On the Pleasures of Not Reading

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/31/on-the-pleasures-of-not-reading/

by dnetesn • 11 years ago

130 59 11 years ago

breischl4• 11 years ago

tl;dr: Don't judge a book by its cover, its marketing, or its author.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

Seems like you actually haven't read the article. That's not what it says -- at best it's a very small part of it just to counterbalance the main part, which advocates that it's alright to do the inverse: judge a book with prejudice.

walshemj• 11 years ago

As long as it not one of those Genere Novels :-)

breischl4• 11 years ago

I don't see anywhere that it says that. It observes that people do that, and that they take pleasure in their prejudices, but nowhere does he approve of that. Rather he talks at length about how it causes people, including himself, to miss out on good authors and books for no good reason - "Our distaste for the trappings of publication puts us off from something great." He also refers to this prejudice as elitist and says he could only defend it with a "pretentious" deflection.

Heck, just look at how he summarizes at the end: "And soon enough, it seems that what passes as taste is an arbitrary extension of our insecurities and neuroses, and that an insane hubris undergirds every value judgment, and that the best thing to do would be to start over, bringing no preconceptions at all into our lives as readers."

If I missed the part where he actually advocates prejudice please point it out.

corndoge2• 11 years ago

Wow. What an incredible article.

There are writers we instinctively, permanently dislike: not only will we never read them, we will quietly relish the not-reading, finding in it a pleasure that can occasionally rival reading itself.

I know exactly what the author is talking about, and it doesn't just apply to books; in fact, a far more visible and pervasive instance of this kind of behavior occurs with respect to music. So many people (and I don't exclude myself in the slightest) are so opinionated about what kind of music is "good" and make such gigantic points of what they refuse to listen to, sometimes to the extent of hostility! I fell into this trap for many years; within the last 6 months I decided to trash my preconceptions and force myself to believe that all music is good, and that "good music" is really just "music I like" since any judgement on the quality of art is necessarily subjective...not to say I completely stopped disliking some music anymore, but at least with that viewpoint I can happily coexist with people that like music I don't.

Anyway, great piece about a behavior lots of us engage in but few of us like to admit :P

shaunxcode• 11 years ago

I once tried to do this with my preconceptions about music. Phish and 311 were still terrible (to my ears).

bitwize2• 11 years ago

Hope you don't live in New England. Phish are gods here; publicly disliking them is very nearly grounds for lynching.

corndoge2• 11 years ago

Yeah, but at least you become able to acknowledge and understand (if not through direct experience) why other people like music you don't. Plus i've found that dropping a lot of my judgemental attitudes towards music resulted in a much larger breadth of material to listen to since I didn't hate myself for listening to it.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Pretty sure a lot of the attraction of Phish is when using psychedelics. So if you just tried to play some of their songs normally then it might not have the same impact.

brazzledazzle2• 11 years ago

I've been on a similar path, a lot more pop music has become accessible to me even if only temporarily (it tends to get old fast). But I still can't enjoy almost any (modern) country music and I can't yet figure out if it's truly my taste or not.

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I can relate to that. Over the past 10 years or so I've really tried to broaden my musical horizons. I mean, look, I'm a metal-head. Full-stop. I like heavy-metal and I think heavy-metal will be my favorite music until I die. But for years I thought that anything that wasn't metal (or classical) was crap. Rap? Feh... had no use for that stuff. Dance music? Bah... maybe for a couple of hours while I was at a club, IF I was really drunk. Country? BARF And so on.

But then I started listening to more rap.. and a little more... and a little more... and while it'll never be my favorite genre, I'd developed a real appreciation for rap / hip-hop and listen to the stuff quite regularly now. Same for a lot of electronic / techno / house / trance stuff. Not my favorite, but certainly on my playlists now. I got really into listening to Giorgio Moroder last year. Love his stuff. 80's New Wave and pop stuff? Again, I've found there's some really amazing stuff there. Sure, there's plenty of crap, but there's some really genuinely fun and interesting stuff there.

And so on... I still don't listen to jazz, and I doubt I'll ever listen to much country or bluegrass, but I definitely decided to open up, and I've been rewarded by the effort.

jqm• 11 years ago

My musical tastes have changed with age. I don't care for hostile or aggressive music I liked years ago. Also, music isn't the important cultural marker it was in youth. I listen to whatever sounds good and I'm in the mood for.

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

Yeah, somewhere around 25 or 30 I apparently decided to grow up and do something similar. I've found that there is now barely any music I actively hate unless the lyrics are genuinely offensive.

(It also helps that I'm no longer in high school or a retail environment, so I'm much less likely to be a captive audience for overplayed radio stuff.)

exelius2• 11 years ago

No true Scotsman, and all... Books are no different than media in general: there was an article posted earlier today on HN about how there are simply too many TV shows right now, and at the same time new shows have to compete with every other great TV show that people might not have watched yet.

