There’s a slyly damning scene in Donna Seaman’s new memoir about her expertise/behavior/mandate for studying on a regular basis — simply studying and studying and studying, nonstop, from her childhood within the Hudson Valley to her longtime profession as a Chicago-based critic. On this scene, Seaman is shoplifting. She’s a child, however not stealing sweet. She’s pocketing Dostoevsky. She’s slipped a replica — right here’s the humorous half — of “The Idiot” into her coat. The shop clerk is just not oblivious. Seaman is requested if she was planning to pay for that.
She sweats, then blurts earnestly: “Who is the Idiot?”
“River of Books: A Life in Reading” is just not about a lifetime of crime and misrule. It isn’t the story of how a former Newberry Library conservator (which Seaman was) goes on the lam for pilfering the work of Russian novelists solely to remake herself into an organizing pressure in Chicago’s literary group (which Seaman has been for years). It’s in regards to the act of studying above all pursuits — for higher and worse. She writes in regards to the thought of books as meals for thought with such ravishment, that you simply image her chewing paperbacks. When she writes of being a baby fixated on the phrase “island,” the way it’s made up of various phrases, you image a baby discovering an island, studying all day and by no means being bothered.
We met the opposite day on Chicago’s Northwest Facet, in her neighborhood library department. She has an extended, animated face, curly hair and a pleasant, beneficiant method that belies the truth that she would in all probability reasonably be dwelling studying a e book proper now than speaking to a reporter.
“Oh, I was such an antisocial kid,” she remembered. “I used to be a moody child. I may get uncommunicative. My mother and father can be like, ‘Please get outside and stop reading and be a child!’ I used to be conscious that my studying was an avoidance tactic. I’m nonetheless like that. I’m tremendous personal, and I like quiet, and I’m nonetheless most snug with a life like that. However I’m not a whole introvert. I’m all in favour of folks. Satirically, although, that depletes me, and so spending time with folks means having to recharge, and which means studying one thing.