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.

Reading, Books, and Things That Are Way Better

There’s nothing inherently good about reading.  Especially literature.

 

A few days ago some of us graduate instructors were talking about what we were going to do after we finished school this summer.  I mentioned that didn’t think I wanted to become an English professor because books just aren't any more important than other kinds of media.  For example, reading “The Wasteland” is fine, but in the end there doesn’t seem to be any reason why that's better than watching Kill Bill.  In fact, if we see the point of reading literature as making us more critical thinkers, more understanding of the human condition, more active participants in our culture, etc., “reading” other media (like film) actually seems better than reading books. 

 

Obviously reading literature is a good thing.  It can be both fun and enlightening; however, I also haven’t seen any reason why it should be privileged over other activities.  When pressed to give good reasons why literature is better than TV, for example, I’ve heard people say that reading engages the mind more, that TV rots the brain, that TV is passive and books active, etc.  Obviously certain kinds of media are different from one another, but the reasons for elevating literature generally seem both vague and unsubstantiated.  Why is one more active than another?  Are the ways we approach different media inherently embedded in that media?  Might some people approach media differently than others?  In the end I’d take something by Alfred Hitchcock over something by Herman Melville any day.  Frankly, I’ll also get more intellectual stimulation (as well as all those other things that supposedly result from reading literature) from watching The Office than I ever will from reading “Beowulf.” 

 

All this isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy reading.  I do.  Probably quite a bit more so than a lot of people (after all, I did get a master’s degree in English).  My point however, is that there’s no reason to fixate solely on literature.  Some people like it and others don’t and it appears that the value of literature boils down to personal taste.  Whatever we’re trying to get out of reading can also be accomplished through other means, and those means ought to be given the same esteem.  On the other hand, if we claim that literature is the only way to achieve certain ends (like critical thinking, or better citizenship, or greater empathy, or whatever), then those people who end up disliking books may also end up disliking those ends as well. 

 

For example, I once read an essay about teaching poetry to high school students.  The author of the essay wrote that she told her students to read a classic poem and if they didn’t understand it to read it again.  If they still didn’t get it, they had to read it over and over until they did.  This approach to teaching paints a romantic and mystical image, but ultimately just alienates people.  It implies that there is something to get, and that that something will eventually reveal itself to the worthy disciple.  Yet, imagine if this was the way English speakers were taught Russian or Chinese.  The teacher would give them some text in the language and tell them to stare at it.  If they didn’t get it just keep staring until they did.  Obviously that would be ineffective and would probably lead the students to lose interest in the learning process altogether.

 

As a reader of literature and other media, I hope that we begin to see literature as simply one of many valid forms of discourse.  It is good, but so are a lot of things that also need to be taught, read, and discussed.  Hopefully in the future things like TV, movies, fashion, food, etc. will get just as much attention as traditional books.  In the meantime, I just can’t see how insisting that literature is great will ever prove that it is.