Media has finally evolved to the point where the long tail is starting to become the market. This has interesting implications on consumption patterns, though what we're seeing is that the long tail is increasingly served by a single company: YouTube for video (excluding "head" or "neck" content on cable/Netflix/etc), Amazon for books, Steam for games, etc. This points to discovery and market access being a problem: people don't look for the long tail elsewhere because the draw of the long tail is selection, and only one store/site can boast the best selection of obscure content.

Where does this go? I have no idea, honestly. Media is incredibly interesting right now because of that. I don't know if the long tail effect is good or bad for society, but we're seeing it play out in a lot of weird ways right now (Trump's campaign, the awakening that the police may shoot a lot more innocent people than we realized, etc). Polarization (which can be thought of as drifting into the long tail of less-popular ideas) is happening, but it's happening irregularly throughout society without much of a discernible pattern.

walterbell• 11 years ago

The long tail for video is DVD and videotape, only a subset of which are licensed by streaming services.

exelius2• 11 years ago

No way; I bet more video is published to YouTube every week than was published in all of human history before 2000. I have no stats to back up the truth of this statement, but I would be interested in knowing if it's true or not.

ap22213• 11 years ago

If the long tail is happening, than I'm truly oblivious and don't know where to find it. I've been looking very hard (believe me) for anything even moderately fitting my tastes in any media (books, music, film, games, etc.) I can't find anything! I wish there was a guide to whom I could describe what I'm looking for or even tell the things that I've liked previously who would give me even marginally better recommendations. I'm struggling!

grayclhn• 11 years ago

ask.metafilter.com or the right subreddit could be good places to try.

bitwize2• 11 years ago

I once spent a bit of time trying to avoid Kevin Smith's films, not because of any dislike per se, but because they were such universal unassailable cultural icons in the 90s that I wanted to have a go at not seeing them just to see if I could remain culturally relevant without doing so.

Then I realized I'd screwed the pooch when I saw the director's credit on Zack & Miri. Cute film, but not a real eye-opener in terms of humor or thematic content.

outofcuriosity• 11 years ago

Perhaps when we select books to read them, we only do so in order to describe ourselves as a "Calvino reader" or a "Russophile" as much as the author rejects Bukowski so as to be thought of as "a person who despises Bukowski." In that case, forming an identity through the art you arbitrarily despise and have not experienced seems only slightly more flimsy than doing so through the art you have experienced and have a real opinion about.

But, I think most of us read to learn or to gain new perspectives, etc. So, openly hating things you haven't experienced or examined critically is about as anti-intellectual as claiming to have read things one hasn't. Why not just say, "I am more interested in [some type of fiction with certain themes], and my reading list is quite long." Easier and doesn't freeze out the conversation quite as badly.

I still haven't read Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read"...

bambax4• 11 years ago

I was afraid this would be another lecture about trolls but it turned out to be quite profound.

We tend to define ourselves by what we like and dislike, which is fine, except, most of the time, it's not based on fact, but on arbitrary decisions.

This is quite obvious with kids; for example, my two younger kids (6 and 7, boy and girl) try to hate the preferred foods of one another, even if they have to admit they like its individual components. The boy loves fruit yogurt but "hates" fruits (will leave the table when someone's eating a raw fruit next to him), and the girl actually does love fruits but decided she will never eat yogurt... or use a spoon.

This is all fake, it's all an act, and yet it's quite powerful and difficult to overcome. (What gives it away though, is that these "tastes" vary according to location; when in school, those preferences disappear!)

We adults use spoons, but act the same with literature, or really most of our tastes in arts or crafts or products; we like the idea of ourselves not liking this or that (hello, vegans! ;-)

Dislike and contempt is also much easier to develop and maintain than an actual taste that has to be nurtured; it's like free money.

I really should get around to reading Houellebecq.

bambax4• 11 years ago

It's probably even worse than that: we probably actively dislike what we don't know.

First, it's an excuse to not know; I don't know this, not because I'm lazy and didn't make the effort to check it out, but because, you see, it's bad, or beyond me.

And second, it's hard to dislike something you actually got to know, because knowing requires some sort of empathy.

You can list all the problems with something you know, and say why it's not as good as it could be, etc., but if you declare that you "hate" it whole, it's a sign you don't know much about it.

CodeMage• 11 years ago

it's hard to dislike something you actually got to know, because knowing requires some sort of empathy.

I can't say that I agree. I don't see why dislike has to be irrational.

You can list all the problems with something you know, and say why it's not as good as it could be, etc., but if you declare that you "hate" it whole, it's a sign you don't know much about it.

