One of my favorite souvenirs from my trip to Oxford a few years ago is a pair of coasters from the Bodleian Library that say “silence please.” I love these because they speak for me: so often I crave silence so that I can concentrate on my book. Reading, for me — at least serious reading, rapt, transcendent, lost-to-the-real-world reading, which is the best kind of all — takes concentration, and I know no greater threat to that concentration than intrusive noise. Especially since I had children, I feel as if it has been a constant struggle to find the kind of quiet conducive to that kind of reading. The polite Bodleian signage reassures me that I’m not anomalous: that others too value the silence that enables us to merge our consciousness with the words on the page.

I was thinking about this recently because my husband and I attended a fundraising event for the new Halifax Central Library, currently under construction and expected to open its doors this fall. I am hugely excited about the new library, because I’m a huge believer in libraries as great civic spaces. A public library represents an idea that’s at the heart of democratic society: that the accumulated thinking of centuries is our greatest resource and should be freely available to everyone. A library’s specific commitment to reading as a source of both information and pleasure is a wonderful thing. Like so many families, mine made regular trips to our local library branch while I was growing up; it looks a little different now than it did, but it’s still in the same place, and walking into it on a visit home last summer I vividly recalled the feeling of liberation that came over me whenever I entered its doors as a child — there was a whole world in there, inside the covers of all those books, and my library card was my passport. I had free run of the collection: I don’t recall anyone, either parent or librarian, ever trying to steer me away from anything I was interested in because it was “too hard.” (I have struggled greatly with the emphasis in the schools here on “just right” reading — reading should be aspirational! I was incensed once while volunteering at a school book sale when a mother pulled her crying child away from a book, berating him about wanting something he couldn’t read on his own yet. “But he wants to read!” I wanted to yell at her. “Read it with him until he’s ready!”) I discovered many favorite authors in the stacks; some of my most cherished books today are library discards with the “VPL” stickers still on them. It was built after I’d moved away, but the Vancouver Central Library is a spectacular building that has long inspired me from a distance.

I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby right now and while I have some issues with the book overall, I really appreciated what she says about libraries:

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years’ War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children’s books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. All readers are Wu Daozi; all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.

“Here in quiet rooms”: for her too, quiet is part of reading. The temporary hushing of everything going on around us is what lets us pass through into that other landscape and really see and think about what we find there. So why does it seem to have become such a bad thing to imagine a library governed by a polite request for “silence please”? Over and over at the fundraising presentations, speakers spoke with disdain of the old-fashioned notion of librarians shushing patrons and celebrated the library as a place for what sometimes seemed like every activity besides actually reading to yourself. “It’s not just about books anymore” seemed to be the go-to argument for why we should enthusiastically support the library’s fundraising campaign — even though (interestingly) they also emphasized that they are raising money now “for the collection.”

I should be clear that I think the social and educational functions of libraries — children’s activities, teen hangouts, workshops and meeting groups of all kinds, performances, lecture series — are also wonderful things integral to the library’s mission as a place to nurture and support its community. But after a while I started wondering where, among the atriums and coffee shops and recording studios and play areas, a person is supposed to go who wants the traditional hush of a place suited to actually reading books. I’ve been looking again at the plans and it turns out that the fourth floor does have designated areas for “quiet reading and study.” As far as I can tell, though, they are still very wide open, and I wonder how much ambient noise will travel up from below — and whether anybody will respect or enforce the suggestion that here, at least, shushing might be in order. It’s already such a noisy world everywhere else! I even recently left a local bookstore in a huff because the annoying pop music they were playing distracted me from browsing the shelves: the words to the songs came between me and the words on the page. If I had the kind of money that makes this kind of thing possible, I think that I would have offered to fund a real “reading room” somewhere in the new library building: comfortable chairs, good lighting, no wi-fi, a door that closes (quietly, without slamming!), and a sign on it courtesy of the Bodleian.

