Leisurely

According to Nick Hornby, "If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity. . .then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits." I'm all for the joys of reading, but what strikes me most about Hornby's encomium to pleasure reading is that he doesn't finally seem in his own attitude toward reading to be following his own advice.

Among the reasons Hornby gives for his own need for reading is that "I'm a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how." So much for the "dubious benefits" of reading. One wonders why, if Hornby finds "inspiration and education" in his reading, he's so quick to suggest that others give in to their natural inclination to avoid the "effortful" and put aside "difficult" books. Presumably not all of the books that have taught Nick Hornby how "to get better" as a writer have been easy reads that merely reinforced what he already knew. And what's true for a writer is also true for a reader: You can learn "to get better" by reading books that challenge you, that make you reconsider what makes for a "good read" even if such reconsideration at first requires--gasp!-- some "hard work."

Hornby also reads because early in his life he discovered that books were "desperately important for my sanity." Again, this seems to go well beyond the notion that reading is a "leisure activity." It even implies that for Hornby reading is an indispensable, life-enhancing pursuit that he won't do without. Yet he is entirely willing to see other readers deprived of the kind of self-testing reading experience he himself appears to value. What's up with that?

I am not the kind of critic who believes in reading books that are "good for you." Many of the posts on this blog have argued that seeking some kind of external utility of this sort is precisely the wrong way to find value in works of literature. But I can't help but interpret Hornby's article as a fit of pique against "reviews pages and our cultural commentators" (maybe especially Harold Bloom, whose recent book How to Read and Why is echoed in the title of Hornby's essay?), who have not always found great value in his fiction. Combine this with his denigration of "contemporary literary fiction" and its "prose that draws attention to itself," and you get a pretty distasteful melange of jealousy, condescension, and bad faith being passed off as a defense of the Common Reader.

Comments

[Carl V.]

Based on your comments and examples I think you are right. There is a sort of circular logic going on there in which he comes around to cancel out his own statements with examples to the contrary. I don't know many readers who do not read for pleasure. I would assume that those who find little pleasure and much difficulty in the activity are those who are being forced to read for some reason.

I am not a big advocate of books like Bloom's. I do not want someone telling me what I should get out of the experience or how to be a critical reader. It isn't my paid profession to be a critic. I prefer to read what I want and the gammit runs from the most simplistic, predictable plot science fiction books to classic literature. I read for the mood I am in, for fun, because I like certain authors and like certain subjects. Overall I think I have no problem extracting the pleasure out of the reading experience. Seems pretty easy to me.

[Rodney Welch]

I disagreed strongly with Uncle Fester on several points, namely this one: "here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do."

What in the hell does that mean? Kinda depends on the person, no? Couldn't you just as well say "nothing good will happen to you" if you make love or go swimming or eat lobster? For some people, that statement is perfectly correct, but not for me, and it certainly isn't true regarding certain novels (classic or Booker) I've read, though not all, of course. Good things did happen; I got an artistic experience out of it that deepened my sense of the world, the same thing Uncle Fester supposedly looks for.

There's something patronizing about Fester preaching to the masses that they need not suffer through books they don't enjoy -- despite the couple he cited, there are a lot of people who aren't suffering.

Enjoyment is a funny, strange, unusual and unpredictable thing. What we enjoy may not be what merely entertains; maybe it's what interests us. John Cheever always, to me, had the last word on this subject: "Interest is the first canon of aesthetics." That's what motivates our choices in a lot of ways -- what intrigues us, what draws us in, what is unusual, what is odd, what is not part of our world and what we could not imagine. It's fine to go ahead and encourage people not to feel any guilt about reading cheap fiction, but I think there are a lot of readers who aren't interested in cheap fiction -- it doesn't work for them. They want something more just as they want something more in movies or music.

Uncle Fester seems to be making an argument against having any kind of taste or sense.

[Kate S.]

The all too common opposition of pleasure and difficulty in discussions about reading is a false one as far as I'm concerned. I do sometimes get pleasure from "easy" books but I also get a great deal of pleasure from difficult books and generally that pleasure is because of the difficulty, not in spite of it. Interacting with a difficult text, puzzling over aspects of it and working things out for myself rather than just taking what's handed to me can be enormously satisfying.

[Condalmo]

Decidedly less diplomatic than my take on the essay (at my site), but certainly not wrong. I'm wary of the danger of being a snooty academic/intellectual who looks down on the John Grisham readers of the world. It takes chutzpah to pursue reading of any sort, given how marginalized it is. At the same time, Hornby certainly can't write a well-thought essay, can he?

I clearly have a lot of conflicted feelings on the matter.

[Rekekekex]

I do not now, nor will I ever, understand the evangelical desire on the part of some writers -- usually those who, by dint of success unimaginable by any but a small percentage of writers, are afforded a prominent soapbox -- to slash and condemn "difficulty" as if it posed some sort of threat to their continued dominance of the popular audience. I'll grant that the willful lust for ignorance may arouse a small dark joy in each of their hearts, but to proselytize..? The vast gaps in my own knowledge are a source of humility to me, not pride.

[arthur]

For similarly enraging condescension, see Franzen's New Yorker piece about Gaddis, "contract" and "status."

[Finn Harvor]

In May of this year, Rachel Donadio wrote on the topic of sales of literary vs. commercial fiction and drew the analogy of the former being like an "elegant but impoverished aristocrat" and the latter a "noveau riche spouse". I don't know if it's a comparison everyone in the lit world would feel all that comfortable with, but it's worth remembering that literary fiction has never been viewed by publishers as mainly about profit. And the reason it hasn't is simple: it's never been about popularity, either -- at least, not on a mass scale. So it's difficult to see why Hornby should be so concerned that literary fiction prove itself by becoming popular (or retaining some level of popularity he assumes it has; but I don't know what precisely he thinks that would be because the whole piece is filled with vague generalities).

Hornby's demand (shit, I just about wrote "Horny") that all literary writing compete with image-based culture proposes a doomed strategy: simplifying writing the way he suggests would only lead to pressure on many writers to dumb their work down. Personally I think writers would do better by experimenting more, not less. Of course, "experimentation" is an extremely open-ended strategy, too, and one person's successful experiment is another's pretentious failure. But at least it allows creative people the freedom to create work how they want and then see how audiences react to it.

Now, if only the publishing houses would be a little more open to new work instead of battening down the hatches.........

[Kevin Holtsberry]

Mr. Hornby needs to embrace the power of "all of the above." He seems to live in a world where one can only read one particular style or type of book. Why? I read almost every type of genre from literary fiction to spy thrillers to Christian mystery to classics. I read journalistic non-fiction, polemical diatribes, academic history, etc.

Sometimes I just want an enjoyable easy read. Sometimes I relish a challenging and "difficult" work of fiction. Sometimes I enjoy a book that is mostly about language and aesthetics other times I want a tight plot and a suspenseful story line.

Some books make you think, other make you feel, other simply entertain you, some do all of the above. Is Hornby incapable of figuring this out? He got paid to write this stuff?