The More You Read ...

... the Less You Know.

I've written about this before, but I want to modify what I've said a little bit. Yes, the more I read, the more I encounter things I have not known--like other writers, like other books, like (well) other worlds of information and imagination out there.

I found this especially true when I was reading about writers who ended up in biographies I was writing: Jack London, William Shakespeare, Edgar Poe, Mary Shelley. Every time I read something by these people--or about these people--the more I discovered I needed to know. "The long and winding road ...."

I first encountered that long-and-winding-road idea a number of years ago when writer Russell Banks was in Hudson to talk about Cloudsplitter (1998), his novel about Abolitionist John Brown (who, as you probably know, grew up in Hudson--and whose story Joyce has written about in her forthcoming book for the University of Akron Press, Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist--link to info about it).

Anyway, Banks talked about how he was finding the research for the book just about endless, and then he said something like this (not a direct quotation): "As a novelist you have to stop researching at some point and start writing." (Joyce has also found this to be true.)

So ... the more you read, the less you know ... the more you realize you need to know ...

BUT it's also true that the more you read the more you know--the more often you can enjoy, in a private way, something you are reading that alludes to--or in some fashion uses--what you already know.

I was thinking about this just this morning as I neared the end of Gail Godwin's newest novel, Old Lovegood Girls (2020), a novel about two women--Merry and Feron--who meet in a (fictitious) junior college, Lovegood, and who, off and on, remain connected for the rest of their lives. (I'll write in more detail about the novel in my blog next Sunday.)

Both Merry and Feron, by the way, are published writers--Feron has several novels; Merry, some stories (though she basically "retires" from writing when she gets involved in her family's tobacco-growing business).

In a passage this morning Feron, talking with her agent, mentions Ian McEwan's novel Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize in 1998. It's a book in some ways about the sin of Envy--and it's a book I finished not all that long ago (I was on a journey through all of McEwan's books).

So ... when I read that passage this morning, I perked up, felt smart for a moment, then moved on to some things I didn't know about and realized There are some things I really must read!