What do you think: am I just a curmudgeon? Do you like quiet when you read? When you use the library, do you resent or appreciate attempts to keep it a place suitable for quiet contemplation and deep concentration? If you’re a librarian, how do you deal with the competing expectations that the library serve both social and silent purposes?

I first learned about Play It Again, Alan Rusbridger’s account of his quest to learn Chopin’s great Ballade No.1, from Robert Winter’s recent review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a convincingly positive review, which is why it sent me out to get the book, but as I worked through Play It Again I found myself thinking that Winter had oversold it. The book does contain lots to interest, entertain, and inspire anyone who has ever puttered away at a keyboard. (As I’ve written about here before, that  includes me.) But it’s also formally slapdash, with related information — such as the rich analyses of the Ballade gleaned from conversations with a slew of great pianists, including Murray Perahia, Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, and Emanuel Ax, or meditations on the value and beauty of amateurism, or on the effects of the recording era on classical music, or about the neuroscience of music and memory — scattered across a relentlessly chronological and surprisingly dull (considering Rusbridger’s job) account of his day-to-day activities.  (Rusbridger is the Editor in Chief of The Guardian. To be fair, the non-musical bits might be of greater interest to someone keen to get an insider’s view of things like the phone-hacking scandal.) Winter describes it as “a limp diary format” and rightly notes that “the parts themselves provide little structural mooring.” But later he seems to excuse it, calling it “a conceit, a stream-of-consciousness platform for exploring the challenges of remaining human in a world that moves at the speed of Twitter.” I think that’s putting it kindly, if not grandiosely: to me, the “conceit” felt more like laziness, as if Rusbridger was not willing or able to put in more than 15 minutes a day on his book any more than on the Ballade — though there’s no doubt that the book reflects his genuine passion for music and his remarkable dedication to the Quixotic project of learning a piece Perahia warns him is “one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire.”

Winter also notes that “it is the author’s journey rather than his destination that we remember”: I didn’t think the journey was very compellingly told (again, a real narrative rather than a bit-by-bit accounting would, for me, have been more satisfying), but I also think Winter’s assessment may reflect a marketing trend as much as anything, that is, the apparently widespread preference for the personal angle (see recent related discussions at Wuthering Expectations). I didn’t really mind following Rusbridger’s journey, but one reason the destination is not very memorable is that he doesn’t in fact triumph (his final performance is OK, but not by any means flawless or inspired, by his own report), and a lot of what we hear along the way is kind of dull reiteration of his difficulties with one passage or another (“The section that still falls apart a bit is the big A major / E major section” etc.). The real substance is everything he learns around the project, and I ended Play It Again thinking that there must be other books that do a better job synthesizing and narrating this kind of information and offering more insight. In fact, Rusbridger’s own list of “Further Reading” gives me a few ideas, including Charles Cooke’s Piano for Pleasure. I’m also  reminded that I’d meant to look up Charles Rosen’s Music and Sentiment, brilliantly reviewed by Greg Waldmann in Open Letters Monthly a couple of years ago. And Tom at Wuthering Expectations reminds me that Wayne Booth also wrote about his own efforts as an amateur cellist: I’ve put his book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, on request at the library.

One effect Play It Again had on me (besides making me wonder if I shouldn’t do a little practising this summer) was to make me pay much more attention to the Ballade: I’ve been listening to it a lot, including while I tried to follow along the annotated score that is my favorite part of Rusbridger’s book (he includes many of the specific comments made about the piece by the pianists he interviews). I’ve always thought it was a spectacular piece, but it’s not until you imagine trying to play it, or watch someone else physically engaged in it, that you appreciate just what a daunting thing it is. There are a lot of recordings of the Ballade on YouTube but not a lot of them are videos, and I love to be able to watch the pianist’s fingers. (After a childhood of always being reminded about this, it is an ingrained habit for me to sit on the left side of any theater, even when no piano is on the program!) Here’s Vladimir Horowitz in a bravura performance.

Before the madness of the new term quite overwhelms me, I wanted to put up a few words about Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, which I finished a couple of days ago.

