The Rewards of Difficult Books

On Dante's "Inferno" and what it can teach us about the pleasures and rewards of reading challenging books.

For a while there, a few years back, I became lazy in my reading. I’d spent half a year reading only for pleasure, a motivation that shouldn’t be devalued but that works to greatest effect in tandem with enlightenment, growth, education, and other high-minded reasons to read. Worse, the kind of pleasure I was seeking from my reading had narrowed to the mere pleasure of a structurally familiar plot. I wanted my books to reassure me, to alleviate the anxieties caused by that year’s ordeals, to affirm a pattern I found stabilising and soothing.

There’s nothing wrong with that in small doses, of course, no more than there’s anything wrong with dessert after dinner. But there must be dinner as well. So, I decided to return to the books that offered intellectual nourishment. David Foster Wallace once said that the job of good fiction is “to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. I’d been comforted by fiction for long enough; it was time to be challenged.

Never one to do things by…