Margaret Langstaff is a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly and the author of Garden Psalms and other books. She frequently writes about books and the book business for national periodicals.

OverBooked appears in alternate months and deals with insider news and trends in the book industry.

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A time and place for reading

BY MARGARET LANGSTAFF

The other day, when I was out for a walk with my dogs, a thought flew into my head from nowhere about the circumstances under which I'd read the novel Cold Mountain. It was the fall of the year and my husband and I were living in a 36' x 9' camper on the farm we had purchased south of Franklin, Tennessee, while our house was under construction. We had no electricity and I read the book by flashlight in a stall in the new barn with dogs dozing around me and horses eye-balling me through the dark. The love story set in Civil War times, suffused with longing and bittersweet hope, is all tied up in my mind with the crisp leaves and temperatures and the aroma of wood smoke. A screech owl that sounded like a horse whinnying was in a tree behind the barn.

It was altogether a wonderful time. The book stands as a sort of chapter in my life, I now see, that I can return to and re-savor. I had a feeling I was onto something. Reading, no matter how transporting, occurs in a specific time and place that color and perfume the experience with a date stamp.

Pity the author whose book is read by a person undergoing a root canal. Or is stuck in an elevator. Or waiting for an IRS appointment. Or who knows what kind of uncomfortable circumstance that will always blight the reader's mind at the mention of the title.

"War and Peace? Horrible! I had the worst sinus infection while I was reading that. And they both went on forever!"

Coincidentally, I was at the same time re-visiting T.S. Eliot's The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: "The poem's existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to 'express,' or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader. Consequently the problem of what a poem 'means' is a good deal more difficult than it appears. . . . "

Curious about how this phenomenon personally affects writers as readers, as well as writers as writers, I picked up the telephone.

Marty Stuart, country star, mandolin maestro and author-photographer of Pilgrims: Sinners, Saints and Prophets (Rutledge Hill Press) got it right away. "I was in the back end of a tour bus," he says, "snorting diesel fuel, and buried in The Seeds of Man by Woodie Guthrie and Tarantula by Bob Dylan. Over the miles and pages, I began to see what they were writing about and how. They broke every rule about writing, but what they did was great. My experience of the world went from black and white to color. They weren't primarily writers, and I wasn't either. But I began to see how it was done and thought maybe I could do it too."

He got something right. The Smithsonian is having an exhibit of his work and the 2000 music issue of the Oxford American featured his photography.

Novelist Lawrence Naumoff (A Plan for Women, Taller Women, The Night of the Weeping Women) connected immediately, too. "This memory is so '60s and was far out for then, but not for now. I was reading Naked Lunch by William Burroughs with a girlfriend in college while naked. I also, that afternoon, cooked a steak in a frying pan with no oil and no seasoning, just a piece of meat in a pan on a hot plate, a very Burroughs-looking piece of meat, and the girl, though happy to play Naked Lunch, wouldn't get near that much of a Burroughs' vision."

The quality of my research was rapidly deteriorating. I decided to quit while I was ahead. To my own satisfaction, I'd confirmed my hunch. Reading is one of those "interactive" experiences everybody thinks is a function of the silicon chip. Not so. It's as old as the hills. Two universes collide and, in the explosion, a new world is born . . . for the reader/writer/whatever. Naked or otherwise.