How to Rewire Your Brain

If you love reading, it can be scary sometimes to realize how little of what you read stays with you. When I read a book for a book group discussion, I need to do it within a week or so of the discussion to make sure it's fresh in my mind. Books I've read in recent years, even recent months, are often just a title and a few hazy impressions. It was set in Minneapolis... the hero loved baseball... his girlfriend turned out to be the killer. Well, that's a book I've read several times (The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford--see my list of indispensable mysteries), so it fared better than most. And as for books I read in school--which is where, let's admit it, I read most of the classics I'll ever read--they are mere shells in memory.

So... if we don't remember them very well... why even read them? Well, of course pleasure is a fair enough reason. Reading a book can be its own reward, just like listening to music or drinking a glass of wine or watching an episode of Cheers. No law says everything has to be self-improving.

But if you want to go that route, I do have a theory. We may not retain a lot of the specifics long-term. But in the process of reading, a book takes us places, shows us things, makes us see the world through its own special lens. It changes us in the same way a friendship or a trip to a new place changes us. We come to understand something about a place, about how people work, about a way of thinking or our place in the world. We may not, in the end, recall the details or appreciate what's been added to our mental repertoire. Just the same, our brain's been rewired in a very literal sense. And in a few special cases, that rewiring can be profound, a serious change in our world view.

Enough introduction--here are a few books that seriously rewired me:

The Plague by Albert Camus--For a frank and realistic portrayal of disease, death, and heartbreak, this is a surprisingly uplifting book. But then the author, who fought in the French Resistance during World War II, clearly knows what he is talking about when it comes to confronting suffering and evil.

Middlemarch by George Eliot--This one has a long fuse. It took me a couple of hundred pages to get into this tale of 19th-century English provincial life, but once there, I was thoroughly hooked. Eliot's dry wit puts Jane Austen to shame, and the generosity of her world view is such that even the wickedest of her characters is oddly sympathetic.

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves--The renowned poet and translator's account of his experiences as a junior officer on the Western Front in World War I. The horror and heartbreak of that particular war, and of war in general, are brought home with piercing intensity by his thoughtful, understated prose.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner--Frankly, I find a lot of Faulkner unreadable. But this one is brilliant, the account of a Southern family's decline and fall, told in a fragmented, disjointed, poetic style that perfectly conveys the sad chaos of their world.

Jesus's Son by Denis Johnson--A collection of linked stories that follows the hideous misadventures of a young heroin addict. His world will make you shudder, but Johnson's rendering of it is bizarrely beautiful and deeply affecting.