I read a lot. Mostly I read narrative. Fiction. Stories. I read nonfiction too, and poetry, but I mostly read stories. For every novel I have read, I hold about four simultaneous versions of it in my head. Much like parallel universes might behave, these visions of the narrative are parallel, sometimes cross into one another, and look very similar but... not quite.
The first version I hold in my head is the one I received while first reading. It is the purest, the most blurry, and the most my own. It is not tainted by the author's childhood home, my grievances with the ending, or how Leonard Dicaprio looked in the film version. It is mine to keep. Sometimes this version can be blasphemous. I can completely disregard what the author is telling me in favor of my own imaginings. If I am blurry on a plot point, sometimes it just stays blurry, whether the author intended that or not. If I don't really know what a Russian farm looks like while reading Anna Karenina, I will replace it with a North American colonial farm. While reading a sci-fi such as Hitchhiker's, I can fill in gaps with any number of composite images, or I can keep holes in the scenery when I just don't know what's there.
This version of a novel- these first impressions are what makes or breaks a story for the reader. I believe these first impressions are what creates "favorite books." They determine which stories you want to reread and which worlds you want to revisit. Life of Pi, for example, filled my brain with such detailed and complex imagery the first time I read it that, even though I don't love that book, it will stick to me much closer than say, Bee Season. If these first impressions are largely simply our own imagination’s response to a story or image, then it's not really our choice when we love a book, or the author's fault when we don't. Often it is chance- how well you processed the information on the first read. (That being said, some books just are not well written, and your imagination can't run free when distracted with bad writing.) My first impression of Howl’s Moving Castle is so strong, so unique, and so unlike anything else, that it instantly became and remained a “favorite book.” My friends who love Diana Wynne Jones all love her for their own reasons. My Howl is not Brittany's or Kate's. It's just not. Diana Wynne Jones gave such excellent bones, such ready bodies, that every reader can clothe Howl and Sophie in whatever sort of clothes they please (my Howl dresses like he's from Revolutionary War era Boston. I don't know why.) and the product is still at the heart the same. He is always still Howl Pendragon.
Other authors like George RR Martin don't give the reader much wiggle room. He is talented at giving huge amounts of information very simply. Yes, naturally every reader views Kings Landing slightly differently, but it is the overwhelming agreement that readers of A Game of Thrones share that makes the books easy to talk about, read together, and love in community. I know many people who love Howl, but we cannot sit down and talk about Howl the way we talk about Jon Snow. This is the mystery of writing and imagination. Somehow Jon is KNOWN and readers are in agreement. Like a friend we all knew in highschool, we KNOW Jon as a group. You might have slightly different experiences with him, different memories, but it's still Jon. Howl is different. Howl is an idea. Howl is a powerful symbol. He is mine. I don't and can't share my Howl with you. I wouldn't know how to.
This version of a novel is often very blurry in places, the parts you might not care about. But it is also this version that smells good and tastes good. In Rebecca, when she has breakfast for the first time at Manderly, those words are more than words to me. They are flavors that I won’t soon forget. It’s real food to me. Another reader might not have been stopped dead by the “tea, in a great silver urn, and coffee too, and on the heater, piping hot, dishes of scrambled eggs, of bacon, and another of fish. There was a little clutch of boiled eggs as well, in their own special heater, and porridge, in a silver porringer. On another side-board was a ham, and a great piece of cold bacon. There were scones, too, on the table, and toast, and various pots of jam, marmalade, and honey, while dessert dishes, piled high with fruit stood at either end.” I was stopped dead. This is more than words to me. It’s real. Similarly real are the crumpets eaten in Castle in the Air, the last of Howl’s adventures.
To quote Heminway, “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
Regardless of how well you liked the plot or the characters or the writing, it is this version of a story that is alive and vibrant and moves. It’s the one that lives in you, actively, always.
The second version of a novel is stored in my brain and my throat as I read a well. It is the words. This version is the “literary” one, the linguistic one. An author's words and phrases are important. There are books, novels, poetry, and nonfiction which I don't primarily remember in images as much as in words. After reading anything, I have produced both the initial imaginings and the streamlined word version. Which of the two is more powerful in my memory often has to do with the author and style of book. In Everything is Illuminated we are transported to Odessa, pre WWII. I don't have a clue what life looked like there. If I try really hard the best I can come up with a peasant with a kerchief. My initial visual version of the novel is blurry. When I think on that book, what comes to life for me are the words.
