how to read?

No books yesterday. Sigh.... I'm beginning to think this must be a conspiracy.

However, the online bookstores have been shipping, and a reader (Suzi) writes to ask about the best way to read China's Book of Days, which I thought was an interesting question. "From beginning to end?" she asks.  "Or is it ok to start with the current month/day?" Her question--which seems simple, on the face of it--isn't really simple at all. It started me thinking. I'm still thinking.

With my novels, I expect a reader to open the book, begin at the beginning, and read to the end. (In fact, I confess to being a little surprised, even annoyed, when a reader tells me that s/he reads the ending and then goes back to the beginning. I feel somehow that the reader has broken a rule, which is pretty silly of me.) This beginning-to-end business happens because narratives tell a story, and stories are always set in a temporal dimension. We experience time as moving forward--which doesn't mean that the story itself is straightforward, of course. Lots of stories do backflips and forward somersaults, and generally mess around with time. (One of my favorite novels is Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom!, which you can't understand until you've figured out the time of the telling and the time of the event being told.) Still, the general rule is: start at the beginning and read to the end. And since we're reading print in our Western culture, we're reading left to right, top to bottom. Even the pages are arranged so that we read the left-hand page before we read the right-hand page. (Don't know about you, but I always have the feeling that time, too, marches left to right. That's how strongly print has affected my brain!)

But of course, there are all sorts of books that have nothing to do with time. Cookbooks, for instance. Craft books. Catalogs, dictionaries, reference books. We still read them right to left, top to bottom, but we enter the book wherever we want or need to. To find what we're looking for, we use the index.

And then there are calendars, which are all about time. We go to them to see what day it is, what we're going to do that day, etc. Related to calendars are almanacs, which Wikipedia defines as a publication "containing information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar." If this is the kind of thing that turns you on, you'll find a history of the almanac here.

Strictly speaking, Days is a daybook, which is a personal almanac--an almanac that is organized by the writer's personal interests, but is not quite so personal (or private, or idiosyncratic) as a diary. You could write your own daybook. Lots of people have. I don't know when the first daybook was written--when people began to write, probably. There are published examples from the seventeenth century on.

(And here's something else for you to chew on: is a blog an online daybook? Think of all the themed blogs you know about, blogs about cooking, knitting, weather, and so on. Blogs are daybooks, maybe?)

Days is China's and my daybook. There is information about herbs, compiled from different authors, different sources, different cultures. There is stuff about China's life in Pecan Springs, entries about the mysteries, even entries from Lifescapes. And Suzi's question makes good sense. What's the best way to read this melange of material? Like a calendar, day by day? Like a story, from beginning to end?  Or are there other ways to get into this book?

I'm still thinking. I'll post something more about this tomorrow. In the meantime, maybe you have some thoughts on this question that you'd like to share. Feel free.

Reading note: I have herein communicated such Notions as I have gathered either from reading of several Authors, or by conferring sometimes with Scholars, and sometimes with Country people; To which I have added some Observations of mine own, never before published: Most of which I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant. —William Cole, The Art of Simpling, 1656

Comments

[Marti Johnson]

When my book arrived, I immediately began reading the dates important to me: birthdays, anniversaries, and so forth, and then turned to January 1 and am currently into August. This system made sense to me, but whatever way you read it is correct for you.

I'm also reading a "Time-Travel" book, TimeFrame by Michael Crichton which starts in the current century, and then sends the main characters to the 14th Century to survive. A fascinating fictional history account of a turbulent time in history!

Marti J.

[Linda Mandeville]

As I sit patiently waiting for my book to arrive I have also wondered where I will start. My sister gave my a wonderful book, Emily Dickenson's Gardens by Marta McDowell. It is by seasons. My dilemma--it is now fall, this book begins with spring. I always start at the beginning of a book, but it's not spring and I want to read about fall. But if I start with fall--I will miss out on some important facts about Emily Dickenson's life I would like to know along the way. So, I have decided to start at the beginning. I will probably do the same with Book of Days. I'll re-read it anyway--and the second time I can read it with current day. I can't wait!!