A lot of people think that reading, especially critical reading, is
on the decline. The thinking goes that we spend too much time
distracted on devices. And when we turn the devices off long enough
to read a book, we read the intellectual equivalent of junk food.
Not only is reading
alive and well in America, but we suffer from confidence issues: we
wonder whether we read well, with proper focus and attentiveness, and
with genuine discernment.
Read what gives you
delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the
King James Version of the Bible..
Don’t turn reading
into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or
(shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined
appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count
words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the
“calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise
that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with
grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading
at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “cosmical and ethical
hygiene.”
Read what gives you
delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And
even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by
what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady
intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of
restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in
part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily
encountered, easily assessed.
The poet W. H. Auden
once wrote:
When one thinks of
the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous
about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should
be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit—for our own personal
Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.
The Pleasure of
Books
What should you do
if you’re reading a book that fails to delight you?
For if this
particular book is not giving me pleasure now, it may give me
pleasure later, if I allow it to do so. Maybe it’s just starting
slowly but will pick up speed; maybe I haven’t fully grasped the
idiom it’s working in but eventually will figure it out; maybe the
problem is not with the book but with my own powers of concentration
because I slept fitfully last night. …
Many maybes. But in
any case, I have to decide whether to persevere, and for a long time
my default position was to continue. Indeed, I was twenty years old
before I failed to finish a book I had started: it was The
Recognitions, a novel by William Gaddis, and I gave up, after an
extended period of moral paralysis, at page 666. That day I grieved,
feeling that I had been forced from some noble pedestal; but I work
up the next morning with my soul singing. After all, though I would
never get back the hours I had devoted to those 666 pages, the hours
I would have spent ploughing through the remaining four hundred were
mine to spend as I could. I had been granted time as a pure and sweet
gift.