The uncomfortable reader

How do you arrange your body so you can lose yourself in a book?

By Beth Kephart

Jun 21, 2000 | Jeremy, my book-wary 10-year-old, wants to know how to sit when he reads. He asks me flat out from his miserable sprawl on his bed. "I am just not comfortable," he complains. "I just don't get it. I don't."

I study the crooked line of him, his grave exasperation -- how he's propped up his head with one of his hands and smashed his book to the quilt with the other. Every time he needs to turn a page, he has to adjust all his weights and all his levers, get use of both hands, separate the one page from the rest, flip it over, grind it down, replant his elbow and start again. A shadow falls across the words. He grumbles, pitches his body to the floor, lies on his back, lifts his book above his head and squints as if looking at the sun. His arms quiver, twitch, visibly ache. They grow weary. He looks at me. He half crab-crawls to a barren patch of wall and bangs his back against it, throwing his lean colt's legs out straight.

"It's so much better when you read to me," he grumbles and whispers, then sighs to prove his point. "All I have to do then is be in your arms and wait for the story to come."

Over the next several days I make it my business to understand the ergonomics of reading: the hands that hold; the fingers that turn; the spine that curves or straightens; the legs that must forget that they are construed of flesh and blood. At the neighborhood library, under the cover of a book, I watch the way a woman with flowing hair paces as she reads, up and down, up and down, rifling a breeze through the stacks. I watch the way old men gather at the chest-high reference shelves and lay out their books and papers and maps, like so many priests at their pulpits. A boy with a leg-long cast hobbles in, pinching a portable raft with his fist. He finds a swath of natural light and settles, the air from his chair fast escaping, his crutches now tossed to one side.

"There are plenty of ways to read," I report back to my son.

"Sure," he says. "Sure. But which one's comfortable?"

I remember a book in our basement, an extraordinary collection of Andri Kertisz photos. The unwitting inventor of the candid photograph, the Hungarian-born, self-taught Kertisz focused his lens on what was true. An old woman in a hospital bed in France, upright with the help of pillows, a black blanket on her shoulders, a book held like a prayer in both her hands. A man halted before an outdoor cart of used books on New York City's Fourth Avenue, his face adorned with thick eyeglasses, his right hand holding a magnifying glass, his left palm cradling "Comradeship," his nose breathless inches from the page. There are the readers in Washington Square backed up against trees, strewn over grass. There's the S-shaped woman in Paris, 1928, the white page in highest contrast against the black folds of her skirt.

"There are so many ways to read," I assure Jeremy. "So many, I can't count them."

"Sure," he rolls his eyes, then snuggles back into my open arms and waits for me to read to him.

So I ask my friends, who, come to think of it, I've hardly noticed reading. I can't imagine how Susan sits or Barbara does, or where in the house Joanne puts herself inside a book. So I send them and others little messages, urgent pleas, and while I wait for their replies, I read "The Enormous Egg" out loud and tell Jeremy I'm working on it. Still.

"Oh Beth," my friend Susan, the book critic and writing teacher, messages back. "What a question you ask: how do I read? Well, I hardly ever sit when I read. I usually crawl under the covers in bed next to my reading lamp and hold the book above my head and prop my arms up with pillows. I can read like this for hours. And also, I really liked reading when I was pregnant, kicked back in a worn-out Lazy Boy with a book propped up on my swelling stomach, and I also love to read in a really hot bath, but I'm always dropping the books into the bath water and they swell up like little accordions. I had to stop doing that with library books."

Next Page: On the train, in a plane, in a park, in the dark?

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