“I didn’t read it,” Roger confessed once the plane reached cruising altitude. “But I meant to.”
I should have known. Except in cases of rare devotion—and even then—trying to make someone read something is like force-feeding a baby. Most people prefer reading what they want to read. This cold fact was particularly upsetting to my father, who viewed reading or watching something he recommended as a demonstration, even a proof, of love. He was obsessed with recommending, cajoling over and over until you submitted. “You have to watch Ballad of a Soldier, he’d insist, strong-arming you into the TV room. “Come in here,” he’d say as soon as I walked into his apartment on the Upper West Side. “I just want to show you one scene from Black Narcissus. Just one scene! Pammy, please!”
These repeated requests only hardened my lack of interest. I’m not sure why, as his recommendations tended to be worthy, and the palpable joy my mutual enjoyment elicited was its own reward. But I would dig in my heels. Perhaps it was because when I was a child, reading had been my way to declare independence. Perhaps because I too wanted to read what I wanted to read. Watch what I wanted to watch. Choose my own adventures.
“You’re never going to make your father happy and watch The Red Shoes, are you?” he’d ask miserably. “Can’t you just sit through the opening sequence?” When I started dating, he took to asking my boyfriends instead, where his chances of success were greater. “Have you ever seen Stalingrad?” he’d ask, throwing a paternal arm over some poor guy’s shoulder. “Let me show you the opening scene of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”
With books, he was slightly less demanding. I’d see him spread out an illustrated guide to field artillery before one of my decidedly nonmilitaristic boyfriends—like he was sharing a rite of manhood—and plot a rescue operation. He didn’t employ these same tactics with me. It may be he knew I wouldn’t cotton to Robert Ludlum (“They’re not good,” he admitted) or David Baldacci (“These are really terrible, Pammy—but I enjoy them”). My father was an unself-conscious reader, in it for his own pleasure and curiosity, something I, with my studious aspirations and constant looking over my shoulder, envied. He read voraciously, plunging into a subject and dwelling there for years. From Catskills history to old graveyards to the Spanish Civil War, where he embedded himself for well over a decade, supplementing his reading material with folk music and undercover visits to meetings of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. (“These people are crazy, Pammy! But I find them fascinating.”)
My new boyfriend Michael was the same way with his books. He read high, he read low, he read in the middle. He read according to whim and mood and passing interest and passion. He read a lot of books I’d never heard of, something I always find especially alluring. And our curiosity about and interest in each other was mutual. When we met, I was reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography; he was reading Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought. We looked at each other’s books and thought, We’re good!
Shortly into our courtship, I left for Germany on a three-week trip I’d been planning for months but now wished I weren’t doing solo. In Frankfurt, I’d be staying with college friends who were working in finance; in Heidelberg, I’d visit my French sister, Juliette, there on a postdoctoral fellowship in biogenetics. I had a magazine story to write in Baden-Baden (hardship assignment on the city’s storied baths). Everything had been carefully mapped out, but already I felt like someone was missing.
At every village with an Internet café, I stopped to check for messages from Michael. I thought about what he would think when we returned together to those very same spots one day. Would he also love the museum of advertising? Would he marvel at the wooded twists of the Alpenstrasse? The few moments not devoted to what he thought were spent thinking about what our children would think and how much they would like the cuckoo clock museum.
When I got back to New York, I had my usual Bob update to do: I entered the books I’d read on my trip, a random assortment of paperbacks given to me by a friend who worked in publishing, into my Book of Books. And then I found myself thinking about a literary present I wanted to give to Michael (I’d brought back only a small matchbox from Germany, from a guesthaus bearing his family name). This was a coup, but the next gift would be more meaningful. A few weeks later, sitting on a bench in Central Park one night, I presented him with a small wrapped package containing three books: Middlemarch, because I adored George Eliot and was making my way through her entire oeuvre (still not Romola, I must confess). Buddenbrooks, because I was determined to keep Thomas Mann as my own rather than allow him to become a relic of my ex-husband. And The Master and Margarita, because my brother had passed it to me and I’d passed it to Kirsten, and I felt fairly certain that Michael was soon to be part of this circle. I inscribed each of them with messages.
These three books weren’t my favorites. Nor did I expect Michael to read them right away. It just seemed that if I were going to get involved with someone and he were going to get involved with me, he should get a sense of what moved me on the page. I wanted to please him and for him to be pleased by me. The prospect of finding someone who takes as much pleasure in the book as I do is often more a reward than the book itself. A little like my dad, after all.
To my astonishment, Michael began reading right away. He didn’t like the books nearly as much as I did and his takeaways often differed radically from my own. But that was okay—he wanted to know about what I read and what I thought. He later went on to buy me a replacement set of Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and a beautiful edition of George Eliot’s letters. My books, my life of the mind and of the heart, meant something to him. And his did to me. Michael’s shelves were stocked with contemporary British novelists I’d never heard of, long-forgotten fiction from the 1970s, books about computer hackers and mountain-climbing accidents, polemics about civil liberties, and outdated computer manuals.
There was nothing I would have read on my own in the past and a lot of it I had no desire to read in the future. But his books showed a very different mind at work. I didn’t know what to expect from this person, and in a dating world that can feel wearyingly predictable, this was exciting.
When Michael gave a toast at our wedding, he pointed out that I’d given him “a reading list” early on in our relationship.