When I was a child I was forced to memorize poetry, long pieces of Shakespeare, and Bible verses. I have an awful verbal memory when it comes to reciting, but a rather impressive verbal memory for written word. I am rather talented at memorizing the map of words on the page. The length of a book. I can find passages very easily because I just know where they are. (This is naturally, the biggest problem with Kindles and Ibooks. You can’t flip.) This memory of words on a page is possibly unique to me, but I am sure everyone who reads often enough has those passages they can recall to memory, even if they can’t recite them. Like a language you only know a little off, you can understand and place the general idea and little phrases, but you couldn't dictate the whole page.
Everything is Illuminated is like that. The following quote is important in terms of character development, and it has its place in the story, but most of all it’s just beautiful. Give me a moment. “Lunch in a bowl: I don’t love you. Bark on a tree: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Fence post: the shape of you, the feel of you. I don’t love you. Nothing is more than what it is. Everything is a thing, complete in its thingness.”
I just wrote that out from memory. The real quote is, “Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.” I never tried to memorize it, but the power of that quote has such a hold on me that when I close my eyes I can see/taste/KNOW the words and where they sit on the page. I can guestimate the words, recreate them to an extent from memory.
Words are harder to talk about than things. Words hold more meaning, or rather, can hold more meaning. Words are subject to interpretation. I’ve talked to my sister about this. She tends to see books through this lens. I tend to remember visually. But every book has a quote or a turn of phrase that sticks with me. Sometimes it’s a small thing. Just one word I will add to my vocabulary afterwards, without knowing why. Sometimes the words are important in and of themselves, as well as for the picture they describe, because they are doing work past simply describing. They are teaching you and delivering a concept beyond the scene.
"Only a moment. Dionis broke away sobbing. She ran down the path toward home. She did not once look around. She had not said 'yes', she had not even said 'good-bye'. Yet, as she ran, there came upon her again that sense of belonging to Jetsam--that terrible, intimate sense of responsibility for him. She could not tell whether it was intense gladness or intense sorrow."
This quote ends one of my favorite books. But when I read it, I don’t SEE Dionis breaking away sobbing. I feel it instead. I comprehend the concepts behind the words, the universalness of a girl, breaking away from a kiss, crying. That terrible, intimate sense of responsibility she has for Jetsam is not just the feeling for Dionis. It is mine as well, and yours, and everyones. This quote is a picture of love. It’s more than a teenage Quaker girl’s feelings. It’s what stands behind the words and behind the scene that makes it so memorable. Then, naturally, there are words in books that stand alone from a scene, and are not actions at all. They evoke simply the thoughts they are meant to evoke, they live outside of the narrative, to teach you something, to show or share something bigger than a story.
“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women... I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
This quote from American Gods is, like “lunch in a bowl: I don’t love you,” lives outside of the story Gaiman was telling in his novel. It tells its own story. Roughly I think words in a book can be broken into three categories. The first category is pure function: get this information across. Then there are quotation, paragraphs, and sentences that stand alone, outside of the story, and need no context to be understood or appreciated as beautiful. Lastly are quotes that rely on the context of the novel to bring out the beauty or the humor. I find Anthony Trollope to be one of the funniest authors I have ever had the pleasure of reading. He is witty, wry, and truthful. But when I try and quote his humor, I can’t. Much of it is found in dialogue or is highly situation. If I wrote it out here, you wouldn't giggle. His words are part of something bigger. They are meaningful- in context. I have this humor in me somewhere, and I draw them out as words and not as scenes, since they are often exposition or dialogue, but they are not easily shared. They are mine to mull over. They belong to the reader. PG Wodehouse is similar. His humor is in the situation, in the big picture. You need the back story. There are funny lines, but he does not write books of one-liners.
Sometimes though, a quote can be contextual and stand on its own, but take on slightly different meanings. Sometimes we can steal words from the author’s mouth, misuse and abuse them. In Little, Big, a multi-generational fairy tale set in turn of the century(ish) New York, a character says, “I don’t know, I don’t know! All I know is that I love him and that’s enough; I want to be with him, and be good to him, and make him rice and beans and have his babies and… and just go on and on.” This quote is lovely in and of itself, though it makes a lot more sense within the context of the story. But it’s also up for grabs. I used it once. It came out of my own mouth, in the past six months. I was talking to a friend about a boy, and almost this exact quote came tumbling out of my mouth. Not verbatim. And I don’t think I really meant it. But I completely plagiarized my emotions, either way. Sometimes your own words aren’t enough. When that happens, go back to the literary versions of the novels stored in your head. See if Jane Austen or JK Rowling can’t help you out. I don’t know how to be romantic on my own- but I have a lot of beautiful words stored in my head. They help me see my own life in perspective, put words to emotions I can’t vocalize, and when I am really stuck, I can use them as my own.
