Shelf Life: Adventurers in reading

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on July 30, 2008 at 4:45 AM, updated July 30, 2008 at 4:50 AM

Duane Mikulencak

34, petroleum engineer

Do you ever write notes in your books? I don't but my wife does. She's an avid note-writer. If I'm reading a book after her, I find it a nice bonus to see what she wrote. She'll highlight passages, too, and that's another bonus. It can give me insight into her. Say, for example, she read "The Sound and the Fury" for the first time when she was 21 and then read it again at 30. You can track her age through her notes. You can see where she was at various points. We've read some books over and over again. You can trace our history by them.

You enjoy re-reading books? I think I've read "The Sound and the Fury" four or five times. You have to read that book two times right in a row just to follow it. The structure is hard to identify the first time around; it seems amorphous. You just kind of muddle through the book. And then you read it again and again, and you appreciate the way he delineated the book, how things are well-connected. Everytime you read it, you find something you didn't see before and it's like wow, that's really good, I get it now.

It's almost like a puzzle and things start to fall into place. You get these epiphanies. You appreciate deeper and deeper levels of it.

It reminds me of engineering. When you do something the first time, you may appreciate it only at a certain level. But the more you study it, the more you grasp the complexity of the subject. It's rewarding.

Can you give me an example? If you want to learn the behavior of a gas, say, you can take a simple approach and talk about chemistry. Or you can take the approach of statistical mechanics and learn about the individual atoms and what they're doing. One method is very empirical. The other is very elevated, involving atoms and molecules and millions of different configurations. You prove the same law but you do it from a much loftier position, using calculus and probability. You get to the underlying complexity.

Do you frequently read a lot of books by the same author? I've read a lot of William Faulkner -- maybe 10 books. I've also read a lot of Dostoevski, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Umberto Eco. Faulkner is partly what drew me to the South. I had a taste of it growing up in Texas, which is the outskirts of the Deep South. I think what appealed to me was the rich characters, the rich stories, the deep history.

Do you find that it enriches the experience of each book to have read the others? It's like a safe bet: You want to read another book by the same author because you know you'll get more of the same. Nowadays I only read about one book a month, so I have to be selective. If I get a good author, I'll try him again.

-- Elizabeth Mullener