The pleasure of slow reading

I’m a fast reader. I’ve always been a fast reader, ever since I learned to read, and went racing ahead of the rest of the class through the Village With Three Corners series. But lately I’ve been starting to think that maybe I read too fast.

I remember reading in bed when I was a kid. My mum would tell me I could read to the end of the next chapter, or whatever, and then I had to put out the light. But sometimes I would be so into the book that I would skim-read ahead of that, just to find out what was going to happen. Skim-reading is, of course, a very useful skill if you have a lot of academic reading to get through, but it’s not the best way to appreciate the finer points of a good novel. Sometimes I find that it’s easy to concentrate on the dialogue and the action and not to read the description too carefully, but I know that I miss out when I do that.

I realised to what extent this was the case recently, when talking to people who read much more slowly than me. Until then, if anything, I’d assumed I had the advantage over them. After all, I could get through so many more books than they could. And that, in turn, meant I was much more open to discovering new things – it’s easier to take a risk on a book you’re not sure about when you don’t feel it’s too big a time commitment to get through it.

However, a couple of people have mentioned to me that when they read, they hear all the voices in their heads, as though it were being read aloud to them. This was a revelation to me, as I do no such thing.

Language is an interesting thing – the letters and words represent sounds, which in turn represent objects or concepts in the real world. But when we read, our brains don’t have to do that whole process – we can look at a word we recognise and our brains can leap straight to the meaning without having to sound it out. Which is great, of course, or we’d all be struggling through everything with our lips moving. But I’m starting to think that if our brains rush through the process too fast we will miss out. Reading literature is not just about getting the meaning, but about the way that the language itself is crafted. For example, for me, I can appreciate poetry – which is all about the use of language and hardly about story at all – much better if it is read aloud than if I read it to myself.

I’ve started trying to consciously slow my reading pace down, but it’s not always easy – I suppose old habits are hard to break. However, I’m currently reading The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, and those books are working wonders at turning me into a slow reader. McCarthy never rushes the pace – he describes long horseback journeys in such detail, and so fully and believably realises the passing landscapes, that they almost seem to be happening in real time. You get a real sense of the time and distance that everything takes. Long passages can pass without action and dialogue, and McCarthy can move seamlessly from description of setting, to the characters’ external thoughts, or to the sorts of philosophical musings that few modern writers could attempt without sounding trite.

Just one example of an extract where the writing stopped me in my tracks and made me read it again, just to appreciate it fully:

“Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightening glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” (All the Pretty Horses)

Who wouldn’t want to read that slowly?

Why Stephen King is wrong about vampires

So Stephen King has announced that he is going to make vampires scary again, complaining that the genre has been ‘hijacked by a lot of soft focus romance’. Now, I think he has a very interesting point. Vampires used to be pure evil, bloodthirsty monsters. These days we have the likes of Buffy, True Blood and the Twilight series – we see vampires struggling with their consciences, falling in love with humans, trying to resist the urge to drink blood. King certainly seems to have put his finger on a trend here. But the vampire myth has existed in many different forms in many different parts of the world, the ‘facts’ associated with the lore have been constantly evolving as long as it has existed. So is this latest iteration really robbing the myth of its power?

First of all, although the trend for depicting human-vampire romances may be a recent one, I believe that it does have a solid grounding in the history of the genre. After all, sex has been a big part of the vampire myth for a long time now. Check out the great book of the genre Dracula or the lesser-known Carmilla for plenty of barely-repressed sexual imagery. Dracula can tell us lots about how the Victorians viewed female sexuality as something dangerous and perverse. It seems both logical and inevitable that this sexual subtext should, in our more permissive times, be expressed more explicitly in sexual and romantic relationships between humans and vampires.

Much as I am not a fan of Twilight and its icky abstinence message, it could still be argued that Stephanie Meyer’s use of feeding as a metaphor for premarital sex is at least in keeping with the myth. (Even if the same cannot be said for the whole ‘sparkling in the sunlight’ thing!)

When Buffy, in later seasons of the programme, found herself drawn into a complex love-hate relationship with bad boy vampire Spike, the storyline was rich with symbolism regarding her own darker impulses – the side of herself that her work as the Slayer had brought her into contact with, leading her to feel isolated from the normal world and from her friends. Spike’s character arc, and their relationship, was one of my favourite things about the programme, precisely because it was far from straightforward. Spike wasn’t noble like Angel, but nor was he a mindless killing machine that needed to be staked on sight like most of the other vamps in the series. He was a bad guy all right (to start out with, anyway), but he was also funny, cool and capable of emotion, and it was that tension that made his character so compelling.

Similarly, if we look at Eli in Let the Right One In, we see a character who is far from the restrained nature of an Angel or an Edward Cullen. She kills people and she drinks their blood – neither the book nor the film shy away from the true horror of that. However, she genuinely cares for Oskar, and there is a strong sense of how bleak and isolated her life is. To me, a work that can make you feel pity for someone who has committed such terrible crimes is far more compelling than one about a mindless killing machine.

Again, this twist on the myth is not entirely new. For example, if we look at the novel Dracula, although the vampires are as much bloodthirsty monsters as King could wish for, there is also a transitional stage – the process of becoming a vampire is not instant but takes place over a period of days or even weeks. We see this with Lucy, who walks around in a strange, dazed, liminal state for some time before dying and returning as a vampire, and we see it again with Mina – the attempt to reverse the process and save her life forms the climax of the novel. The representation of someone caught between their humanity and their more bestial urges was particularly potent in the late Victorian period, as society reeled from the implications of Darwinism, and it remains a powerful image today.

In True Blood, we see vampirism pressed into service as a metaphor for all kinds of ‘otherness’: vampires have ‘come out of the coffin’, graffiti is seen saying ‘god hates fangs’, meanwhile new vampire Jessica’s experiences of the changes she is undergoing are compared to puberty, and the Fellowship of the Sun church preach hate towards vampires and secretly plan to tie one to a cross to burn in the morning sun.  However, what I find most interesting about True Blood is the complete lack of unity in the vampire world. Some of them toe the line and drink synthetic blood, others see humans as mere prey, and still others are on the defensive, trying to protect their own kind. Similarly, the humans have wildly varying levels of tolerance for vampires. Somehow, it all seems oddly believable. If vampires really did exist, surely there would be good ones, evil ones, and many, many more somewhere in between – just like with humans.

So, I’m sure Stephen King’s argument would be – so what’s the point? If vampires are just like humans, why write about them at all?

Well, I certainly don’t think his kind of vampires have no place in the myth. They haven’t died out, and they still have appeal. But I think that vampirism is a potent symbol for all humanity’s darkest urges. And for that reason, I believe, we are fascinated by these representations of creatures that are struggling with these urges, caught between their baser instincts and their better nature.