Reading Books Discourages Reading

For the last six months I've been reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I began it right around the time I graduated last year under the assumption that I would need to try extra hard to read once I was no longer a student.

I read the first 100 pages of the book quickly. They were interesting and entertaining and I was surprised at how funny James could be. However, since that time I have slowed down considerably. As of today I'm just over halfway through the book, which unfortunately is 300 pages in. I'm to the point where I've invested enough time to not want to quit, but I've also pretty much lost all interest in continuing.

The result of this situation is that I rarely read. And when I say that, I don't simply mean that I rarely read The Portrait, I mean I rarely read anything at all (other than massive amounts of news). Despite having two degrees in English, my literary consumption has dwindled to almost nothing. Since I began teaching at Salt Lake Community College this month I usually have an hour or so between classes, so sometimes I read then. That means that on a good week I'll read for maybe three hours.

I think that this is one of the great problems with literature and one of the reasons many people today never read at all. The "good" books that people are told they should read just seem insufferably boring. Though The Portrait is a classic and a relatively entertaining book, it drags on for over 600 pages without ever doing much. It describes settings, attitudes, and lifestyles that modern readers not only can't relate to but that they can't even visualize or comprehend. It's so utterly foreign in its sensibilities that it hardly even makes sense and whatever "meaning" an average reader might glean from its pages becomes lost.

Consequently, reading classic literature is a discouraging activity. Every time I think about reading I think about what a chore it is and how it brings me no pleasure. And eventually, I just watch videos on Hulu instead. Of course, I do enjoy reading (even some classic books), but having to slog through The Portrait has forced that interest into dormancy.

A similar situation happened to me last summer. I had just finished my master's thesis and decided I need to read something. I picked up Willa Cather's The Professor's House and almost the exact same thing happened: I started off strong, lost interest, didn't want to give up, and thus barely read anything at all for a couple of months while I tried to finish the book. Sure I could have picked up a second book to read simultaneously, but when the first book had already got me so down on reading I couldn't find the motivation to do that.

I can only assume that this is the sort of thing that happens to the masses of people that don't ever read literature. They try to read something (or are forced to do it in high school), find that they hate the experience, and never try it again. The problem, then, isn't TV or "the media" or whatever else is the fashionable thing to accuse of corrupting society. The problem are the books themselves. Luckily in my case I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick in between Cather and James, which book reminded me that there is in fact some literature that is both entertaining and edifying.

This post is, of course, diagnostic and not prognostic or proscriptive. I have no solution, (other than to encourage people to stop forcing others to read things like Shakespeare that will turn them off to reading, which is hardly a solution). However, I think that those who are interested in literature need to acknowledge the fact that reading can be a tremendous pleasure for some, but a tremendous pain for a lot of others. Simply saying otherwise isn't going to change that fact.