(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Calvino was an Italian novelist and author of short stories.
“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be” (Calvino 1998, 72). The going is different as we age. When we are youths our reading is endowed “with a unique flavour and significance” and can be “literally formative” in supplying exemplars, paradigmatic experiences, scales for comparison and value—many “things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book” (Calvino 1999, 4). Yet in youth we are also impatient, find it difficult to concentrate, and lack both life experience and skill in reading (ibid.). Reading at this stage doesn’t need expertise or patience in order to have a dramatic, yet mostly unacknowledged, effect on our lives.
Classic works in general contain “a particular potency” which can be forgotten yet remain inside us like a seed (ibid.). When we reread these books after having matured we “rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from” (ibid.). For this reason, as adults we should reread the books important to us as youths because, as with all rereadings, even though the book’s the same, the fact that we have changed means we’ll experience the book anew (ibid.). Further, our maturity should allow us to appreciate more detail and depth of meaning that our impatient, inexperienced younger selves missed (ibid.).
The classics, in this way, provide just as rich an experience the first time we read them when we’re young, as they do when we wait until we’re in a better condition to appreciate them (ibid.). Their influence comes from how they stick in our memories, imprint themselves on our unconscious, and hide in the collective unconscious—they work on us despite us because we live in a community of which they were foundational. Hence, reading them feels like we’re rereading them, even if this is our first time (p. 5). Great books never exhaust what they have to say (ibid.). They hide in our cultural memory because they leave traces, because they bear “the aura of previous interpretations” (ibid.). Having an image of a classic book through hearsay doesn’t lesson its impact because, by its nature, it must surprise us in being “more original, unexpected, and innovative” when we do read it (pp. 5–6).
Calvino believed that “no book which discusses another book can ever say more than the original book under discussion”, so recommends reading without the aid of secondary literature (p. 5). A classic is a book which “constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off” (p. 6). Even when it doesn’t teach us something new, it reminds us of something old in a fashion that is gratifying by connecting this familiar idea with its source or origin (ibid.).
There must be a “spark” for a classic to work as a classic, to establish “a personal relationship with the reader” (ibid.). It’s pointless to read out of a sense of duty, a feeling of respect, or a belief that the book is useful in some specific way; “we should only read them for love” (ibid.). They should be read simply because “reading the classics is always better than not reading them” (p. 9).
Through these personal relationships we come to recognise our “own classics” (p. 6). In a lofty sense “‘your’ book” is “any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans” (ibid.). Or, more typically, “a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it” (p. 7). That is to say, you need not agree with an author or enjoy their argument for a book to have a meaningful impact on you.
To read classic books “you have to establish where exactly you are reading them ‘from’”, you need a sense of the contemporary context, “otherwise both the reader and the text tend to drift in a timeless haze” (p. 8) Our present time is “always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either backwards or forwards”, so it’s not desirable to entirely eschew contemporary literature (ibid.). Instead, Calvino suggests that the reader “skilfully alternates classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material” (ibid.).
We should each “invent our own ideal library of our classics” (p. 9). Approximately half should consist of books that we’ve read and found meaningful, and half should be titles which we want to read because we think may be meaningful; plus, there should be a “section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries” (ibid.).
In his novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Calvino cautions the reader entering a bookstore (Calvino 1998, 5):
You have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written.
He “reminds us that any choice one makes of what to read is made against a backdrop of deep and humbling ignorance, and that any attempt to call a book the best or the worst book one has read this month, this year, or in this lifetime requires a necessary self-deception regarding one’s own knowledge of literature” (Emre 2023).