Taking Books Seriously
On the reader's responsibility, the writer's paradox, and a master of metaphor.
“Someone might ask: ‘Why write about all this, why remember that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.”
[Vasily Grossman, “A Writer at War”]
There’s a practice in Stoicism where you imagine everything good in your life suddenly vanishing. You’re fired from your job, your bank account is drained empty, your house burns down, everyone you love dies, and for good measure you inexplicably and irrevocably smell like fish all the time. Part two of the exercise allows you to relax into the safe knowledge that none of that is true, which leads to a greater sense of gratitude for having all of those things you just imagined losing.
Every so often, something like that Stoic practice unwittingly happens when I realise that most people since the beginning of civilisation couldn’t read. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans could not decipher the lines and dots the elite of their societies chiseled into stone or scribbled onto paper. In fact, global literacy only became the majority condition for our species some time around 1970.
Put like that, I’m forced to see how lucky I am.
But readers like me (and I’m assuming like you, dear reader) are luckier still: a number of recent surveys show that most literate adults in various Western countries haven’t read a single book in the last twelve months. In fact, one survey even classed a “reader” as someone who said they’d read one book or listened to an audiobook in the past year.1 The point here is that, for reasons I did not create nor curate and so can accept no credit for, I am fortunate enough to be someone who reads a lot. Around a hundred times more than that one-a-year reader.2
I too often forget this truth, that reading is a privilege. I take this privilege so for granted that reading can feel like a mere pastime, a leisure activity graded on how well it entertains me. This is conveniently relaxing for my sense of ethical duty; we owe nothing, after all, to our pleasures. They serve us or they don’t, that’s all.
But what if that privilege we so enjoy also demands certain responsibilities? What if our relationship with literature was less like an infinite ATM from which withdrawals never end and more like an actual relationship, one with give and take, with a spirited sense of reciprocity?
There’s the brute fact to consider that without readers opening the covers of a book and giving themselves over to its words, the book is dead. Or dormant. Or at the very least like the proverbial tree falling in that lonely forest — it makes no difference. We who love books must give love to books. That’s the first of our responsibilities as readers.
Then there’s the work and dedication and care and faith that go into the writing of a book, and into its publication. When I sit down to read, I’m not only connecting with the words on the page; I’m in communion with the mind of the author. As I enjoy the story, the characters, the use of language, and the ideas, I can’t help but think of the person these things came from. They deserve as much care from me as a reader as they put into the crafting of their novel. Being a writer myself, I feel I owe other writer’s this much: to take their book seriously.
And if it’s our readerly duty to read well, then it makes sense to see it as our responsibility also to read better. To nurture our critical abilities. To read more widely. To discover other ways of seeing and of being, other minds and values. Perhaps we have a responsibility to those whom we’d overlooked before widening our literary gaze. This has been the professed goal of university curricula for decades now. There are very mixed things to be said about their methods and results, but the fundamental urge to be catholic and generous in our reading is inextricable from the nature of great literature.
Vasily Grossman believed (see the above quotation) that readers have a civic duty to learn certain things about the world through their reading. We might learn precisely what Grossman wanted us to learn through his writing on war. Or we might learn about AI, Neuralink, uploading our consciousness to the cloud, and other transhumanist hells. Or we could learn about humane responses to factory farming and techno-futurist solutions to climate change. The list of things literature can teach you is endless, so my method has always been simple:
Pick a problem that interests you, or one you think you can help solve (in however small a way), then learn about it. Read as much and as widely as you can.
Also:
“The Writer’s Paradox”
Here’s the full essay by Ahmet Altan.
I’ll quote from myself in an essay on daily reading to explain why I recommend Ahmet Altan’s essay in relation to our readerly duties:
“From a prison cell in Turkey, where he’d been sentenced to spend his life, Ahmet Altan wrote an essay called The Writer’s Paradox (2017). In it, he assures the world outside of his prison cell:
‘Wherever you lock me up I will travel the world with the wings of my infinite mind.
Besides, I have friends all around the world who help me travel, most of whom I have never met.
Each eye that reads what I have written, each voice that repeats my name, holds my hand like a little cloud and flies me over the lowlands, the springs, the forests, the seas, the towns and their streets. They host me quietly in their houses, in their halls, in their rooms.
I travel the whole world in a prison cell.’
When we journey through books, we carry their ideas new places too. Reading — I realise as I have before and will again at other times in my life — is not only a pleasure, it is a responsibility.”
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by
It’s a little odd to include this book in this particular edition of Notes, because Hornby raises an eyebrow at suggestions of books being things we ought to view as any kind of duty, my main theme above. But a) the reality is that I’ve been re-reading “Spree”, so I’m honestly reporting that, and b) this provides some balance. Reading can’t be all about self-improvement or proving one’s cultural mettle; much of it (probably most of it) should be about joy. [Note: much more on this in the next edition.]
“The Complete Polysyllabic Spree” is a wonderfully big-hearted and surprisingly pugilistic account of Hornby’s reading in the early 2000s. Apart from his sense of humour, which is sharp enough to cause paper cuts while reading, I found myself returning to it because of Hornby’s opinions on various aspects of a reading life. I often found myself deeply disagreeing, and every time enjoying the disagreement.
“If you don’t read the classics, or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you” — well, sure, I can nod along with that. “More importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do” — what?! The man’s lost his mind!
Whether I agreed or not with his takes, it was always a joy to read them and to argue with him. (I’m pleased to reveal that I came out the victor in all of these one-sided arguments.) Hornby’s ability to interject these asides that show up the contrasting angles of his mind is one I deeply appreciate in the current culture of AI-written slop (which contains nothing surprising or indicative of a soul) and the achingly-earnest life-writing that appears in so many blogs and substacks. That stuff seems intent on telling you how seriously to take what they write, by making clear just how seriously they take themselves. It turns out I need a little snide with my sincerity.
One more observation: Hornby is a master of the metaphor. I was annoyed with how good he is at giving freshness to familiar ideas. Describing an admired novel: “[It] wasn’t just up my street; it was actually knocking on my front door and peering through the letterbox to see if I was in”. Fucking hell, I muttered to myself with a grin.
Later, in a discussion of how modern novels are frequently praised for being “sparely written”, Hornby points out that “not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful”. (This is one of the ways in which they fail to capture the fullness of life, because the human condition is tragic, of course, but also, often, painfully funny.) He then gives us this great bit about why spare writing is allergic to humour:
“Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you’re doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they’re the first things to go.”
A brilliantly developed metaphor that’s equal parts surprising and intuitive (as the best metaphors tend to be), and he just drops it into a larger paragraph as if he’s a literary Midas who spits out gold like this all the time, no big deal. Needless to say (as everyone does before wasting your time further by saying it) I’m envious of his talent.
If I have a sneaky cigarette after a few too many drinks on my birthday, am I a smoker? If I only read one book a year, am I a reader? This seems like one of those philosophical brainteasers, like how many grains of sand make a pile of sand? Maybe there’s an answer, but I don’t have it, so I won’t dwell on the matter here.
Speaking of philosophical questions not to be given space in this column: the question of whether reading so much does, in fact, make me fortunate. The case for reading as a good in a person’s life seems too easy to bother spelling out. For the purposes of this column, it only matters that I think it’s a good thing, therefore my feeling of great luck at being someone who does it.