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Have you ever read a book, thought it was terrific, remembered it fondly, finally re-read it and...it sucked? That's the work of the Suck Fairy.

Author Jo Walton (whose Farthing books I've read, btw) has a great essay from 2010 on the Suck Fairy at Tor.com. Walton says, "You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck."

I can recall reading Mists of Avalon with a book club years ago. I did not care for it at all. I had read The Once and Future King when I was a teenager. I knew what a good Arthurian novel was. I decided to re-read it to get the taste of Mists of Avalon out of my mouth. You guessed it. The Suck Fairy had been there. But according to Walton the Suck Fairy allows me to retain my happy memories, to remember "what’s good while not dismissing the newly visible bad."

There's a whole flock of re-reading fairies out there. Ever re-read a book and can't imagine how you missed the racism, sexism, or homophobia? That's right. Your book was visited by the Racism, Sexism, or Homophobia Fairies.  After reading Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl four years ago, I'm afraid to re-read Little Women. I suspect it will have been visited by the Message Fairy.

Walton says the Message Fairy often hits "children’s books or books read when you were a kid. Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It’s good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them messages thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them."

Yeah, I'm really worried about re-reading Little Women.

Thanks to Facebook Friend Suzi Steffen for tipping me off about the Suck Fairy and directing me to Jo Walton's essay.

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In The Percy Jackson Problem in The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead discusses the old "so-long-as-the-kiddies-are-reading-they-will-move-on-and-up" strategy vs. the old "you-can't-start-'em-on-Shakespeare-too-young" theory. According to Mead, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books fall into the first category. Ouch.

Mead finishes her essay speculating about what will happen if reading books like Percy Jackson doesn't lead to young minds moving onward and upward to eagerly sucking up the Assigned Book List. "What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for more of the palatable same?"

I have no problem with palatable. We live in a free country, kids! Go rogue with your reading!

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What I Learned On My September Vacation

When I got my own personal laptop and was no longer sharing computers with family members, I became very excited over bookmarking sites. I bookmarked a lot of them. I classified them. I stockpiled the things and fantasized about reading them. I looked forward to reading them on this vacation I just took.

I did read a great many of them. And what I found was that in many cases I didn't need to have bothered. A lot of these things were repeats of information I'd already seen elsewhere. There is only so much information out there on writing and marketing, but there are a lot of blogs and websites with writers who have just discovered this stuff and think it is newsworthy.

How much time could I save myself by being a lot more discriminating about my reading material? Well, I decided, let's see.

Personal Precedent For Creating More Time By Cutting Reading

Quite honestly, I've been cutting reading for years.

• Giving up. Yes, yes, I used to be one of those readers who had to finish any book she started. It was an obsession or some kind of moral code. When did things change? I don't know. Maybe around the time I started hearing stories about a million books being published every year. (I don't know if that's actually true, by the way.) Which may have coincided with me reading one too many bad books. Which may have been around the time I realized life is short. I should be fussier about how I spend my time.
• Skimming. I also skim books, particularly those that have some significance in my field but I just don't like. Skimming definitely lets you hit the high points in a work, get a feeling for its world, and just find out what happens. "That's a skimmer," is a phrase I often use, but only to myself. (Did I just write that out loud?)
• I gave up reading listicles a year or two ago. There's something I've never missed. Seriously, ever seen a listicle called "The Top 10 Cures For Cancer" or "5 Ways To Find God?" Okay, you probably have. In which case, you know what I mean.

How Can I Cut More?

• Impose Limitations. Some time management specialists suggest making to-do lists on post-it notes in order to force yourself to be reasonable about what you can do in a day. I'm going to try limiting myself to just three to five bookmarks in any category. I want to add a new one? I have to take one off, either by reading the thing or just dropping it.
• Give Them A Chance To Make Their Case. To make the bookmark list, a post will have to meet a two-paragraph test. It has to prove to me in that time that it has material new to me or compelling in some new way.
• Size Matters. Personally, I believe the Internet is different. Material written for it should be concise. Otherwise, it should be in The New Yorker. Over the years, I've moved away from blogs that regularly ran long. I'm not saying I'll never read a magazine article on-line, but if I do, it won't be a random act.
• If You Haven't Read It In A Year... Ever hear that advice about getting rid of clothes you haven't worn in a year? Yeah, I could do that with bookmarks.