It's not one or the other. That list of "all the problems with something you know" is an explanation for why you dislike that something.

bambax4• 11 years ago

It's probably even worse than that: we probably actively dislike what we don't know.

First, it's an excuse to not know; I don't know this, not because I'm lazy and didn't make the effort to check it out, but because, you know, it's bad, or beyond me.

And second, it's hard to dislike something you actually got to know, because knowing requires some sort of empathy.

You can list all the problems with something you know, and say why it's not as good as it could be, etc., but if you declare that you "hate" it whole, it's a sign you don't know much about it.

why-el• 11 years ago

There is a timeless quote by _why (of Ruby fame) that goes something like this: "You need to create, because otherwise you are defined by your taste in things." (my terrible paraphrasing).

rrtwo• 11 years ago

"when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

jholman• 11 years ago

I'm not a huge fan of _why (apropos of the article, I have read some of his work), but I think this quote deserves to be posted in its entirety:

“when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”

brazzledazzle2• 11 years ago

I'm not a vegan so apologies if I'm speaking out of turn, but: I know there are a ton of temporary vegans out there doing it for attention but there are a lot of vegans that are doing it because they really do consider it unethical. I've also found that it's usually the omnivores that take issue with the vegans rather than the other way around.

Most lifer vegans I've met try to remain low key about it for the most part since it tends to result in the same arguments or discussions and it gets old quick.

vinay427• 11 years ago

This exactly. I've found out long after meeting some of my friends and acquaintances that they were vegetarian or vegan only when it was relevant (meal plans, cateringg, etc.) and never would have guessed were it not for, in other cases, omnivores berating them for their preferences. As someone who is sometimes a vegan, I've actively tried to hide it in public because it's almost never looked upon favorably by omnivores, who as far as I can tell seem to assume that vegans think they are superior to everyone else. Never met a vegan who was this way, though I'm sure they exist.

holri2• 11 years ago

Is ethic a taste?

bambax4• 11 years ago

Oh yes it is.

It's entirely dependent on context, for one thing: "good" or "bad" mean very different things to different people (and peoples).

johnchristopher2• 11 years ago

We adults use spoons, but act the same with literature, or really most of our tastes in arts or crafts or products; we like the idea of ourselves not liking this or that (hello, vegans! ;-)
Dislike and contempt is also much easier to develop and maintain than an actual taste that has to be nurtured; it's like free money.
I really should get around to reading Houellebecq.

Try absorbing this material http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2015/04/29/rapunzels-gu... before getting into Houellebecq.

mturmon• 11 years ago

Similar sentiment about the complex transaction of not partaking in parts of culture because of what you've been told about it: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-6/the-intellectual-situation/t...

Teaser:

"Of course there was never any such thing as truly independent aesthetic judgment. No cultural artifact ever appears out of nowhere, to be taken purely on its own terms; there is always what reception theory calls “a horizon of expectation.” And who would want to possess independent aesthetic judgment anyway? It would mean you were impervious to the enthusiasms of your friends and the arguments of critics; it would mean that you were a total blockhead, ineducable, stupid."

manifestsilence• 11 years ago

The author's claim to "a kind of nervous contrarianism" in searching for new directions for growth is interesting. I think it highlights the limits of arbitrary aesthetics as detached from the more concrete needs of life. The themes in Hess's the Glass Bead Game come to mind - Hess builds a beautiful ivory tower of pure ideas, detached from reality, and then tears it down before your eyes, bringing the focus back to people and their need for growth.

I like the idea (can't remember where I saw it) for a service that helps connect readers with books that would help them with their evolution. I think this idea is powerful and can take the idea of self-help to a much deeper level that encompasses spirituality and psychological well-being rather than just fads and fashion trends by helping people find novels that aren't straightforwardly "about" an area of life but happen to address it deeply in their own way.

ikeboy• 11 years ago

Relevant:

http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read/dp/159691...

npsimons2• 11 years ago

The sad fact of the matter is that this boils down to: you will never live long enough to read even all the good books, for almost any value of "good" [1]. While the OP may be responding to another writer whom he deems "troll", the other author is just pointing out "look, I'm not going to live forever, and I've determined I don't like this author, so I'm not reading his works." albeit in a trollish way.

This old chestnut has been trod out so many times it's becoming a dead horse. Not that it doesn't have a point, but I can remember a discussion here a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8492659) where we went over a very similar topic, although with not as deep connections to culture in general.

Suffice to say, everyone selects, and usually from ignorance, unfortunately. The best you can do is force yourself to look at things you wouldn't normally, get out of your comfort zone, consider expert advice like that given in "How to Read a Book". And I say this as someone who has read Pratchett, enjoyed some of it, didn't enjoy other parts, and I will (probably) never read the twilight series as I consider it garbage (and no, I've never even looked at it).

