Don't Take It Out On the Books!

Recently in an article on Book Riot’s Facebook page, a writer/academic boasted of her lifelong disdain of a “great” work that everyone is supposed to like, but apparently, no one does. The work in question is Moby Dick, and the writer congratulated herself for finally tossing the work aside, realizing that you can be an academic without sacrificing your own sense of taste. On the one hand, she’s exactly right: being an academic doesn’t mean conforming to a rigid standard of taste or values, since no one is more argumentative or less homogenous than a group of English professors. I should know—I’m one myself, and ran the gauntlet of a PhD program in English literature with a highly divisive group of mentors. Indeed, one of my favorite professors would often tell us, “Jane Eyre is a piece of shit—read Wuthering Heights instead!” I was far too timid to contradict her at the time, but the question always forming on my lips was, “er, why can’t we read them both? Does liking one necessarily exclude the other?”

But to return to the article in question: why is rejecting a work a badge of pride or an arbiter of taste? Of course we’re not all going to like the same books, or appreciate the same music, but that has less to do with conforming than our individual aesthetics. I get that the writer felt pressured (by whom?) to like and appreciate Moby Dick, and by defying it to all and sundry, she felt she was asserting her independence from the academy. My only question is, why take it out on a book? Books don’t care what you think of them; they don’t have a secret agenda to make you feel stupid; and they certainly don’t belong to a secret club of hipster academic rock stars. Yes, a group of hipster academic rock stars might carry specific books as icons of their own importance, but that’s their choice—not the book’s.

I think the most tragic mistake we make as readers is grafting other people’s personalities onto books we haven’t read. A student recently told me, “I rarely read books that are assigned in class; I prefer to chose my own reading material.” While that sounds very enlightened and independent, it also says “any book an authority figure likes is immediately branded with their image.” So he rejects the book as an effigy for the professor, rather than putting his ego aside and taking the book on its own terms. After all, what if a book he might have read himself is on a class reading list? Does it suddenly become anathema? Does he pretend he never wanted to read it? Or does he actually convince himself he never did? Should reading books be so complicated? Isn’t the point of reading to learn, to dream, to imagine, to expand, to travel, to exalt, to fulfill, to explore, to be something more than you are? So why settle for so much less?

Okay, granted, you might have every intention of liking Moby Dick, or Beowulf, or To The Lighthouse and a dozen pages in, you’re nodding off. So you toss it aside and try again a few days later...with the same result. Maybe you try again in a month, even a year, with the same experience of tedium or blatant dislike. How could you respond so negatively to a work embraced and loved and taught by millions? It’s natural to feel a little embarrassed, as if everyone is laughing at a joke that doesn’t seem in the least bit amusing. And often that vague embarrassment turns into resentment—and then a total rejection of the book in question. Some people assume it’s a conspiracy or an act of pretension; no one really likes that book—it’s just something people say! Another click bait article on FB recently announced, “25 books that if people say they’ve read that proves they’re lying,” with rather tame favorite such as Pride and Prejudice and 1984. Is it really that simple? If two people disagree about a book one of them has to be lying?

Or is the answer much more complex? Books, like all creative art, have to be examined from multiple perspectives. Reading alone doesn’t make you the master of all books, and no matter how many places you’ve lived, you’re not ‘worldly’ enough to understand every book from every culture. Every book has its own aesthetic DNA which resonates when a reader shares a similar genetic makeup—either through their life experiences, or the books they’ve read, or their hometown, or their thought processes. Not liking a book isn’t necessarily a failure of the book—and it’s certainly not a failure in you. What is a failure is when you censure a book for not meeting your standards and/or assume that a book that bores you isn’t a book worth reading. Even worse is when you go on a crusade to stop anyone from reading that book...which is what the author of the article seemed to undertake as a newly minted academic (her poor students!).

Simply put, you will hate, dislike, be bored by, or simply find yourself indifferent to very good books. Even some of the best. Even worse, other people will hate, dislike, be bored by, and simply find themselves indifferent to the books you love most in the world. Some of these people will be your best friends...one of them may even be your husband or wife (gasp!). And it’s okay. Life goes on.

However, as we grow older our tastes change, broaden, deepen, are refined. The books we loved as teenagers don’t always carry on into late adulthood. Likewise, books we find deep meaning in after 50 might have infuriated us at 25. So how do we read for both or multiple selves—the one we are today, and the one we hope to grow into? Here’s what I would suggest if you find yourself at odds with a book that everyone else claims to love:

* Read some reviews of the book. Not Amazon or Goodreads reviews (ye gods!), but a review by a professional critic or another writer or academic. Or even better still, read the Introduction or Afterward often published in editions of classic books. Such reviews/intros will give you a fresh perspective on a book the way a college class can invite multiple discussions on a single page. The more voices you invite into the reading experience, the more you might see—and appreciate—in the book before putting it down again.

* Learn more about the author. Often we dislike a book because it seems to exist in a vacuum. If you don’t know anything about Flaubert, and his book seems tiresome, figure out who he was. Where did he come from? Who did he love? Why did he write this book? Connecting a book with an actual human being changes things immediately. It makes it real, a precious object rather than a mass-produced pile of pulp. It might also explain why some of the things that annoy or confuse you are actually there.

* Figure out what else was being written at the time. This is especially important for the so-called classics. Reading Candide might confuse you until you realize what Voltaire is directly responding to. This will help you understand much of the satire in the little volume, but also how courageous he was in standing up against tyranny and the dictates of popular taste. Also, seeing how one book responds to and expands upon another helps you appreciate the “spider web” effect of literature, and how everything exists in a symbiotic relationship—even books by authors who used to hate one another. Especially authors who hated one another!

* Give it time. We often think that we’re the most advanced, enlightened, educated, emancipated person right now that we’ll ever be. And it’s never true. In a year you might think differently. Things will change. A relationship (or lack thereof) will change how you read a book. So will a change of job. An election. Even the time of year. Nothing is more true than this: your taste will change. Not get “better,” perhaps, but evolve. The book you toss aside today might one day become your constant companion. And nothing is more annoying than admitting that to a friend you convinced never to read a specific book.

So don’t hate books. It’s not worth it. Hate politics, dogmas, bureaucracies, secret societies, even a few people while you’re at it. But not the books. They represent the best of what we do, and they last because they offer us more than we could possibly become ourselves. We diminish ourselves when declare a holy war against art. Because only art itself is holy, not our self-righteous and often hypocritical ideals.