Seriously, How Much Time Do You Expect To Gain With This, Gail?

Hmm. Maybe not that much. But I won't have a long list of bookmarked sites hanging over my head, which can only be a good thing.

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In my last Time Management Tuesday post, I talked about strategies for reading more in whatever time we have. Today I've been reading a lot. I've been researching Internet sites to approach for promoting Saving the Planet, and I've been taking notes on a nonfiction book that will be the basis of a post here and maybe have an impact on my work some day.

When I went to The Millions for one of those breaks between 45-minute work binges I do, I didn't feel I had a lot of time. I settled on Elegy for a Grey Cat by Janet Potter because it included an His Dark Materials reference in the sub-title.

The essay is divided into three sections. I skimmed just enough of the first section to determine that it was about a human's relationship with her cat, a subject that doesn't hold a whole lot of interest for me. (Yes, I am an awful person.)  But sections 2 and 3 dealt with books, By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Amber Spyglass, respectively. I've read Silver Lake and a lead-in to Amber Spyglass. Those sections of the essay interested me.

Those sections were, in fact, quite lovely, as far as I'm concerned. Have I not gained something in pleasure and thinking from having "just" skimmed the first part of this essay? Isn't my reading experience valuable, even though I didn't read every word of the whole piece? Because I'll tell you, if I were an all-or-nothing type of reader, I wouldn't have started a cat essay at all. And what would I have gained from that?

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Okay, as I was saying back before we were interrupted by a hurricane, writers, like people in any other field of work, need to do a lot of professional reading. How can we find/make time to do it all?

Well, maybe we should be looking at this problem differently. Instead of finding/making time to read, maybe we should be trying to read differently so we can read more in whatever time we have.

Iin his book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard actually writes about reading, not about not reading. He's talking about acquiring knowledge about how a book relates to the rest of the world. When writers are reading for professional reasons, to a great extent that is what we're trying to do. More specifically, even, we're trying to acquire knowledge about how a journal, editor, agent, or other author--whatever we're reading about--relates to us. How can we use this information in our work, our lives? We don't need to read every word in order to do that. We can hunt for specific info and then zone in on that material that is really necessary to us.

Bayard talks in his book about different types of what he calls not reading but, of course, I would say he is talking about just the opposite. Two of the types of reading are skimming and collecting info about the book through reading about a book rather than the book, itself. For instance, there's info all over the Internet about Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. You can get a lot of  information about it. If you have nearly two hours to kill, you can hear him speak and not have to read anything at all. (But two hours is a long time for those of us who struggle with time.) You can benefit from his ideas without having to read every word of the book that contains them. Or even any word at all.

Bayard also talks about books we've read and forgotten about. For example, I can't remember if Bayard says what percentage of what we read we actually retain. A quote from his book at 3:17 am describes our retention as "in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion." You get the idea. Does this suggest that we really should be reading more of what we read in the hopes of remembering a better percentage or that we should be reading less and looking for the important stuff, those "few fragments" that will stick with us? You choose.

A case in point: Several summers back I read The Art of the Short Story by Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. I can guarantee you I didn't read every word. Now I can't remember most of the authors I was excited about at the time. What I remember is Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I read it in my sun room in the evenings. To have culled just that memorable experience from that book is worth everything I've forgotten and if it had been all I'd read of that book, it would have been enough.

So, if you've been skimming this blog post (and if you were, good for you), the point here is to think about your definition of "reading."  Are you going to insist that reading means reading every word and completing every piece of writing you encounter? Or are you going to sometimes define reading as acquiring information that you need, for whatever reason?

If the latter, consider:

1. Skimming, particularly nonfiction or anthologies from which you are looking for particular kinds of information. When you find what you're seeking, you can always slow down and start giving more attention to detail. Personally, I will also often skim fictional works that I don't care for but feel a responsibility to familiarize myself with. (I'm thinking of you, last Harry Potter book, whatever the heck you were called.) I refers to such books as "skimmers."

