We live in a culture of perpetual distraction. Last year, the average American checked their cellphone 205 times per day — at work, at home, in bed, while driving and everywhere else. Life is a constant scroll and search –– for a TikTok video, a stock price, a new restaurant or millions of other bits of information. This 24/7 access to pretty much everything in the world is probably why we seem to have become a less patient and more anxious culture.
Which is why I found it both surprising and hopeful to learn that book sales — physical books, e-books and audiobooks — have risen in recent years. Yes, people are still buying and reading books. In 2023, Americans bought 767 million of them!
Why does this matter? Books would seem to be the antithesis of — or at least an antidote for — the digital tornado of info swirling around us. Reading a book requires a different kind of thinking. It is not hurried and reactive, but deliberate and reflective. And to read well requires significant patience and attentiveness — essential human qualities that are sometimes in short supply.
These two qualities are abundantly evident in the life and work of renowned Chicago literary critic Donna Seaman. In her new memoir, “River of Books,” she tells her history with books and reading — an assignment, we soon learn, she is well suited for. But her book is also unique in that she artfully weaves her history of reading Chicago writers with her own story.
Seaman grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of parents who loved art and literature and reading to her. In elementary school, she was enamored with language, with words — with “march,” for example, because it’s a noun, a verb and a month! In adolescence, she was insecure and “book-obsessed.” During those confusing years, “reading was a way to escape the chaos and the pressure and to make sense of it,” she writes. “I was engrossed not overwhelmed. The me I despised disappeared.”
After college at the Kansas City Art Institute, Seaman moved to Chicago, which she describes as a “bricky town of harsh weather and bluster, hard work and avid play, pragmatism and creativity, violence and kindness.” The neighborhoods, she writes, are “punctuated by humble churches and cave-like taverns, shoe-string family restaurants and noisy laundromats.”
All of the jobs Seaman found in Chicago somehow involved books. She landed a position at the Newberry Library doing book restoration while also working nights at a small bookstore to help pay her rent. As she describes this time in her life, she weaves her personal history with the broader history of the city. We learn about Bughouse Square (Washington Square Park), across the street from the Newberry, which once was pitched as “Chicago’s Premiere Free Speech Forum.” And that Studs Terkel, who lived nearby, often stopped by Bughouse to listen to the “open air debates” from the “politically agitated” soapbox orators. In later years, Seaman came to know Terkel and interview him in various contexts.
In addition to Terkel, other key Chicago writers are folded into the memoir: Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Sandra Cisneros and Lorraine Hansberry. Seaman situates these writers in Chicago literary history — including the stories behind their classic works, such as “The House on Mango Street,” “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Division Street.”
After the Newberry, Seaman’s next book job was at the DePaul University Law Library. She took this position because it allowed her to attend DePaul tuition-free, and thus work on her master of arts in English. The library was not on the main campus but in the Loop — which she describes as a crowded, chaotic place:
“People burbled up from the subways, poured down from the El, pushed into buses and elbowed their way out, jousting with umbrellas and hunching in the knifing wind, spinning litter, blowing grit and diving pigeons,” she writes.
As this passage suggests, Seaman is not only adept at reading books but also at reading the city itself. She often captures it with the same arresting diction of the iconic writers she admires.
Seaman followed her job at DePaul with a position at the American Library Association writing and reviewing for Booklist, the ALA’s prestigious magazine.
Today, she is editor-in-chief at Booklist, where she masterfully negotiates the river of books that still flows into her office.
Tom Montgomery Fate’s most recent book is “The Long Way Home,” a collection of essays. He will be offering a free memoir workshop at the Glen Ellyn Public Library in January.
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