What Are You Reading?

• Published in: Theatre survey Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 307 - 309
• Main Author: Case, Sue-Ellen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.11.2005
• Subjects: Libraries; Reading; What Are You Reading, Edited by Edward Ziter
• ISSN: 0040-5574; 1475-4533
• DOI: 10.1017/S0040557405000190

Recently Ruby Cohn, the expert on Samuel Beckett, was staying at my house. One morning she announced to me in a disapproving tone: “Your library has no focus.” Nor, I fear, would Ruby find a focus in my reading. I read several books at once from various disciplines and approaches. They lay about in different rooms of the house, where I read them at different times of the day. For example, the 4:00 p.m. read in the library is something less demanding, suggesting rather than theorizing or documenting; whereas the morning read in my study is a note-taking venture, in proximity to little yellow stickies or the computer so I can type in passages as they generate new ideas. Worse yet, I am on the Internet multiple times daily, The New Yorker is usually open to some article I read while waiting for my partner to get ready for a date, and various novels are next to the bed for reading before going to sleep. Reading is not what it used to be. It more closely resembles online surfing than the removed, “focused” (as Ruby would say) reading in, say, the British Library. In part, my selection of books reflects the variety of articles I will be completing within the coming months; in part, the nature of current postcanon scholarship, which is held to account for a complex and variegated critical perspective.