The joys of reading

If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity — and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured — then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits.

Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Nick Hornby

It's better to read a romantic thriller that we may not even remember a week from now than to not read a great work of literature. That seems to be Nick Hornby's point. So many people attempt to read some important book they think might be good for them, then soon fall asleep or get so bored after four or five pages that they close it and turn on the TV. His advice is the same as that of good teachers suggesting summer reading to students who don't like to read: Find something you like and read that. Reading a Spiderman comic book beats not reading anything.

Many adults are those students who didn't like to read now all grown up. Reading a book still seems like work. It seems boring. One thing you can say about a television program is that it keeps playing even if you fall asleep or even if you lose interest or get distracted by something else. You can pause your DVR, the electronic equivalent of a bookmark, but you won't feel guilty if you don't. Nor will you feel stupid. 

Or you can change the channel. And that's what Hornby suggests for wannabe readers who just can't seem to get into a challenging book. Don't pause it. Change the channel. Get another book. You are not in school anymore. There is no required reading. Nobody says you have to read something by Marilynne Robinson, no matter how good other people, including Hornby, say it is.

"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good," Hornby says. Not true, he argues. Some books are like broccoli. They may be good for us, but we'd rather have some fries. Hornby says go ahead and eat the fries.

Stepping into a large bookstore I am often struck not just by how many books there are but also by how many of them don't interest me in the slightest. And I am someone who always has several books of various kinds and various levels of difficulty going at once. I may not like most of the books in a bookstore, but somebody else will. Nobody says we have to like a book somebody else raves about.

I know how hard it is to put aside a book that fails to interest me. I recently did that with a Richard Powers novel, and it made me feel stupid. Did I discard it too quickly? Should I have stuck with it? Yet eventually I put it aside and picked up a Miss Julia novel. Some fries, in other words. Nick Hornby would have been proud.