My first real book

The book that has impacted me the most is The Brothers Karamazov, but not for the reasons you may be thinking. I chose the book because it was the first thing that came into my hand when emerging from my feckless, poorly-educated youth into the life I saw in my older brother and wanted for myself, the life of the mind.

Impressed by his raving about the book, I went and bought a tattered, Modern Library hardback at a used bookstore, the Constance Garnett translation. The pages were like tissue paper, the font was 8-point. What I learned from that experience was that reading was fucking hard, but by God, I was going to finish that book.

It was my last year of college in 1989. While student-teaching 6th-graders, I would sneak in moments to read whenever I could—5 minutes here in the staff room, 10 minutes there trying to eat lunch—really finding only enough time to remember where I left off before having to quit. Far from enjoying the book, I was practically weeping with frustration, reading laboriously, out of sheer stubbornness of will.

Prior to that, I had hated reading. We burned our paperback copies of The Mayor of Casterbridge when 11th grade was out for summer. Romeo and Juliet? there was always the movie. The Great Gatsby was forgotten before I closed the cover. Why the hell some friends were taking a class called “Reading for College-bound Seniors”, I couldn’t imagine. They could be seen carrying around some boat anchor called The Fountainhead for Pete's sake.

Reading a thousand-page book (did I even finish?) for my first endeavor may have been a mistake, like an 8-year-old choosing a marathon as his first effort to get physically fit. All the heady concepts in BK were lost on me. What’s the big deal about Father Zossima’s dead body starting to smell? Father and son after the same woman? Gross. And Alyosha is a nice guy but kind of a wimp.

But that experience, while not especially literary, set the course of my life. I knew I was reading something important; the deadness of the page revealed to me the depth of my intellectual poverty. I could see what an uphill journey lay before me. At least I was bewitched by the smell of musty pages, a meager consolation to new initiates. But I began to fill a notebook with a list of new vocabulary definitions. I started paying attention to what books there were and what others were reading. And I could talk with my brother with some familiarity with the story and benefit from his elucidations. I became someone who was never without a book, because you never know when you’ll be stuck somewhere with nothing to do. I still have that old Garnett copy. I have since read BK two more times with much better results, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. NOW I get it.