The third version of a novel is the most confusing because it isn't real. To use the parallel universe example again, this version of a novel in my memory is the universe that some idiot (me) messed up by time traveling around in the timeline to change everything they didn't like. I don't purposefully do this, but if a scene bothers me, an outcome upsets me, or 200 pages in the author decides to tell me a character who I imagined to be blonde was actually brunette... I have the choice to accept it. Or I course correct, create a pocket universe where the blonde version lives. Take The House of Mirth. Have you imagined an end where Lily isn't dead? Did her waking up ever cross your mind? That version stays in your subconscious somewhere. While reading Atonement, when Briony (and likewise McEwan, who was the one actually lying to you) admits to the reader (you) that Robbie and Cecilia were actually never reunited, what do you do with the fuzzy little future you'd made for them in a cottage in Yorkshire with a chubby baby and a tabby cat? You probably did not consciously think it through in so much detail but when you're robbed of it you think.... “But wait! What about that tabby cat and rose bush?” It's your tabby. You gave it to them prematurely, before you had all the facts. But it will live on in the “alternate history” version of the novel.
When you read you are constantly predicting. Some of these predictions are forgot in half a page, when the truth is revealed. Some of these predictions stick with you the whole way through and, when are proven false, have no where to go. I did this more as a child, when you finish a book dissatisfied and you try to fix it. (What if Manderly had never burned down?) I have an entire future for Johnny and Cilla, and incredible amounts of back story as well, for Johnny Tremain. I invented it when I was very young, and felt the book to be incomplete. It has always stuck with me, and when I read the real text of Johnny Tremain, I can also call up my back story and my sequel, as it were. I admit these versions are often stupid, filled with random nonsense. Any back story I gave a minor character, any romance I saw brewing in the background that was never really mentioned. It's all mine to do what I please with. Usually these extracurricular voyages your imagination takes are ultimately useless, sitting in the background harmlessly. But there have been times I have reread a book, years later, and found something missing. Something I really thought was there. A conversation. A sentence. A description. But it was never there. I made it up.
Usually the larger a book is and more you read it, the more complex your additions can be. In my mind, Kitty Bennet and Maria Lucus become best friends with Georgiana and spend summers in Pemberly helping out a pregnant Lizzy. I have never read one of those bogus Pride and Prejudice sequels. I don’t want to. I have my own. I first read that novel when I was 11, I think. That’s 10 years this little “fact” has sat with me. I don’t want to throw it out in favor of some other person’s imaginings.
The last version of a novel that you can have is not a narrative. It’s not complete. It is the version of a story that has been influenced by outside fact. When I visited Louisa May Alcott's home in Massachusetts, I had to realign Little Women with that home. It did not rob me of my initial impression from the novel- I'd read it too often and too long ago. Besides, you can't just edit your imagination. But somewhere in me, I took her real home and sectioned it off with other alternate Little Women universes, like those effected by film versions. A film will never ruin a book for me. Even if I have seen the movie first, I tend to read the book with fresh eyes. However you have to admit the knowledge sits in there, somewhere. There have been times when I have thought "Robin Hood" and seen Errol Flynn first. When I read The Hunger Games, I see that characters as I first imagined them (darker, younger), but I see the arena from the films.
This version of a story can be influenced by personal experience as well as added knowledge of an author or time period. When I visited Switzerland I was able to visualize Heidi better. But I still held on to my "false Switzerland" that I had invented as a seven year old, faced with the concept of Switzerland for the first time. However my original Switzerland was actually not terribly inaccurate. The more of the world you know the more accurate your original imagination might be. But fields with wildflowers, I have learned, look pretty similar the world over. I recently went to Colombia. I readjusted all the South American novels I've read with what I saw there. Of course, Isabel Allende’s Chile probably bears very little similarity to Colombia. But Colombia is probably closer to the truth than my previous picture, which was a little more like a Southern Belle's Georgia. (The mind is strange. You can’t control those first impressions.)
Of course this is often a bit messy when your knowledge precedes your reading. Even while writing this, I realized I had read the entirety of A Farewell to Arms imagining Frederic Henry to look like Nick Miller from the Fox comedy New Girl. Trying to rationalize this I realized Nick loves Hemingway in the tv show and mentions him often. Also, Ernest had named a fictional version of himself Nick Adams in stories he'd written while in Paris with Hadley. Those facts together turned Henry into actor Jake Johnson.
