each year as new year’s day approaches, billions of us instinctively reflect on our lives and appraise ourselves. in that appraisal, we often find ourselves wanting. for some of us, this conclusion is certainly borne out by the evidence; for most of us, this conclusion is an exaggeration intended as self-motivation; for some of us we are attempting to reclaim our lives from the grasp of the vanity of fulfilled goals and dreams. the one universal notion, whatever day of the year new year’s falls on in your culture, is that we select certain things to emphasize in the new year, align those things with some desirable trait or objective we hope to attain, then set to the work. we call them resolutions, and unlike most words we use collectively as a society, i believe that resolution is the correct word for the new year’s day intentions we set.
at the start of 2013, i’d come across an article written in the NYT about a woman who’d read one fiction book every day for 2012 (or was it 2011?). while reading her account, it occurred to me that i’d probably never willingly read a work of fiction since my years of high school. [no, my memory just failed me. make that “only read a handful of fiction works since high school.”] the last fiction books i can remember having willingly read were breath, eyes, memory by edwidge danticat, the farming of bones by edwidge danticat, black boy and native son by richard wright, and parable of the sower by octavia butler. i also distinctly remember reading the blacker the berry in high school because i couldn’t understand what anyone meant by that metaphor. the book didn’t help me understanding the metaphor, but it did help in understanding the american prism that refracts racial diversity into its constituent colors. as an aside, i can’t wait to teach my son his history through the tales we collectively share as black americans and haitian americans. these were some of my favorite books and i look forward to seeing them through father’s and husband’s eyes…
these were the last fiction works i’d willingly read, up until 2013, of course. at the end of 2012, i was tired of reading things just to understand equations or to make some esoteric technical point to students or other scholars. it was as if i was gaining knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but still couldn’t articulate shared social values. i found myself at a loss for words when i’d want to discuss some self reflection with my wife or someone else intending for the self reflection to reveal to her something about my soul while also edifying her as my partner. in short, i think it is appropriate to say that life was becoming in some important ways both dumb and boring.
when i’d read that account of the journey through one book per day, i couldn’t help at least a momentary reflection on the role fiction and stories play in my own life. while one book per day of any kind (except perhaps a few Bible books) is completely out of reach for me at this season of my life, i felt then, and still feel now, that one work of fiction per month, on average, is a reasonable and worthy investment of my time. i’ve written about some of the benefits indirectly in short reflections on some of the books i read this year, but a short summary statement is probably worth it.
the most important benefits of reading fiction are two. they both involve awareness. awareness of my own voice, and awareness of democratic ownership of the human narrative.
my professional life has benefitted greatly from this resolution, and i’m hoping to make such an effort a regular part of my life. reading fiction has awakened me to my own voice. it sounds counter intuitive–reading so many others’ voices, sometimes for 800 or so pages at a time, awakens one to their own voice. i’ve found this to be true in my experience. reading fiction has made me very much aware of the words inside of me, the person and image i’ve become, and even sometimes helps me to imagine how i must appear to others. because of this, it has also made me more creative as a professor. i have begun to think about decision analysis and risk in ways that were not possible for me, personally, before 2013.
since my personal and professional lives are inseparable, all of that is true for my personal life as well. yet, personally i feel enriched in ways that are difficult to describe in words. fiction allows one to place oneself. one becomes a true citizen or steward of some small piece of our collective heritage. and fiction allows one to find his place in their corner of humanity. this must be why it has been illegal for marginalized peoples throughout history to learn to read and write. the principalities and powers of this world stand to lose too much if this ownership of the human narrative is democratized. [i wish i had time to really dig into this, but my toddler is awake now…]
i am now aware of my place as an american, african diasporan, christian, engineer, and husband and father in new ways. while i may or may not make a literary contribution, my ownership of the piece of the narrative i occupy is expressed through my role as a professor, instructor, father, and husband. in all of those roles, i can redefine and reshape in small ways what it means to be all of those things because of the stories shared with me this year.
if you’ve read this far, bless your soul. may God also bless you and your family in the New Year. may your community and family, and indeed the cosmos, be blessed by the resolution God will place on your heart for 2014.
(p.s. so, what books did i read last year?)
- Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
- L’Etranger [The Stranger] (Albert Camus)
- Kindred (Octavia Butler)
- Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
- Fledgling (Octavia Butler)
- Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)
- An Outline of the Republic (Siddhartha Deb)
- Fallen Land (Patrick Flanery)
- The Dark Road (Ma Jian)
- The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
- Untouchables (Mulk Raj Anand)
- El Enamoramientos [The Infatuations] (Javier Marías)