It's Always More Complicated

We're not here to have fun, we're here to improve ourselves, to upskill our skills, to be, dare we say it, pompous superior bores? How to Read a Book at Higher Order Reading Skill Level. Total immersion is how you learn from great authors

It's all about great books:

mak[ing] you wiser and improv[ing] your self-knowledge. It can also open opportunities you didn’t know existed and help produce the results you expect in life.

And effort.

We note that the idea that reading might be a pleasure is distinctly absent from this mindset. No, you get up and you get to your Big Serious Book when you are fresh and you take notes, and we think that Mrs Parker would have Fwowed Up, do we not, my dearios? and decided that there was something to be said for AA Milne after all.

How very different, and, we confess, more congenial to ourselves, is this approach: There’s No Wrong Way to Read a Book. (With the corollary that there is No One True Right Way.)

There’s no wrong—or right—way to read a book. There are just the ways that work and don’t work for each reader. Sometimes that means reading fast; sometimes it takes months. Sometimes the right way to read a book is to put it down entirely, and find it again later.

Reading is or should be a pleasurable activity. I will cop to have ground through certain things because they were required texts or for research purposes (but that may at least have a second-level pleasure factor), but I found pleasure in unexpected places.

I also sometimes stand somewhat amazed at the long-term beneficial outcomes that have derived from what some people would consider a misspent youth and after of wide and random reading for pleasure.

Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You'll Ever Have Time to Read. An overstuffed bookcase (or e-reader) says good things about your mind.

I am really getting a bit tired of all these articles about Reading Is Good For You! Books Are Morally Worthy!

I surround myself with books because:

a) one of these days I might really want to read that fat biography of not terribly well-known, thought I would not say entirely forgotten or neglected, writer, or whatever;

b) I grew up in something of an economy of scarcity of books, or so it seems on reflection (and this may be wrong?), and I did an enormous amount of re-reading because there was nothing new to read;

c) if I don't get it when I see it now at a reasonable price, it may vanish or only be available at inordinate sums in future;

d) I might want to re-read that some day.

(I am trying to gear myself up to a cull and a clear-out: I think I am psychologically prepared, it's more the practicality of where do I put the discards before they can actually leave the house.)

This endeavour to make Reading Books associated with successful high flyers, rather than those of us who'd rather be in a corner with our noses stuck in a book, makes me want to do the reverse of that thing of putting the trashy novel in the cover of some serious work, and hide any serious work I might be reading inside the cover of some pulpy paperback.

Spotted on somebody's post and catching at me: apparently Kafka once said something to the effect that

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

a) for that 'only', which immediately, in the light of recent posts, aligns him rather too closely with the egregious Jonathan 'reading is not, ever, meant to be FUN' Jones.

and

b) the assumption that only some kind of literary violence will break up the internal frozen sea or bring this moment of revelation. As I have heretofore remarked:

Generally I think that the benefits of comfort and what Stella Gibbons defined as 'the Gentle Powers', in Westwood - at one point a character suggests 'Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter' are among these but not the complete list - are seriously underestimated.

I suspect that the dates don't work for telling Franz to lighten up and read some Wodehouse, let alone Pratchett, but it is a sentiment statements like this move me to.

Or at least, doing that lj thing of turning something adverse into the basis of a post.

An accusation that one does not give enough attention to burning global issues like world poverty and the environment, is, I think we can all agree, somewhat vitiated when the source is a vitriolic anonymous troll comment in ones's lj [deleted], by someone who is, self-evidently, neither out there doing something about these problems nor producing thought-provoking essays on the subjects, but simply sitting at their computer on a Saturday evening venting at other people for writing about other topics than these in their own ljs.

However, this gave me to consider, or complicate, this question.

Omitting the fact that I might be doing all sorts of stuff relating to burning global issues which for all sorts of reasons I might not be posting about, why is it so immensely virtuous to post on these questions rather than feminism and gender issues (the topic of the post to which this comment was appended)?

Okay, there is a looooong history of women being told that all sorts of issues ought to take priority over fighting for women's rights, which are a sort of icing on the cake to be applied when everything else has been sorted out (see jonquil's recent post here). I wouldn't exclude this as having some relevance to the attack.

But on the complaint that I am 'self-opinionated': I think that I have some grounds (personal experience, academic immersion in the field, having read the book/seen the film in question, etc) for having opinions on the subjects on which I express opinions. 'Opinionated' suggests to me people holding forth at length and as if authoritatively on subjects on which their every successive word reveals they know very little. And my feeling is that if I were to be holding forth on world poverty (Bad Thing: something ought to be done) or the environment (Preservation of, Good Thing: something ought to be done) this would be 'pompous and self-opinionated', in a way that my thoughts on feminism, history, literature, etc, might not be, and also constitute a rather pharisaical demonstration of what a Concerned Person About Major Issue I was, because it wouldn't say anything about anything I was actually doing, or not, it would purely be a gesture of self-righteousness.

***

And because this seems somehow related: why I am not flying the icon described here. My vision of cities, any city, and particularly my own dear London Town, is that they are made up of many communities, and that is one of the things that is good about them. So I would find the slogan 'Many communities - One city' far more resonant.