I ended up enjoying Miss Pym Disposes a lot. Not as much as Brat Farrar (so far, still my favourite Tey that’s not The Daughter of Time), and not as much as The Franchise Affair (which touched on deeper, darker problems)– but I still really liked it. I think that my reaction was affected by the very slow unfolding of the novel, so I might end up liking it even more on a reread. The crime itself doesn’t happen until about 180 pages in (and the novel is only 235 pages altogether): well before then, I was starting to get impatient with the book, wondering how Tey was ever going to fit in any kind of investigation if she ever actually got around to what I supposed would be the main business of the book. By the time I’d finished the novel, though, I had realized that the “crime itself” had actually happened much earlier, but was an act of injustice (at least, arguably so) rather than an overt offense against any rules or laws. That act precipitates the actual crime, and must be understood for the crime to be seen — as Miss Pym struggles to see it — in a way that answers the very difficult question of what to do about it. “What was justice” in this case? wonders Miss Pym. “Do the obvious right thing, Miss Pym,” advises another character blithely, “and let God dispose.” But it’s Miss Pym who disposes– and it’s only by thinking through the whole story, and thinking about all the people involved in it, that we can decide if she makes the right decision.

Like the other Tey novels I’ve read, Miss Pym Disposes made me wonder about the lines I draw when selecting readings for my survey class on detective fiction. All four of the novels of hers that I’ve read are really not “detective fiction” in any conventional way. They are hardly even “crime fiction,” though this more nebulous label works better for them. The same thing is true of The Talented Mr. Ripley: it includes a crime, and it’s about guilt and innocence and justice and a lot of the same themes my course turns on — but it doesn’t really have the structure of the classic detective story, organized around a single crime and then its investigation and, usually, its solution. It’s that unity of the novel’s elements around the central crime and investigation that typically distinguishes novels we identify specifically as detective fiction or mysteries from novels with crimes (or detectives) in them. (Thus Bleak House, for instance, is not itself a detective novel despite including a great detective plot.)

Genre definitions are notoriously imperfect, but they are also extremely useful, and at the 2nd-year level, it generally seems good enough to go with that basic “we know it when we see it” definition. From a pedagogical perspective, focusing on detective fiction rather than crime fiction more broadly understood helps (like all rules) to control the fun —  otherwise, the options for book orders proliferate disconcertingly, for instance. I also think some of the coherence of the course depends on sticking pretty close to the formula, which makes it easier to learn the conventions which the great practitioners of the genre both perfect and subvert. It’s not like there’s no variety, as we still go from Poe and Wilkie Collins through Christie and Hammett to Paretsky to Walter Mosley (and sometimes Paul Auster).

Still, Tey (or Highsmith, or du Maurier) would be fun to include. If only I could make it a year-long course! Because after all, book orders are a zero-sum game, more or less. I already assign what strikes many students as a lot of novels in the survey class, and most of them are clearly in the “classics of the genre” category — touchstone texts that trace out the development of the genre over time. The only one I suppose is tangential to that Greatest Hits approach is P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman — which is one of my favorites, but doesn’t really represent a specific subgenre. Maybe I could switch it out for one of these next time around. I suppose if I did, though, it wouldn’t be Miss Pym Disposes, which I think is too understated to be very popular. I bet The Talented Mr. Ripley would be a hit, though.

Anyone who has been to an academic conference is familiar with the “question” from an audience member the entire subtext of which is “You didn’t present the paper I would have written on this topic.” (Some of us may even have asked such a question — in which cases I’m sure we were all 100% justified, because our papers would have been so much better than the ones we were listening to, right?!) Questions like these are bound to provoke some eye-rolling. For one thing, these aren’t usually the most constructive or welcome questions, and wouldn’t the world be a dull place, anyway, if we all approached our topics in exactly the same way? Yet when it’s a subject close to your heart, it’s still hard to accept that other people are going to do different things with it.

