What do you read when you’re sick in bed?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had some long illnesses as a child, and since I started reading very early,\u00a0 reading while confined to bed was always part of the day.\u00a0\u00a0 My mother could chart my fever by how fast I read, whether I put the book down and closed my eyes, etc.\u00a0 (She preferred a thermometer, though, having trained as a nurse.)\u00a0\u00a0 Among the signs I learned to watch for in myself was reading the same page over and over.<\/p>\n
As a younger child, I preferred stories about horses or dogs,\u00a0 and if they had human characters, I preferred children of the more lively type.\u00a0\u00a0 Timidity and squeamishness and a preference for playing indoors instead of outdoors–not my type.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By 9 and 10, I was reading both horse stories (and dog stories) and my mother’s books, dipping into them to see if there were any horses, dogs, or interesting children.\u00a0\u00a0 Mysteries–my mother had a stack of paperback mysteries–did much better than historicals for someone with a fever.\u00a0 Trying to outwit Agatha Christie and figure out whodunnit before the end occupied the mind, but not deeply.<\/p>\n
As an adult, I found that mysteries and light thrillers (if I can make up a subcategory)\u00a0 still worked well.\u00a0\u00a0 I could follow the story, even with a moderate fever, and it would distract me.\u00a0\u00a0 Some nonfiction books also worked, mildly instructing me about something interesting but not too challenging.\u00a0 Best, as fever went up, were mysteries I’d already read, but–with the fever going–I couldn’t quite remember in detail.<\/p>\n
But to have the right books on hand when the illness strikes, to know where they are and lay a hand on them before retreating to the bed…that’s the trick.\u00a0\u00a0 In a house overcrowded with books, I had neglected to keep a handy shelf of “sickness-reading” books when this latest crud hit.\u00a0\u00a0 There’d been a lot of reorganization of books (moving from living room floor to the then-empty shelves in the room that had been our son’s–inadequate for what was on the floor, so they’re double-stacked.)\u00a0 I was thus left with flotsam on the surface of a turbulent book-ocean.<\/p>\n
And that is how I ended up reading H. Rider Haggard’s Beatrice<\/em> through one almost-sleepless night of coughing and coughing.\u00a0\u00a0 I had started this illness with an Elizabeth George that happened to be out being re-read.\u00a0 I moved on to the only other mystery I could find at 2 or 3 am, one of Charlotte MacLeod’s Professor Shandy series.\u00a0\u00a0 After that, it was Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana<\/em>,\u00a0 during the worst of the fever,\u00a0 and finally Haggard’s Beatrice<\/em>, which I hadn’t re-read in years, probably well over ten years, and had a vague memory of as somewhat overwrought, but not taxing.<\/p>\n It’s tricky being a writer reading other writers.\u00a0\u00a0 We know the short-cuts; we know the temptations.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us aren’t good enough at spotting the infelicities in our own work (I’m certainly not) but we can certainly find the mote in the other guy’s eye (and book.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve often read bad books for the fun of feeling superior (it doesn’t hurt the writer…I bought his\/her book and I’m not going to publicize the badness and ruin more sales.)<\/p>\n But fun of that sort is best enjoyed when not running a high fever or coughing your lungs out.\u00a0\u00a0 Fever and pain make writers grumpy, and grumpy writers no longer enjoy bad writing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And H. Rider Haggard is safely dead, where his feelings can’t be hurt.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What made Haggard fun to read, when I wasn’t sick, is what made him mentally painful to read, when I was.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I was too sick to get up in the middle of the night and search for something else.\u00a0\u00a0 (Two of my own were on the floor by the bed, but another truth of being a writer reading in bed while sick, is that if you read your own<\/em> books then, you will spot every single flaw, now too late to fix, and raise your fever another half-degree fretting about it and calling yourself stupid, incompetent, undeserving, etc.)<\/p>\n Tranquility is not characteristic of Haggard’s work.\u00a0 Steady, calm, sensible, the kind of story that eases the sick brain along, gives it a focus but not wild emotion…that’s not Haggard.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so I was plunged into what, in modern days, would be written online in all-caps and studded with multiple exclamation points.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m used to late 19th c. styles of writing–I can usually discount anything that, today, we’d find Too Much.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not upset by the ignorance of that period–what they didn’t know about, for instance,\u00a0 about modern emergency medicine.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not upset by more telling and less showing, by long (to us) descriptive passages.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Their readers didn’t have television–even colored photographs were in the future, let alone movies and video–so they needed word-pictures.\u00a0\u00a0 And I remembered having enjoyed what I could of Haggard and snickering at the rest.\u00a0\u00a0 But that was in halcyon days of yore, when fever’s burning hand had not yet been laid on my suffering forehead….you see what I mean.<\/p>\n C.S. Lewis argued that when bad books sell, and especially if they become popular, it’s because they have some literary virtues as well as literary faults.\u00a0 That they wouldn’t work at all, with any readers, if they didn’t offer the reader some pleasure.\u00a0\u00a0 So I must admit that Haggard has literary virtues.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The characters are unforgettable (so, alas, is Haggard’s long moralistic lecturing about them.\u00a0\u00a0 He’s clearly fascinated with Beatrice herself, has created this superwoman, superb in every way…except she’s not a Christian and she’s too headstrong and had he\/she\/they but known….)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Haggard’s ability to set mood with description was excellent (not so his insistence on pounding home the portents with a sledgehammer…he can’t let you see that the sun setting in a storm cloud might be a metaphor for the whole book, he has to tell<\/em> you that it would’ve been better if Beatrice and Geoffrey had never met.)<\/p>\n It is not a book to read on a nearly-sleepless night when you’re sick.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I went back to The Gentleman from Indiana<\/em> the next night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do you read when you’re sick in bed?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had some long illnesses as a child, and since I started reading very early,\u00a0 reading while confined to bed was always part of the day.\u00a0\u00a0 My mother could chart my fever by how fast I read, whether I put the book down and closed my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[112,17],"class_list":["post-1087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-writer-as-reader"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1088,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1087\/revisions\/1088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}