[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/

rdc122• 11 years ago

Except that is not what the orginal posts [1] author said, he slagged off Pratchett's writing calling it pot boiler and calling Pratchett himself mediocre, while being preachy about his taste. Despite having never read any of his work himself (he openly admits that).

The cynic in me thinks it all was really just a bunch of click-bait which in pratice it vertainly has been.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/20...

npsimons2• 11 years ago

he slagged off Pratchett's writing calling it pot boiler and calling Pratchett himself mediocre, while being preachy about his taste.

Hence the trolling. And while it might be clickbaitish, he did have a very good point, and just pointed out what we all do, which is namely to select, and usually from a position of ignorance.

While the call to read Great Literature can be seen as preachy, it survives for a good reason: Great Literature enriches, makes people better for having read it. It's one of those things people should aspire to for self-improvement.

Paul_S• 11 years ago

"Someone is being an ass on the internet" and it's OK because "opinions". But it does touch upon one of more interesting problems. There is only so many years you have before you die and there are many more books than you can read and you will not know whether you like it or not before you read it because reviews are just too personal. Say you read an average of 100 books a year, that's 6000 books and that MIGHT just get you through all those top 100s of this and that genre. And it'd be nice to leave some room for serendipity. If not for that I'd never read any Murakami. This is an unsolved problem and all that amazon and goodreads does is recommend you more of the top bestsellers (and let's be honest, high street bookstores are even worse).

okonomiyaki3000• 11 years ago

I was going to read this article but..you know.

yakult• 11 years ago

Rather than griping about inaccurate dislikes, I would like to highlight the much, much larger number of books that you will never read simply because you've never knew about it. Go check out the Amazon best sellers list, for example.

It's not worth worrying about, I think. Even if 90% of all (fiction) books are destroyed irrevocably tomorrow and no more are written ever you'll have enough to last you the next thousand years.

An interesting problem may be how to maximize enjoyment per reading hour given a functionally unlimited library: something like a cross between spotify and tinder for books, perhaps: present random high-interest page of a book. Swipe right to read next page. Swipe left for next random book.

jkosai• 11 years ago

An interesting problem may be how to maximize enjoyment per reading hour given a functionally unlimited library: something like a cross between spotify and tinder for books, perhaps: present random high-interest page of a book.

This would make a great extension to Goodreads. I now wonder about sampling vocabulary and structure of various texts in order to match with your highest-rated books.

nocman• 11 years ago

I'm enjoying not reading all of the article.

OK, I admit I read most of it, but I really am enjoying not finishing it.

:-D

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

On that point, at least, I can agree entirely with Jones: I am always crushed by how many books I have not read.

So much truth here. The sad thing is, barring some Kurzweilian breakthrough in life-extension technology, none of us will live long enough to read all the books we might want to read. I often joke with people "I wish all my favorite authors would quit writing for about 100 years and give me a chance to catch up, and they just won't". But even the joke is silly, because IF I lived another 100 years, and IF none of my favorite authors wrote anything else in that time, I'd still not "catch up". In fact, I'd venture I'll still be further behind at the end, as NEW writes keep spring up as well.

You can't win, really. And since you have to make a choice based on something, I figure it might as well be pretty close to arbitrary. There are authors I'll never read, although perhaps not many that I would make a fuss over actively avoiding. But out of that list, there are probably plenty I'd enjoy very much, if I bothered to read them. Maybe I'd like some of them more than some of the authors I read now. But the bitter irony is, you can't really know if you'd like reading a book or... until you have already read it. sigh

I think the best most of us can hope for is simply to make it a point to try and be at least somewhat diverse in our reading, and take the occasional foray into unexplored territory. I did that a while back when I picked up my first Haruki Murakami novel. I'd heard of him, heard him mentioned by a lot of "literary" types, and assumed his work was probably snotty, pretentious "pat yourself on the back" stuff, and so put off reading anything by him for quite some time. And then I read After Dark and I was hooked. I've still only read two of his works (the other being Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki) but I'd now mention Murakami as one of my favorite authors.

I resisted reading the Harry Potter books for quite a while because "they're kids books". Once I read them, I found that they were very much worth the time. OTOH, I started Infinite Jest by DFW a while back, and I have been struggling to find any enthusiasm for reading this book. Should I continue with it just because it's so widely revered? Or should I read something I enjoy more instead? That's one of life's little conundrums. shrug

At the end, you just have to do the best you can. Nobody gets out of life alive and all that...

pronoiac• 11 years ago

Infinite Jest is a really brilliant book, but I remember the start of it seemed deliberately hard to read. Then I read enough to follow the rhythms and it became a compulsive read.

On the Pleasures of Not Reading

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