How Reading Changed My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

groups in recent years: the women’s movement insisted that we do something, be something, use our minds as well as our hearts, while in daily life many of us were still surrounded by the mundane,the sink full of dishes, the car pools, the endless flotsam and jetsam of children. A book group provides one small way for the two selves to coexist: a carefully scheduled occasion for intellectual exercise leavened with female companionship.
    And a book provides what it always has: a haven. I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for the fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed, into the dark and placid English rooms of Anita Brookner’s newest novel, into the convoluted plots of Elmore Leonard’s latest thriller, into one of my old favorites,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Goodbye, Columbus, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights
. The romantic ramblings of Heathcliff make a piquant counterpoint to dirty diapers, that’s for sure. And as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one’s own.

The mere brute pleasure of reading—the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing
.
    —G. K. CHESTERTON
    T HE FIRST BOOK that ever seized me so completely by the throat that I read and reread it several times turned out to be one that epitomized both this utter falling into a book that is the hallmark of the way women often read, and the kind of intellectual snobbery that characterizes much of the discussion of books among those people who are considered experts in them. Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the secrets of life and love, all the mysteries of the universe. There are other things in life like this as well: the meal perfect in the aspic of memory; the afternoon along theseashore with a breeze and a boat, in hindsight translucent as an opal; a moment of lovemaking. But none of these others can be conjured up exactly as they were. A book—the book that was, for some reason,
the
book—can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.
    For me that book was a novel written in the early years of the twentieth century. I say a novel, but it is really three novels, or perhaps nine, depending on how you count. But by the time I read it it was called by one name, and known to most readers as one book:
The Forsyte Saga
. Its author, John Galsworthy, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 on the strength of it, although when undergraduate reading lists are handed out heavy with Fitzgerald and Hemingway there is rarely even a mention of Galsworthy, a man of this century whose work indubitably feels as if it was written in the one before. While the book was a huge success in England in the years between the two world wars, and enjoyed a renaissance when public television networks in America aired a dramatic series based upon it, it has never, to my knowledge, showed up on one of those ever-popular best-book-you-ever-read lists.
    Yet for many years I believed it the best book ever written, for no other reason than that I believed in it completely, in the convoluted family relationships, the suffocating Victorian mores, and especiallyin its characters, particularly Irene, the beautiful and sensitive woman married to the cold, unlovable Soames Forsyte. It is one of those great doorstops of a book that I still approach with delight and then suffer the greatest disappointment if it does not merit the