How to be a better reader –butisita page-turner?
If only this celebration of the very private act of reading was a bit more, well, readable...
Sir John Betjeman was about to attend a lecture by his friend Lord David Cecil on ‘The Pleasures of Reading’, only to decide against when he realised that Lord Cecil was not going to talk about the town of Reading. I thought of this charming little story when I saw the title of this book. Surely we already know about the art of reading: might a little book on the art of Reading not be more illuminating?
Yet, when you think about it, reading remains a mysterious pastime. Our brain converts tiny little shapes on a page into things that make us laugh or cry, that enthuse us or infuriate us, that invent or describe characters we would never have a chance of meeting, that take us into realms far beyond our experience or imaginations.
Small wonder that some of us spend more of the day with a book than without one. ‘People say that life is the thing,’ said the elegant Edwardian essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, ‘but I prefer reading.’
At the same time, it is possible to read badly: not simply in your choice of books, but in the way you go about the act itself. All but the most diligent reader will know about skimming and skipping, about letting your mind wander, or reading only for the plot. And how critical should you be? Is it better to let the author’s arguments engulf you, or to hold every paragraph to account?
And what to read next? Should you plot a dogged course through literature, or let chance be your guide? After 10 minutes in a large bookshop, I often find myself in such a whirl of indecision that I feel completely unable to pick a book. After all, what are the odds against the book you choose being the one that would suit you best?
Damon Young has written a neat little book addressing many of these questions, and a whole lot more besides. His aim, he says, is ‘to provide a public reflection on this often private art’. He refers to two recent surveys in America. The first found that three out of every four people want to write a book. The second found that only one out of every four have actually read a book in the past year. One of the key aims of The Art Of Reading is to sharpen our interest in reading, and to train us to read more intelligently.
His own reading has been as haphazard as most people’s. Though a highbrow, he has often dived low, though not without guilt. For nearly 30 years, he confesses, he has been following Star Trek ‘on television, in films and prose’. Furthermore, ‘more than a third of the fiction archived on my tablet is from the Star Trek franchise’. This is quite a confession, coming from a man who is, his author’s blurb assures us, not only ‘an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’ but ‘a prize-winning philosopher and writer’. His Star Trek binge was followed by remorse. ‘Buying sequel after sequel, pausing for Earl Grey but not thought, I felt addicted, and this habit was ugly to me. What I found repugnant in myself was called akolasia by Aristotle: intemperance, indulgence.’ A true academic, he feels obliged to throw in a gratuitous reference to Aristotle, as though needing the reassurance of a life-rope while descending into the vulgar unknown. And his confession does not end there. His Star Trek craze was, he says, ‘a psychological disorder’, an ‘obsession’ and ‘a badly managed craving for psychological repose’. Come, come, Mr Young, don’t beat yourself up about it! Speaking for myself, I am perfectly happy to read the back of a Corn Flakes packet without feeling the need for therapy. But there is something of the puritan about Damon Young: though he calls his book a celebration of reading, he often makes it seem more like a solemn duty.
He argues forcefully for a serious approach to literature, but only in his account of his childhood reading does he let seriousness blossom into enjoyment. ‘What I finally took from Conan Doyle’s mysteries was not savoir faire but freedom: the charisma of an independent mind. This Victorian London, with its shadows and blood, was mine… I willed this strange world into being, with help from Conan Doyle. The author was less like an entertaining uncle, and more like a conspirator. We met in private to secure liberation from school’s banality and home’s atmosphere of violence.’
Even when he is dealing with the Batman ‘Dark Knight’ books, he can’t shed his academic wariness of delight. Celebration comes cloaked in the dusty gown of waffle: ‘Batman is less a single character, and more the name for a family of traits – they share not some essential soul but what Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations called “family resemblances”.’
Is the expression ‘family resemblances’ made any clearer by putting Wittgenstein alongside it? Young sometimes goes mad with his literary name-dropping, as though no thought, however banal, can be voiced without reference to a big-wig. In one paragraph, loosely on the subject of the ninja books he read as a child, he writes: ‘We are born in what the poet Horace called in medias res: in the middle of things.’ Later in the same paragraph, he begins a sentence: ‘As Alfred North Whitehead observed…’, and in the next paragraph we hear that ‘Death is “the most terrible of all things”, said Aristotle’.
In this age of instant opinion, unfettered by knowledge, he makes a good case for reading authors who prefer ambiguity, opacity and mystery. Yet he himself can be curiously strident and impatient. For instance, he sets out to praise Henry James, but his praise is so grudging that it ends up reading more like a condemnation. Basically, Young argues that it’s worth putting up with the long-winded prose
‘He feels obliged to throw in a reference to Aristotle, as if needing reassurance while descending into the vulgar’
because what he calls ‘the slog’ is eventually worth it. He makes it sound a bit like embarking on a course of antibiotics.
Now, I know some people find Henry James too much like hard work, but fans – of whom I am one – love him for his elaborate, endlessly qualifying style, and don’t just see it as a means to a virtuous end. In fact, the example Young offers of what he calls James’s ‘agonisingly protracted’ prose is a sentence from The Golden Bowl that strikes me as perfectly clear and straightforward, as well as beautifully crafted. It’s odd that an advocate of serious literature should confess quite so often to finding it all a bit heavy-going. And when he offers praise, it often sounds grudging and headmasterly. ‘James’s work demonstrates rare talent and merits some forbearance,’ he concludes.
Though the book is short – just 140 pages, if you cut out the notes – many of its sentences are twice as long as they need be. ‘Patience is not a sexy virtue, but it is prized because the benefits of reading are never instantanaeous.’ ‘It is impossible to make sense of modern life without recognising clock time and its continually increasing progression.’
‘Children can no more abstract themselves into maturity than the elderly can shrug off their decades.’ If you take away the flim-flam, these sentences all boil down to the bleeding obvious: You Can’t Rush Things; Time Flies; With Age Comes Experience. Other sentences sound clever, but you need to read them three or four times before you can work out what they’re on about, for example: ‘Because it leapfrogs the immediate, curiosity can leave the actual too far behind.’
I wanted to like The Art Of Reading, but in the end I found it too irritating. Who knows? I might have found it more enjoyable had it come with a companion volume called ‘The Art Of Reading The Art Of Reading’.