Gateway Books: An Introduction
Books are like drugs according to many a source in modern media, that's why so many kids are reading so much these days.
Dear Reader,
Recently while perusing social media, I came across a post about “gateway books”. As defined by the original poster, a gateway book is a formative text that made someone into a reader, that inspired one to read, and to devour books. It is a book that was brilliant in the moment of reading, but with enough time or maturity or readerly experience, it might not offer the same joy, let alone *actually* be a *good* book. The original poster hesitated to share their gateway books, not because they regretted them, but because there was an intimacy in that readerly moment and memory. They did not want to ruin that special magic those books held for them as an adolescent, and as such, they did not want to re-read those books in case they were in fact correct that the gateway books did not age well!
It made me think about my own gateway books. And not necessarily in terms of the books I read as a child to solidify my interest in reading – that had to have been inherent, an always already state of being for me because I cannot ever remember a time when I was not interested in reading, whether it was being read aloud to or reading myself. I do remember the galloping speed I acquired once literate enough to read on my own; I remember devouring hundreds of pages of chapter books at the age of seven. Having quickly outgrown the children’s fiction and young adult fiction sections at our branch library, my parents started taking me to the main library where it was revelation to know I’d never run out of things to read.
That specific childhood magic of reading was somehow lost when I was an adolescent – while I still enjoyed reading, there were few books that had the same magical effects of transcending space and time. I had to wonder what were my gateway books, the books that had shaped my adult consciousness, books that had challenged my world view and had utterly propelled me to some kind of future self. Books that were so formative that sharing them feels almost like revealing a secret. As someone who is not attracted to genre for the sake of genre, I’ve always wondered if that is part of the appeal for dedicated followers — that genre allows for a return to the pause in space of time that few other forms or media allow for in terms of a complete, mentally immersive takeover.1
What’s fascinating about the concept of the gateway book is that it is not new in literature. The literary equivalent is often ironic and sometimes sincere, but always a meta-textual trope: the book or text that influences a protagonist so intensely it informs the rest of his or her life and thus shapes the outcome of the book it is in.2 Perhaps the most intense and profoundly disturbing in its consequences is the one portrayed in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)3:
It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
The book in question, A Rebours by the French aestheticist J.K. Huysman, is central to the novel’s plot and Dorian’s ultimate moral shift from the naïve and innocent young man to a monstrous devil. While this “yellow book” (as it’s described by Oscar Wilde) is itself a commentary on the power of art and literature to influence morality, a subject Wilde himself was passionate about as an artist and gay man in Victorian society, the novel asks whether Dorian Gray is fundamentally influenced by the book, those around him, or his own desire to be something represented by this book.
What has always fascinated me about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the nuanced discussion on how literature and art can reaffirm our already primed viewpoints and ideas of the world or entirely dissuade us of them in the first place. The yellow book merely acts as the tangible placeholder for what Dorian is already set out to do. He as the reader also determines how to interpret the yellow book and use it as his own source of inspiration, just as we as readers must interpret Dorian’s own actions.
In fact, Wilde wrote a preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray following the novel’s initial magazine publication and subsequent criticism that he was corrupting his readers with the immorality of Dorian Gray:
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
What Wilde posits is that the artist is the one who simply records events and once the text is in the world the audience or critics interpret it. Most of Dorian’s immoral actions actually consist of are kept purposely vague in the book, as are the specific influences of the yellow book, forcing the reader to fill in the gaps and imagine the details, sordid or not. In fact, one would say that it is the bad reader who decides that Dorian Gray, a simple man easily manipulated whose sole pursuit is an unhealthy obsession with self-image, is one worth emulating. Perhaps a morality tale for influencers?
While most readers are not bad readers (I always hope),4 there is a power to certain books to shape a certain moment or reaffirm identities or even offer a glimpse at what is not yet possible for ourselves, but is not out of the question. I have often written here about books that have reminded me of my own past experiences, whether the awkwardness of freshman year of college or failed attempts at being an artist. However, all of these books have elicited retrospection.
Gateway books are the the books that offered a propulsion towards futurity and an idealized world that somehow was representative of who we want to be. A future readerly self, showing us the way to who we want to be.
To Be Continued in Part 2: My Gateway Books…
And some online recommended reading as placeholder for more books for now:
An excerpt from Hu Anyan’s haunting new novel Living in Low Places
Sainthood in the Digital Age: an article on the canonization of the first millennial saint
I want to think movies and music do this as well, but I often find my mind hard at work during both, trying to digest everything, whereas truly immersive reading has a different cognitive effect.
This is different from most meta-literature, in which a text within a text is discussed or shapes the narrative (similar to a frame narrative). Some examples include Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives.
How embarrassing that in an earlier version I kept referring to the titular “Picture” as “Portrait”. Despite teaching this book many times, I have always mixed the two.
The “bad reader” problem is one in which someone reads a text, but fundamentally takes away the wrong message or does not understand anything beyond the surface level commentary and details. The famous example comes from the realist novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, in which the eponymous protagonist misreads medieval romances as a form of realism and decides to use them as models for her own banal, middle-class life. Problems ensue.