Now, imagine that the internet is a giant conference … and prepare to roll your eyes, because I’ve been feeling particularly curmudgeonly about people who are writing about Victorian novels online and not doing it right! By which, of course, I mean they are not doing it the way I would do it, or the way I think it should be done and can be done.

My first example is an article from the Huffington Post called “Everything I Knew About Dating I Learned from 19th-Century Novels. Big Mistake.”  I know this piece doesn’t claim to be serious, much less pretend to be serious literary criticism. Yes, it’s tongue-in-cheek, and surely (surely!) the author knows perfectly well that the “readings” of the novels trotted out here are precisely as shallow and solipsistic as you’d expect from the teenager she claims to have been when she first “loved” them. (Not all teenagers, mind you, are that incapable of reading with  insight and nuance.) Nonetheless, I hate to see these complex works of art pimped out as link-bait like this. (Their piece on “11 Lessons that Jane Eyre Can Teach Every 21st-Century Woman About How to Live Well” was pretty stupid also.) “But why do you even care what the Huffington Post says about 19th-century novels?” I hear you asking. Good question. Is it just silly that I feel this kind of cheesy crap degrades the whole enterprise of literary journalism? It’s the bookish equivalent of tabloid journalism — and like the tabloids, it clearly “sells,” too, which is certainly frustrating. It’s disappointing, if not surprising, that this kind of thing (and there’s plenty of it online, goodness knows) is so much more successful in getting readers than we’ll ever be at Open Letters. In this case, though, my main aggravation really is that the novels deserve so much better than to be used as part of a parade of faux-intellectual self-display. Think of the social and artistic and intellectual risks their authors took! And this is how you repay them? And then you get paid in page views? Shame on us all if this works … which is why I have not included a link to the piece itself.

Adelle Waldman’s essay in The New Yorker on the enduring interest of the marriage plot is much less offensive but it’s still irksome. You could say that it’s the highbrow equivalent of the HuffPo piece: it too offers little insight into the 19th-century novels it discusses (though at least it addresses them reasonably and seriously) and it makes them relevant primarily by appealing to our needs and interests (but at least to our literary ones, not our dating ones). My real gripe in this case, though, is that the essay is both dull and leaden, which it ought not to be if it’s published by the New Yorker. I’m also puzzled at why Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot needs a response so long post-publication anyway. Wasn’t it put firmly in its place back in 2011? (I think my review actually did a lot of the same work as Waldman’s essay, though I took just one paragraph to explain why 19th-century novels aren’t just about the happy ending and I wasn’t at all concerned with whether other contemporary novelists could or should explore related territory.) Could it be that this essay is (implicitly) more about Waldman’s new novel than about Eugenides or Madame Bovary? Like the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker does sometimes seem to be produced by a rather tight circle of friends.

In possibly more heartening news, The Toast is going to be running a ‘My Life in Middlemarch’  Book Club. Ever since I launched ‘Middlemarch for Book Clubs’ in the summer I’ve been hoping some book club somewhere would actually take on the novel, and it’s hard not to hope that there might be some synergy between their project and mine. It’s true that I was (ahem) not the biggest fan of Rebecca Mead’s earlier New Yorker article, but I’ve been reading her book with much more pleasure (could it be that I just don’t have a New Yorker frame of mind?), and I’ll be reviewing it for Open Letters in the new year, so I’ll be well briefed to participate–if there’s any place for me in the discussion, and if it’s a discussion I’m interested in. I’m not sure what kind of conversation The Toast will encourage or attract. My sense of the site (from reading it and from following some of its key figures on Twitter) is that the tone is snappy and irreverent (“It’s a long-ass book”), which isn’t really my style, but the aims of the book club are noble (“challenging and fun and gripping and life-affirming and a wonderful bonding experience for us all”). The first “deadline” for discussion is December 2: I’m very curious to see how they run it and what it’s like. At the very least I might take some tips away from their book club that will help me revise or expand my own site — though I’m not going to turn away from my own fundamental concept of it. I’d rather offer something valuable to a smaller group of dedicated readers than chase the masses HuffPo style!