In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:
. . . 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.
I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.
They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.
At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)
Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:
Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.
But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.
Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?
I agree completely with Mr. Hornby…though I would say that people confuse ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging.’ A difficult book is just painful, and requires an act of will to get through. A challenging book is a pleasure to read, you just have to take time every now and than to think about it, or wrestle the ideas out…
The only three difficult books I’ve read in the last couple years: The Detective by Roderick Thorpe, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and Baudolino by Umberto Eco. I desperately want back the hours I spent on these three piles of crap.
Some challenging books I’ve read recently(by no means a comprehensive list): Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, Cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthone Appiah, The Orchard Thief by Cormac McCarthy…
currently reading John Brown: Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. absolutely fantastic, so far…but I’ve always been fascinated by Brown.
Perhaps a different perspective from me? What to I like to read? It depends.
Sometimes it’s a literary classic. A victorian novel of about five pounds by Thomas Hardy. Next it may be a modern techno-thriller. Next a non-fiction history or biography. Then a good murder mystery, especially by a British author. Now light. Now heavy.
My moods and desires for “knowledge” or “entertainment” change. If I start a light comedy and don’t find it funny or engaging I put it down.
My point? There is (or OUGHT to be) room in the world of books for both ends of the spectrum from “fluff” to “struggle through.” For me, it depends on what I want at that particular time. But I hate the intellectual snobbery that says disparagingly, “Oh, that’s just commercial fiction.”
Yes.
Let us be free of the Victorian attitude that we masses must be “improved” and archly “educated,” or ‘re-educated” as the case may be.
Let us be free to choose as our interests take us.
Is this a theme similar to the lit-chick vs. chick-lit fuss?