Date a Girl Who Reads
This is different from what I usually post, in that it was written recently (probably this year), and as far as I know, it’s only ever been published online. If found in on a Tumblr blog. If you have more facts on it, let me know.
Apparently, it was written in response to another short essay called You Should Date an Illiterate Girl., which is either sarcastic or very bitter. (Warning: There’s quite a bit of bad language in that one.)
Date a Girl Who Reads
by Rosemarie Urquico
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second-hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but, by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.
It takes every word in the story
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”
– Flannery O’Connor
Read an old one in between
“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”
– C.S. Lewis
This raises the question, how old does an “old book” have to be? World War II seems like a long time ago to me, and that’s when Lewis wrote, but I doubt that’s long enough. On the one hand, American culture has changed pretty significantly in the last 100 years, but I’m not sure it’s far enough away that it can really give us an outsider’s perspective on our own culture.
Another way to get that outsider’s look is to read old books by people from different cultures. I remember realizing this while reading “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a 150-year-old French novel. I was complete flabbergasted by the characters’ concept of honor and disgrace, specifically the things (like bankruptcy) that you could never live down, that would drive you to commit suicide or enter a nunnery. Or the cultural idea that it was acceptable, honorable in fact, to kill someone for insulting you. The point is, if French people of that time took their idea of honor for granted, what cultural ideas am I taking for granted that I should really re-think?
So what do you think, readers? Is Lewis right? How old is “old?” And does reading a book from a far-away country accomplish the same thing? (In case you hadn’t noticed, the theme of this quote is very similar to that from last week Monday’s Chesterton quote.)
The World Made Small
A book is the world made small;
So that even indoors on a rainy day,
You can travel around it twice each way,
And never get wet at all.
{I’m attending the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing today, so here’s a little poem I learned years ago about books. This was on a poster hung up behind the desk at my library when I was a teenager, and I read it every time I stood in line to check out books, which was a lot. It’s a poem for children, but not any less true. Does anyone know who wrote it? The poster didn’t say.}
Somebody Ought to Know
“There’s a house on a hill where a lady lived that used to keep cats. Along the road the apples are little and yellow and sweet. Puddles dry in the sun, and the mud cakes, and yellow butterflies diddle in the new mud. Cow trails lead up slopes through juniper beds and thistles and gray rocks, and below you the lake hangs blue and clear, and you see the islands plain. Sometimes a farm dog barks. Yes, sir, I returned to Belgrade, and things don’t change much. I thought somebody ought to know.”
– E.B. White
{Frankly, I’m not sure what White’s purpose was in writing this; I found this passage in the highly-recommended “On Writing Well,” a book on writing non-fiction by William Zinsser. I love it because it draws a great word picture, and because he seems to be saying that sometimes we write for the same reason that some painters paint – because we saw something beautiful and feel compelled to share it. To me, that seems to be one of the best reasons to do something creative, as Kipling said, “for the joy of the working.”
{What do you think? Am I missing his point? Is it a good point? Should I read the rest of the essay this comes from?}
Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night
I love books, and here are a few of my favorite things said about them, each by a famous author.
“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”
– Christopher Morley
“Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for the contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our imagination, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error. But most of all, they resemble us in their precarious hold on life.”
– Joseph Conrad
“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds.”
– Charles Lamb
And, because it expresses my feeling so well, one from Lewis.
“You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
– C. S. Lewis
Stars & Stillness 