Adventurous readers

True readers boldly go where they haven't gone before.

Michael Dirda, Browsings

One of the advantages of reviewing books for a newspaper for so many years, in addition to all those free books, was that it forced me to read a great variety of books by a great variety of authors. Some reviewers somehow manage to specialize. They may review only mysteries or only romances or only children's books or only literary novels. But you may have to work for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to do this. Most book reviewers probably have to sample a little bit of everything.

Of course, reading a variety of books is something that qualifies a person to review books in the first place. So, chicken? Or the egg?

Michael Dirda

But Michael Dirda above is not just talking about book reviewers like himself. He speaks of "true readers," then gives a definition of that term: those who "boldly go where they haven't gone before." True readers, he suggests, are explorers. Adventurers. Astronauts. They may never write a book review in their lives, yet they have at least sampled William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Patterson, Emily Dickinson, Danielle Steel, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel West, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, Zane Grey, etc. (No, I have never read Danielle Steel. I guess I am not really that adventurous.)

But in the same paragraph of the same essay, Dirda makes another, equally important comment. "Well, I say if you don't like them, don't read them. You're not in school any more. Even the best mountaineers aren't always up for an ascent of Mount Everest."

Sometimes being bold means, no, I'm not going to read that. I don't care if it is a bestseller. Or one of the great books. Being bold can mean not reading any more of a book or an author one has tried and found boring.

Bold readers don't always read the same kinds of books by the same authors, books they know they will like. Bold readers experiment, sampling other authors, other writing styles, other kinds of books. But they don't necessarily finish them. Sometimes it takes courage to give up.