The two biggest ways you can effect your memory of a novel post-reading (apart from film versions) is by learning about the authors life, and by literary analysis. Some readers/historians/authors protest that a book should never be influenced by the author’s life or his or her intentions. Intentions are not what is important. It is the readers own natural understanding that is important. That is the purest form. There are other readers/historians/authors who believe a book has not been understood until the author’s voice has been added back in. Till the back story is known, and their intent has been analyzed. I don’t know. I think it depends on the book. Normally, I go into novels blind. I read books knowing nothing about them but their title, the gender of the author, and the fact that someone recommended it to me. I find this to be the most pleasant experience. I often don’t even read the back cover. I like words to come from seemingly nowhere- this new world, these new people, just appearing from nowhere, burdened with nothing. I recently read The Painted Veil like this. (I hated it, by the way.) Afterwards, possibly because I disliked it so much, I researched it a bit, to find out where it had come from and why. (I still didn’t like it.)
The author wrote the book. You can never get away from them, really. There is no such thing as divine inspiration, really. An author can protest that they were “given” a story, or “found” a story, but ultimately, it came from them. But I also think you can enjoy a book without being bridled by interpretation. If an author is living and has been quoted giving information of value, a key to the book, that they want to share with their audience, I think that can be important. But the debate as to author’s meaning in novels written by people dead for centuries seems rather meaningless. I mean, it’s interesting. I enjoy reading lit crit. But I don’t let it color the bare bones of the book. These opinions, these interpretations- they can sit on top of the novel. They can be a lens which I can chose to look through, at times. They can’t be the only way to view a story.
I recently fell down the rabbit hole of roman a clef, in Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s works. It was a fun rabbit hole. I read a lot, learned a lot. I have a hard time, now, reading Hemingway without thinking the questions a critical reader may ask. This is due to the fact that I learned about Hemingway before I really read him. I read about his life while writing The Sun Also Rises before I read the novel. This can be a way to read, and a legitimate one. But I don’t think it is quite as fun. It can be sad. Authors are often sad people with sad lives. Often their so-called hidden meanings are darker than what you gleaned. I want that darkness as an optional lens, not my first impression. I can go back to The Great Gatsby and enjoy it with the purity of my first read- I can take off the glasses of the films, of the history, of Fitzgerald’s life. I read The Great Gatsby before I had any idea who the author was. Hemingway is not so easy. Then again, his novels are truly roman a clef. They are all, ever so slightly, autobiographical. Because of this, I think it might be important to know about Ernest before you read his works. An informed reading of his novels may be more enjoyable. You get it. You love it. I didn’t like Hemingway till I met the man outside of his work. When I understood him, I understood his novels.
But Hemingway is a rare case. I don’t give a fuck who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I just know I like them. For most books, I think the analysis, the critical readings, are optional. After the initial read, when you create the visual version and the linguistic version, after you have developed your own little histories and side stories… then you can research. Then it’s safe to adjust the novel based on the author. If you make that adjustment too soon, or if you take what you find too seriously, it might ruin the whole thing for you. I try to forget CS Lewis wrote Narnia. I just want to love Narnia with the purity of a six year old. Now, I can read an analytic critique of Narnia (read The Magicians Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. It’s good.) and I can apply that knowledge to my memory of the series, without really tainting the originals. I need to pocket the critical readings into corners. I know that Rebecca is a dark and twisty mess of a novel. But I like being able also remember the visual world I had created on the first read, the narrative without the analysis.
The more I read the more impressed I am with the human brain. I can’t believe the amount of information I have processed. I can’t believe how much of it I remember off-hand. I learn by reading. (This is why I am good at the humanities and awful at math.) Studying German and Spanish has left me once again amazed at the power of language. Everything I get out of what I read- it’s only understood because I have the tools to understand it. I remember the first time a sentence I read in German struck me as beautiful and poetic. It took me five years of studying to see those words the way I see everything in English. It took me years of study to see and hear and process and remember and analyze what I had read in German.
These four memories of a story, these four parallel versions of a book that I have in my brain and in my heart and on my tongue, are not separate in action, only in theory. Really, they blend and bleed into each other. After having read as much as I have, even two stories will blend and bleed into one another. But I think that if you understand how you remember what you read, it will improve your memory, your vocabulary, your speech, your writing, and your imagination.
I will end by saying I think that reading is magic. It is something that I hear, time and again, as being unexplainable. No one really knows how it works. It’s a miracle. As a religious person, I will say that with confidence. God did, after all, reveal himself to us in words. He must have been confident that the written word was powerful enough to last through the ages. Or maybe, He made reading so miraculous to be sure His word did endure. I don’t know. I know it’s a miracle I don’t understand. I just wrote six pages. How did I do that? Will you remember what I wrote? How will you remember it?
