`Big House'? It's the best book
I ever experienced!
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, December 18, 2003
I was talking to my agent
on the phone the other day, when she asked - conversationally, not in a interrogative
way - if I'd read ``The Big House.''
Had I?
If I was to be honest with myself, and with her,
Ms. Brettne Bloom, I'd have to say, no, I had not sat down with ``The Big House''
and, starting with the acknowledgments, absorbed what was on each page, turning
one after the other until I got to the end.
On the other hand, thanks to the intense media saturation
surrounding George Howe Colt's tale of a summer house on Cape Cod, I did ``know''
everything about it.
Well, everything except what it actually said, that
is.
``I've sort of read it,'' I said.
Being in the literary game, Bloom knew immediately
what I meant by ``sort of,'' and as it happened, has been on a mission for a while
now to find a term to describe exactly such a situation.
``This is the phenomenon,'' she said, ``you've read
every possible review, and the inside and back covers. You know who blurbed it.
You've read interviews with the author and seen pictures of his or her home and
dog. You own the book, and the sensation is such that you feel as if you've read
it, and can talk about it intelligently.''
Actually, in my case, I'm often most intelligent
discussing a book I haven't read because then I parrot what the professionals
have said. But even so, I like the idea of having a fancy term to describe what
I've always thought of as bluffing.
Bloom, whose husband has expressed fear that her
collection of books (and shoes) might force them to find a larger apartment, says
the best term she has heard so far is ``reading into,'' as in ``I'm reading into
`The Big House.' ''
Bloom isn't the type to read into a book, but many
of the people I know are, so I asked around, looking for a good coinages to send
her way.
When I ran the ``sort of'' phenomenon by one professional
faker, the first thing he said was, ``I thought that ITALIC was END ITALIC reading
a book.'' When I pointed out that, technically, ``reading'' means ``reading,''
he suggested the term ``reading around,'' as in ``I'm reading around `The Big
House.' ''
An academic type I know saw a real-world parallel
to the situation some doctoral students find themselves in when they've done everything
but write their dissertations, a state of being known as ``abd'' - all but dissertation.
``A book could be `all but read,' '' he suggested.
I liked both of those ideas, but my favorite came
from a colleague I've always considered a good reader (in the literal sense of
the word). ``How about `experienced?' '' she asked, noting that she had ``experienced''
``The Lovely Bones.''
``I read the first chapter in the bookstore,'' she
told me. ``I knew the whole plot. I'd talked to people who'd read it and absorbed
the experience of what it would be like to read it.''
``To actually read it,'' she concluded, ``would
have been a waste of time.''
