Donna Seaman’s River of Books Recounts a Lifelong Journey to Understanding the World

by Michael Antman

Why live in only one world — a difficult and disappointing one at that — when we can live in two, especially when that parallel world is better, or more illuminating, or at least more transfixing, than our dull quotidian existence? That’s the question posed by the inveterate reader, editor and memoirist Donna Seaman in her richly allusive new book about the mystery and magic of reading titled River of Books.

As Seaman, the editor in chief of the Chicago-based book review publication Booklist, puts it in this memoir cum encomium, “reading demanding books was far easier for me than facing the abrading demands of everyday life.” As a rebellious child and unsettled young woman, Seaman “read insatiably because I was angry, alienated, yearning, depressed, and determined to know more. I read to anchor myself to something larger and more meaningful, to a universe I could trust.”

This urge to escape what the poet Randall Jarrell called the “dailiness of life,” I suspect, is one of the chief motivations of inveterate readers.  And yet, perhaps paradoxically, people who read regularly are more likely to find themselves at home in the world — and consequently to be more successful and influential — than those who do not, as attested by the memoirs of numerous great historical figures and great readers from Jefferson to Lincoln to Churchill.

Reading teaches us how and why to live. The Roman general Marcus Aurelius — by any measure among the most accomplished persons in history — read so much that he reminds himself at several junctures in his famous Meditations to read less. And yet the reading he did do prepared himself for the world’s extraordinary demands. He reflects, “At first (Greek) tragedies were brought on the stage as means of reminding men of the things which happen to them, and that it is according to nature for things to happen so, and that, if you are delighted with what is shown on the stage, you should not be troubled with that which takes place on the larger stage. For you see that these things must be accomplished thus.”

In short, reading is not merely a diversion from reality; indeed, it redoubles our attention to reality, enriching it with new insights into the human condition and the natural world. Seaman writes of “the delectable simultaneity of dueling existences that reading provides.”  Reading, she avers, “is a form of inebriation, but not of abandon. It’s an active state of heightened receptivity.”

That heady feeling is heightened when the exploring of new worlds through the pages of a book is accompanied by encounters with unfamiliar corners of the “real” world. Recalling her time when she and her family accompanied her father on a business trip to the Scottish coastal town of Gourock, “where it was damp, chilly, and draped with gray clouds like sheets over furniture,” she notes that she was, at the same time, reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. She writes:

“I was also dwelling in the fecund, butterflied, spellbound Colombian village of Macondo…I can still slip into that heady duality in which I hovered between two evocatively mysterious realms in different hemispheres and climes, defined by different mythologies and languages — one experienced viscerally, the other through words — but both wholly alive and redolent with nature’s humbling grandeur and epic human longing.”

It isn’t merely that she is living simultaneously in two worlds — Macondo and Gourock — but that each world sharpens her appreciation of the other, catalyzing the dual experiences into something compelling and memorable, greater than the sum of their parts.

Reading calls us to the things of this world. After moving to Chicago, a city she finds at first alienating — “a bricky town of harsh weather and bluster” — she begins to understand the city, sympathize with it, even thrive in it: “The straight-to-the horizon streets ran like lines of text in a clamorous urban chronicle, each building percolating with hidden lives — just as words contain multiple shades of meaning.”

She is, in other words, reading the city like a book, and eventually comes to find a neighborhood where she could enjoy “respite and inspiration…(and) feel awed and exalted, stirred, and girded for everyday struggles, disappointments, and flat-out weirdness.”

Of course, it is not just towns and cities we can “read like a book,” but, in the more common context of that expression, people. And here, of course, is where the real magic of reading occurs: In its ability to silently transmit the consciousness of other human beings (the author, and the author’s fictional or real-life characters) directly and unmediated into the consciousness of the reader.  As Seaman puts it, “what an endlessly strange and marvelous feat it is to so convincingly imagine a richly dimensional human being navigating complicated predicaments in a convincingly rendered world.”

Reading is in somewhat bad repute these days, at least in an academic context, where students often read not to learn new things, or to be challenged, or to prepare themselves for their encounters with the outside world, but rather to confirm the preconceived notions of their professors and peers. The literary and cultural critic William Deresiewicz, in his collection of essays, The End of Solitude, writes:

“Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn't been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature — still more, of art — has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are ‘texts,’ no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to ‘interrogate’ them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. The passions that are meant to draw people to the profession of literary study, these last many years, are not aesthetic; they are political.”

Three cheers, then, for Donna Seaman, whose River of Books is neither academic nor political, its sole focus being the power of literature to delight us, heal us, and assist us in the lifelong task of understanding our world and its fractious inhabitants.

The title River of Books is well-chosen, because the aptly named Seaman employs metaphors of water, rivers and oceans to describe the lifelong journey into the world of words she has undertaken; as she states, “season by season, through storms and drought, reading helps us navigate the river of life.”

It’s a journey that continues, for her and the reader alike; at the end of this passionate and honest exploration into her youthful years, “as books flash by like silvery fish in the river shadows of memory,” she provides a bibliography of no fewer than 100 books and book series mentioned in the text, so that, for the reader, an abundant bounty of rewarding reading waits patiently to be discovered.

Seaman will be in conversation with Alex Kotlowitz at the Harold Washington Library’s Cindy Pritzker Auditorium on Thursday, March 6. Doors to the Auditorium open at 5:30 p.m. for the 6 p.m. start time. Books are available for purchase and the author will autograph books at the conclusion of the program. This event will also take place live on CPL's YouTube channel and CPL's Facebook page. 

Michael Antman is the author of the novels Cherry Whip and Everything Solid Has a Shadow. He is a longtime book and theatre critic and was a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing.