a book that has changed my life. 

I believe that everything you need to know you can find in a book. People have always received life-guiding wisdom from certain types of nonfiction, often from “self-help” books starting with the progenitor of the category, Samuel Smiles’s 1859 bestseller Self-Help (with illustrations of Character and Conduct). But I have found that all sorts of books can carry this kind of wisdom; a random sentence in a thriller will give me unexpected insight. (If I hadn’t read Killing Floor, the masterful 1997 novel that introduced the world to Jack Reacher, a former military cop turned vagrant, I never would have learned this valuable piece of wisdom, which still guides me in work and life: “Waiting is a skill like anything else.”) 

I also believe that there is no book so bad that you can’t find anything in it of interest. That, actually, is a paraphrase from the Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger, a sentiment later adopted by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote. Admittedly, neither Pliny nor Cervantes were subject to some of the weakest “sex and shopping” books from the 1980s, but I still think it mostly holds true. You can learn something from the very worst books—even if it is just how crass and base, or boring and petty, or cruel and intolerant, the human race can be. Or even if it’s just one gleaming insight in a muddy river of words. 

There is a proud tradition of extracting lines from poetry and songs and using them in this way. And for centuries, people have kept “commonplace books”: journals filled with transcriptions of quotes and extracts. But not everyone is a fan of cherry-picking odd passages from random books and using them to direct your life. Some people argue that lines from novels and plays are dependent on the context that surrounds them—that it’s unseemly and self-serving to grab the odd line here and there, especially if it comes in the voice of a character and may not have anything to do with what the writer thinks. I don’t buy this. It ignores the way that your brain collects, refracts, sorts, and combines information. Our search for meaning isn’t limited to thoughts that were created to be meaningful and packaged in verse or easily extractable chunks. We can find meaning in everything—and everything is fair game. Your brain is, in fact, the ultimate commonplace collection, and everything you’ve ever read is in there somewhere, ready to come back into your consciousness when you want or need it.&n...