Life is an open book in more ways than one
By Sarah Merchlewitz | Community columnist

For many, February means Valentine’s Day. You may be in a situation where you have gone out of your way to celebrate this particular day — sent a card, bought flowers or chocolate. But there is another cause for celebration this month, and it is happening all month long. February is “I Love to Read Month.” However, celebrating this event hardly requires special effort.

Yes, learning to read the English language and its rules of grammar is a skill that requires formal training, but the basic way we read is simply intuitive. Reading is how we live, how we survive.
In addition to reading the obvious forms of books and newspapers, every single day we read e-mails, text messages, traffic signs, instruction manuals, recipes, facial expressions and even “between the lines.” Reading is something we can’t escape. You have to love to read or else you wouldn’t be able to get by in this world.

There is an important school of literary theory called semiotics, which basically means that everything can be taken as a symbol for some nonverbal idea. It is how we can “read into” things (yet another form of quotidian reading). Consider how a heart-shaped Valentine can stand for someone’s love without using a single world.

Maybe immersing myself with the study of language like this is just contributing to some kind of obsession. I’ve started to tune into how language is everywhere around me, and now I can’t stop thinking about how everything can be related back to the act of reading. I love to read so much that it’s becoming a little ridiculous in the way that it seems to be essentially taking over my life.

Putting aside all that business about semiotics, I am starting to live by the proverbial book. Just in the past week, I began working for Penguin publishing house, interviewed a candidate for a position on the literature faculty, attended a seminar on funding nonprofit literary endeavors, had dinner and a class discussion at a lit professor’s house, and saw a play about interlingual translation with my lit theory class. It seemed everything I did related back to reading.

In the book “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” author Italo Calvino brilliantly renders the process of reading and categorizing things in a matter of split seconds as a way to cope with the barrage of images we face on a daily basis. He describes how, upon entering a bookstore in pursuit of a certain title, we are bombarded by a vast number of other books, among them “Books You Needn’t Read,” “Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,” “Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,” “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too,” “Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread,” “Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.” You get the picture. ...

I bet I’m not the only one guilty of feeling that way. We all go through this process, maybe not with books, but with one thing or another. We are always reading all the time.

Along those same lines, Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote, “The world is presented to us as a growing heap of texts,” and he, of course, meant it metaphorically, that everything in the world has to be “read” or decoded to be understood.

On the other hand, there is a profound material truth to Paz’s words, and I am not simply speaking from the experience of a college student in a liberal arts program.

One of the perks of being an employee at Penguin is that they have rooms full of their older titles that we are free to select from and take home. When I first stepped into the closet of those “take shelves” lined with books, I was, in a word, overwhelmed. The number of books in the world (and books that are only in English) is staggering. It was as if I was Carrie Bradshaw finally being allowed into the closet at Vogue.

Whoever chose February as “I Love to Read Month” probably did so because the temperatures outside really contribute to wanting to curl up inside with a good book. However, the month’s holiday status really just makes explicit the means by which we survive, thrive and communicate 12 months out of the year. And that is something to celebrate.

Thanks for reading.

Sarah Merchlewitz, a former Winona Winhawk, attends Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She is studying nonfiction writing and music in the hopes that some combination of the two will yield a sensible career. Sarah can be reached at smerchlewitz@slc.edu.

.

More News:

Advertisement