2. Reading articles as well as reviews about a book you're interested in. This will help you decide whether or not you should dedicate time to the book, itself, and particularly in the case of nonfiction it could provide you with the information you need on some particular subject so that you don't need to read the entire book at all.

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I had a night out with M.T. Anderson recently. It was more like an hour late in the afternoon, actually. And maybe 80 or 90 other people were also having an hour with him.

Anderson's appearance at Eastern Connecticut University last Tuesday evening was the "public" part of a three-day visit he was doing there. It took the form of a conversation between him and Professor Susannah Richards, who was very well versed in her suspect--M.T. Anderson.

There was all kinds of good information about M.T., but for thought-provoking blog-material, I liked a comment of Susannah's in which she said something about how reading and writing are not necessarily linear activities, though we often teach them that way.

I wanted to think and know more about that whole idea, so I googled "writing" and "linear activity." I came up with a lot of stuff about linear equations. Googling "reading" and "linear activity" got me a little more, a blog post called On Reading and Linearity; or, the virtues of disorganization.

First off, I want to tell you that the Gina Barreca to whom the blogger refers is a professor at UConn, and I've heard her speak. Secondly, I want to say that I wonder if reading in a nonlinear way necessarily means reading in a disorganized way.

For instance, the fact that I know who Gina Barreca is and bring that knowledge to my reading of this blog post--doesn't that add a bit of nonlinear experience to my reading of it? Toward the end of the post, the blogger says, "we don’t read from beginning to end, we skip the dull parts, we read ahead to see if what we’re ploughing through at the moment is really worth it, we attend to the dialogue rather than the description, or vice-versa. We forget what we read a week ago and start over, or we forget and skip forward to something that looks interesting." That does seem to describe a nonlinear process, but is it necessarily disorganized? "Disorganized" suggests that there's something wrong with that reading process. But is there something wrong with circling back and forth, maybe looping through a reading experience? Or is that just reading, period?

When I reread something like Walden, using the same text I used the first time and rereading my notes, and have a far different and better experience, isn't that reading Walden in a nonlinear way? To get anything out of the book, after all, I had to read the thing twice, with intervening years of living and, probably, reading to bring to that second read. Another person who had lived those intervening years differently and read different things during that time might not have responded the same way I did. Is that disorganization because there isn't a set plan to get from unread to read? Or is there a set plan, and I don't know about?

I hope to do some thinking and writing about writing as a nonlinear activity sometime in the future. If anyone has any thoughts on that subject, I'd be glad to hear them.

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Pierre Bayard describes in How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read four ways of not reading books:

Books You Don't Know: I don't recall a whole lot about this section. At this point, I was still wondering if Bayard was joking.

Books You Have Skimmed: I have to admit, I've had to do this many times. There are a lot of books out there that I feel I should be familiar with but find really dreadful. So once I decide that I'm too old to be wasting valuable hours of my life reading this dribble, I start skimming so that I have a feel for the work. Seriously, I think it's much better to have a feel for a book then to have no knowledge of it at all. As it turns out, Bayard agrees with me.

Books You Have Heard Of: Reading reviews, articles, and blog posts about books can give you a handle on the books' place in the booky scheme of things, or the collective library, as Bayard calls it.

Books You Have Forgotten: Sadly, we're going to forget a lot of what we read.

You know the way of not reading that Bayard doesn't cover in his book? Books you have read and not understood. Sophie's World comes immediately to my mind. Perhaps Bayard, being a French intellectual and all, has never experienced this kind of not reading.

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I didn't have good luck reading a book on how to read books. Perhaps I should try this one--How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard.

Actually, Bayard sounds very interesting. He says that many people (at least in France) "see culture as a huge wall, as a terrifying specter of 'knowledge'...But we intellectuals, who are avid readers, know there are many ways of reading a book. You can skim it, you can start and not finish it, you can look at the index. You learn to live with a book."

I think they may throw the word "intellectual" around more freely in France than we do here. I mean, the only time I hear it, it's being used as a slur. (As in, "Why, thank you, intellectuals, for telling us we don't know how to read.") But once I got past my first knee-jerk response, I read that quote of Bayard's and went, "Mais oui!"

Thanks to artsJournal for the link.

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