Books: the Green Apple Economic Stimulus Package

Why I Read

Our semi-regular feature, in which an author explains "Why I Read" returns this month with an entry by Domenic Stansberry, the Edgar Award-winning local author of Chasing the Dragon. His newest book, The Ancient Rain, also set in San Francisco, has just been released to much acclaim, including a spot on Booklist's "The Year's Best Crime Novels."

Thanks, Mr. Stansberry, for writing this essay for our customers. Here it is.

READING AS A CRIMINAL ACT

"As a crime novelist-a writer who explores the darker side of the human psyche-I feel compelled to say something about the act of reading in terms of the kind of writing that I myself do.

"A good deal of the pleasure of reading fiction, at least for me, has always rested in the act itself-in the dream state evoked when the eyes trace the arrangement of words across the page.   Dreams are passages to the underworld, to the libidinous, to the forbidden-and in many ways the same is true of a good crime novel. It immerses the reader in the darker edge of the sublime, at once up close and intimate with destructive passion, yet at the same time viewing from a distance, experiencing not only from without but within, not just from one angle, but from many.   Maybe this is because the act of reading-like the act of writing itself-involves both the conscious and the unconscious, both immersion and reflection, submersion and analysis.   Because the word as image invokes a sensory response.   Yet at the same time there is an analytic process at work-as reading by its nature involves the interpretation of signs.

"The act of reading lulls and relaxes and soothes even as it excites. It comforts. Perhaps this comfort comes from that fact that reading, like speech itself-at least for many of us-is first learned in the primal lap, in the nursery. But it cannot be only this. There is no doubt something in the neurology of reading-the complex interplay of the sensory and analytical-that induces the dreamlike state.

"For myself, part of the excitement of reading is the entry into secret worlds. Part of the pleasure is cerebral, but not the cerebral alone. The cerebral must co-exist with the sensual-in the space where the hard grit of observed detail invokes the unseen.

"In the confines of a novel we empathize with characters we might otherwise loathe. We see social interactions from multitudinous viewpoints we are unable to perceive in our everyday life. We feel experience condensed into a narrative in which there is a problem that must be solved.   And as in real life, there is a deadline.   The characters only have so many pages, so many minutes.

Part of the comfort of reading comes in seeing characters that share emotions we recognize but dare not speak-perversity, loneliness, love, rage-because at such moments we believe that in our solitude and freakishness we are not alone.

"But I do not believe that reading necessarily transforms us, or makes us wise, or turns us into better people. People have been reading for a long time, and there is a little evidence to support that humanity is becoming less bestial.

"So I do not read because it is good for me, but for the sheer immersion, the dream state induced by the rhythm of the language. This rhythm, like the rocking of the cradle, can give birth to visions monstrous or beautiful, intermingling them in forms strangely human: ragged detectives wandering the edge of the abyss. And there is something about the act of reading itself-in the mechanism the act triggers within the brain-that allows us to experience these visions as if they are authored not by some distant hand, but our own.

"In this way, the act of reading is not so different from the act of writing. It is a connection to the underworld, to the preternatural, the sublime: channeling a realm not of our own making, a mirror image perhaps more real than the one you or I inhabit, here, now, eyes skirting type, heads nodding toward those black letters on a page."
--Domenic Stansberry