Dear “reader,”
Did I hear you correctly? Did you just tell your friend you “finished” me?
Let’s get something straight: just because I’m an essay collection does not mean you get to neglect a third of my chapters and count me toward your summer Goodreads goal. Even if you’re five books behind schedule, you’re not allowed to skim through sections of me you’ve deemed uninteresting from the essay's title and then hand me off to a friend, saying, “I think you’d really like this.”
This might sound crazy, but you have to actually read EVERY word of me if you want to tell others you’ve “read me.” And side note—if you are only reading me so you can log me as “complete” and tell others you finished a book, that’s a whole other problem altogether.
I’ve sat idly by, watching you lie to your friends, for far too long. But today at the café was the final straw. After recommending me to your friend, she asked the golden question: “What’s it about?” I thought the jig was up right then and there. But no. Because you managed to at least read the titular essay (I never should have put it at the start of the book), you fooled everyone around you. No one batted an eye. Except for me. I did.
I’m more than just my titular essay, I’ll have you know. Every part of me, every section—yes, even the seemingly out-of-place essay about my author’s observations on the Hoover Dam—makes me who I am. You cannot just read the first couple of essays, think to yourself, “I get the gist,” and then go on auto-pilot until you reach the last 20 or so pages and start reading closely again.
Here’s an out-there thought: maybe if you read me from cover to cover, that seemingly out-of-place essay wouldn’t feel so out of place after all. Maybe—dare I say—it’s there for a reason? Or, what if each essay starts to make more sense when understood in the context of the rest of the book—or maybe even just the preceding pages you skipped over because there were too few paragraph breaks and not enough words jumping off the page like “Sex” or “Here’s where I buried the treasure.”
Also, were those annotations necessary? Given that you skipped over half of my pages, I highly doubt you’ll ever open me up again to revisit what you wrote in the margins. This leads me to only one conclusion: you underlined passages at random, further attempting to trick the next “reader” you pass me off to that you actually read the book. This isn’t going to work. Want to know why? Because the passage you scribbled an asterisk next to, labeling “Faustian,” had absolutely nothing to do with Johann Faust. It was about Georgia O’Keeffe—hence the chapter’s title, “Georgia O’Keeffe.”
You’re better than this. You know it, I know it, and that self-help book you claimed to read last month knows it too. Let this be a lesson: that pang of guilt you felt every time you flipped through a few of my pages without reading them, well, it was warranted.
Regards from Honolulu & the Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá, Columbia,
The White Album by Joan Didion
P.S. That’s a reference you would only pick up on had you actually “read” me.