
On the Pleasures of Not Reading - dnetesn
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/31/on-the-pleasures-of-not-reading/
======
bambax
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.

~~~
why-el
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).

~~~
jholman
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.”_

~~~
johnchristopher
But that's only _his_ opinion of others. He divided people between those who
are defined as creators and those who are not. And those who are not are
reduced to their `taste' \- _and they are the one who narrow and exclude
people ?!_. But some people simply don't want to create, don't want to
sprinkle the whole world with their little dot-me stickers.

All glory to the entreprecreator, the ubermensch of the internet.

Seriously, let people try to define who they are themselves. Not a quote, a
guru or a motivational speaker who tell you `you are this, you are that, they
are this, they are that'. Or worse, any artist trying to define himself
through the impact of his works or personality on... _others_.

------
exelius
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.

~~~
ap22213
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
ask.metafilter.com or the right subreddit could be good places to try.

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

~~~
corndoge
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.

~~~
WalterBright
I finally admitted my uncool like for 1960's easy listening music. I have
quite a collection of it now, bought from thrift stores and ebay.

I enjoy inflicting it on people who still believe it is uncool.

~~~
brightsize
Brasil 66 is great stuff. :-)

~~~
WalterBright
Got me some of that. And also Conniff, Mantovani, Kaempfert, Jackie Gleason,
etc.

A regular low treatment of that will keep the kids off your lawn. And the
coolest (!) thing about easy listening is you rarely have to pay more than
$.50 for an album of it. It's almost as if people are trying to get rid of
their grandparents' albums!

------
npsimons
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](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/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/)

~~~
rdc12
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...](http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/aug/31/terry-
pratchett-is-not-a-literary-genius)

~~~
npsimons
> 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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Some of 'great literature' is dated and of questionable value. But of what
endures, much is very good (or it wouldn't have lasted of course).

------
outofcuriosity
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"...

------
Paul_S
"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).

------
yakult
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
> 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.

------
manifestsilence
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.

------
mturmon
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...](https://nplusonemag.com/issue-6/the-intellectual-
situation/the-hype-cycle/)

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."

------
mindcrime
_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
_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.

------
bitwize
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.

------
ikeboy
Relevant:

[http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-
Read/dp/159691...](http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-
Read/dp/1596915439)

------
okonomiyaki3000
I was going to read this article but..you know.

------
nocman
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

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

~~~
coldtea
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.

~~~
breischl
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.

~~~
coldtea
He tiptoes around it a lot and goes back and forth in order not to offend
anyone or seem too crude, but the core of the article is all about how it's
common and joyful to not read authors due to prejudice, and how we all do it,
and some examples of his doing it.

Let's put it this way: due to his guilt, instead of an unapologetic
celebration of not reading with prejudice, it's an apologetic celebration of
the same.

~~~
breischl
Having re-read it, I still can't see it as a "celebration." I would say he's
acknowledging a bad habit that he can't kick. It's an admission of continuing
weakness in the face of cheap pleasure, like a good critic that can't stop
binge eating Spicy Cheetos.

~~~
coldtea
There's guilt, but there's also: "hey guys I EAT Spicy Cheetos, and we all eat
Spicy Cheetos. Let's admit it. And it feels good. Here are some funny Cheetos
stories I have."

Then there are the advicing, "yeah, I know it's bad, yeah, health, yeah,
nutricion, you shouldn't do it, we miss on better foods etc".

But that part is more like an obligatory guilt/save-face addition, whereas the
core is "I do, you've done it, it's normal and even enjoyful".

It sure doesn't seem to me like an article written with the intention to
putting an end to the practice -- more to admit it and excuse it. Eveywhere he
stomps on the guy who dismissed Pratchett without having read him, he adds
"but, ...", and "don't get me wrong, ...".

~~~
breischl
Hm. I think you're saying he's putting a faux-rebuke onto a happy article.
Whereas I still think he's putting a happy veneer on what is ultimately a
rebuke. I'm not sure how to tell which is the case, or if it even actually
matters.

But hey, kudos for a cogent defense of your position. Good internetting!

