Hello Finding Out fam! I’m taking a break from sending newsletters this week and next, so I hope you’ll enjoy these couple of encore issues. First up is this piece about how both reading and learning can take unusual paths. New issues will resume December 2; see you then!
The book club I attend in St. Louis embraces the inevitability that some of us may not finish reading that month's book.
What I love about this—besides how we are always welcome to see our book friends—is that I sometimes leave feeling excited about a book that I couldn't bring myself to finish in time.
March's book was The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú. It's a literary memoir about his time immersing himself in the reality of immigration. After he graduated college, he became a U.S. Border Patrol agent. As a political science major, Cantú wanted to see how theory compared to the real world.
While his memoir initially drew me in with quietly beautiful scenes of the desert, I soon realized that its series of vignettes created exactly the kind of book that I find difficult to read more than a section or two a time. Although the changing scenes and characters created a sense of scope that continuous narratives don't, I often needed to pause between sections to give myself the transitions that the book lacks. If I didn't, I would find myself feeling the bleariness that comes from jumping from meeting to meeting in a poorly constructed work day.
Feeling stuck, I turned to one of my tactics for getting unstuck in a book: I looked through the table of contents, and flipped through the rest of the book to find something that caught my eye. Eventually, I found myself in the Author's Note at the end, and happened upon a paragraph that started with this sentence: "One of my principle goals in The Line Becomes a River was to create space for readers to inhabit an emergent sense of horror at the suffering that takes place every day at the border."
"Oh!" I thought at Cantú. "You set out to create a difficult experience, and I am having one!” I felt validated and relieved, and my perspective of the book suddenly shifted.
That Author's Note paragraph concludes by saying that the book "seeks to function as literature rather than reportage, to resonate more deeply within the soul than in the mind." Those were the moments of quiet beauty—as well as the moments of confusion and dismay—that I was feeling as I read. They were the moments that made me feel the need to set the book down and let my gaze drift and make sense of what I read.
But, alas, I had started the book only a couple of days before book club met, and I was feeling burnt out from childcare and the world, and I mostly wanted to use my reading time as an escape.
So I decided to pause on reading Cantú's memoir, and looked forward to chatting with my friends about it.
They didn't disappoint. Thanks to their reading and sharing, I learned about genetics and behavioral research that might partially account for why some people are violent and others aren't. I got an overview of the structure and experience of reading the book, so that I not only feel more prepared to read it, but I now also feel excited for when I try it again. And even without reading the whole book, I got to think about the details of my perspectives on immigration, inspired by listening to people whose opinions and understanding I have come to value so much over the years.
Reading isn't always about consuming each word in the order it appears on the page. Sometimes we need to jump around. Sometimes we need to pause and let our friends tell us what they loved or hated or found confusing. By engaging with books in this way, we can know that, just like reading, learning isn't always linear.
Mentioned in this issue: The Line Becomes a River, by Francisco Cantú.