Three Quotes about Non-Reading
#1
You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion….I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.–Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990)
#2
according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)
#3
[Cowen] lists eight strategies for taking control of one’s reading, which include ruthless skipping around, following one character while ignoring others, and even going directly to the last chapter. Your eighth-grade English teacher would faint. But the principle here is valuing the scarcity of your own time, which people often fail to do. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)
I’m a reader. I believe in the power of stories and the magic of books. This does not mean I finish every book I start. I give books 50 pages; by then if I’m annoyed or disengaged, I stop. There are too many other books I WANT to read for me to waste time on books I don’t care for. Like Cowen, I value my time, which is all the more scarce after having two children.
Like Bayard, it’s not just possible, but common, for me have an opinion on a book I haven’t read. I qualify my opinion by admitting that, though. I’m allowed to think that The DaVinci Code is poorly written and that its story is intriguing. But I haven’t read it; I’ve only synthesized what I’ve heard and read ABOUT it. My opinion is theoretical, because it’s based on the testimony of others, not experience of my own.
Yet I’m still bothered by the cavalier attitude of Cowen and Bayard. Most good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If Cowen and Bayard practice–even celebrate–this literary dilettantism, they may have opinions (to which they are entitled, as are we all), but they are partial, and thus limited. And if Cowen and Bayard don’t disclose their partial knowledge, then they’re being less than honest.
In the end, I think it’s like what Robin Williams’s character said about smoking in Dead Again:
Someone is either a [reader] or a non[reader]. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that. If you’re a non[read]er, you’ll know.
I’m a reader. I suspect you are, too. Don’t read what you don’t want to. But stories in their entirety are most often greater than the sum of their parts. Don’t listen to the dilettantes. To paraphrase another movie:
Read… or read not. There is no try.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I swore I wasn’t going to comment as much, but I read this today in the Post and thought it was a wonderful counterpoint to the quotes you -rightly- took issue with above.
“A wise person (my mother, actually) once observed that it was essential to read novels, because otherwise people would not know how to behave. They would encounter problems of the heart that would be insoluble, save for the education they had received in watching the great characters of fiction struggle to make moral choices.”
–David Ignatius
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2007/07/25/AR2007072501879.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
July 26th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Silly me, I didn’t realise you’d turned your comments back on. Comes from reading everyone in Bloglines I suppose.
I remember that quote from “Metropolitan” and I haven’t seen that movie in, what, 15 years? ! I’m reminded of a delightful quote from “Diary of a Provincial Lady” by E.M. Delafield: “Am asked what I think of ‘Harriet Hume’ but an unable to say, as I have not read it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of ‘Orlando’ about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until read it, and found myself unfortunately unable to understand it”.
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Kate, thanks for the quote. I have long used novels as guides to life, for better or for worse.
And LC, you are part of the club who remembers both Metropolitan and the quote (which I could have sworn had the word review in it, but didn’t!) that my friends Rock Hack, JV, and AH all share. And I’m not sure I understood Orlando, now that I think about it.