The flourishing of the English-language memoir since the '90s, also. If undergraduate literature curricula had required classes that started with Augustine's Confessions, moved on to large selections from Margery Kempe's and Julian of Norwich's writings, and so on, I'm convinced the young people would know what to do. Memoirs are beloved, inspiring and often beautiful. Even the ones that aren't necessarily beautiful can be entertaining or informative in meaningful ways. I'm always saying that in two or three generations, life writing is going to be a key area of specialization for academics coming up. Right now life writing is still a thing people write their second or third book about. But there's a solid body of theoretical literature already out there, starting with structuralist work in French (their memoir tradition has deeper philosophical roots in the Enlightenment). And Oxford UP is gradually putting out a hefty 6 or 7 volume history of life writing, which I think will be some kind of tipping point.
As one of the authors who wrote about Middlemarch on Substack, I can say people are hungry for literature, very glad you and others are out here championing it.
Funny, a quote stuck in my mind from Agnes Callard about her students not being “in the habit of reading.” Google reminded me it was in an interview with none other than “The Common Reader”! So maybe it’s just reality that college reading lists need to be pared down. I mean, this is the University of Chicago.
Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it?
I tend to agree. I do wonder if conditions for writers are negatively correlated with those for readers i.e. exponentially more books published (and printed - pretty easy to buy anything non-rare for a fiver or less), huge self publishing boom, the tail end of the internet being word dominated and largely free. All of those put downward pressure on writing (with AI doing it for a lot of professional non-literary writing).
Having read Rejection, Flesh, Dear Dickhead, Parade, Perfection, Intermezzo, Children of The Dead and The Maniac this year, I'm also pretty sanguine about the state of the books that are coming out now.
Interesting post. I know tons of people who read — unfortunately, I only know a few who are interested in reading the classics, or even a moderately challenging contemporary novel (with the exception of Sally Rooney, maybe). It can feel lonely sometimes. I agree that great novels are being written. I just wish that more people would read them. I hope you’re right about tech bros discovering Tolstoy, because I would *love* to chat about War & Peace with a coworker and not the latest Emily Henry. :)
There is some misunderstanding on the value of reading to bring peace to the world .
AI Overview
“Yes, many Nazis were prolific readers, and Adolf Hitler, in particular, had an extensive private library and was an avid, though unsystematic, reader. However, their reading was often driven by a desire to support their ideology, with some Nazi leaders actively suppressing and burning books they deemed "un-German" or subversive”
"Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas." Perhaps there is interplay between comfort with technology and an ability to appreciate the classics. I am often embarrassed to admit out loud that, on reading Middlemarch last year and making my way through the Austen and Shakespeare book clubs with you this year, an LLM has felt essential to the process. It is tremendously helpful to be able to ask any question about complex passages, historical context, or even something as basic as clarifying the social status of a person whom Austen describes as having x pounds per year, without fearing judgment for my ignorance. If anything, the LLM overdoes excessive praise, which often strikes me as ridiculous but isn't discouraging. The more I use an LLM for this purpose, the more I have learned to tailor my questions to make the most of the experience.
In contrast, a room full of literary people, at least some of whom are battling to prove they are smarter than everyone else in the room, can crush curiosity. Ignorance in such a setting (even with a strong desire to learn) can feel painfully vulnerable.
Are you insinuating that young male voters of democrats are reading more literature? Surely you jest. I was enjoying your piece until you snarked that Trump voters do not read, and in particular do not read literature. Tell me how you surmise this? Is it because more democrats go to college? But in college, as you say they are not reading literature. John Muir once remarked that the quiet shepherd in Scotland was a bigger reader of literature than most educated Americans he met. Maybe the snark could be directed a bit more widely and the listening to one another could improve. Then we could know things rather than surmise on our personal biases. Happy reading 📚
Re-read that paragraph carefully and search for the original 4chan poll - it’s interesting.
It’s difficult to parse the politics of 4chan and anonymous, although ‘South Park Libertarian’ comes close - a delight in offending for its own sake, definitely against political correctness and SJWs but largely against authority full stop.
(Angela Nagle’s ‘Kill All Normies’ is interesting on how transgressive culture shifted from anti-conservative to anti-liberal, and vice versa - the increasing puritanism on the left driving anti-authoritarian personalities towards the right)
The outside assumption of 4chan is young men largely interested in memes, games and Japanese pornography, but the poll of favourite reads on /lit was a pretty solid curriculum, including some heavy weight reads.
Obviously, skewed to the members on the /lit board who do read, but rather less SF and fantasy than the stereotype would have. Harold Bloom would have been proud of them.
And as Henry noted, the reaction to this was rubbish.
I love Austen more than the typical male, but I wouldn’t be a dick about a poll like this not containing enough women or contemporary novels.
Unlike some literary supplements and broadsheets, it had no pretence to being a definitive list of great works, just a poll of what a particular group of people had enjoyed.
It irked some literary experts - I think as it showed their 50 years of effort to redefine the canon and contemporary literary culture had little impact, and also for showing ‘the enemy’ were not all illiterate.
There is some irony when declaring Ruskin, Pound or Nabokov as problematic causes young men to seek out and read them - maybe for the ‘wrong’ reasons.
So the critique moves from ‘they don’t read’ to ‘they don’t read the approved books’.
I am saying this as someone who is not a cultural conservative - but who finds hectoring to be counter-productive.
Agreed - the comment felt unexpected and unnecessary - because as you say (I think) all this goes both ways and in ways we don’t understand or anticipate. Sorry to hector…
Thank you, I do understand the controversy - I’ll read the piece as time allows but her title seems to beg the question ‘How to Read NOW,’ - (but I may be off base, I’m making an assumption); my sense is that history is a palimpsest - once you overwrite it (banning) you lose it. (Some tech can recover it in some cases) - banning or ignoring actual text leaves it to the mischief makers to explain it to us, through their interpretation. We can live with people who can’t or won’t read originals within their contemporary context, but we shouldn’t let them determine how or what to read (talking about adults here). We should encourage the actual reading, and I think that’s the author’s point. Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, among others are represented in school so often as what they are not - and often diametrically so. Which tells me scholars do not read, they just regurgitate what others who haven’t read have said. I took my Masters in Humanities in 2018 (fairly recently) … I have found the professoriate to be quite lazy in this regard. I appreciate the author’s book list - always looking for a good read. I recently read ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi about Southern Italy in the 1930s, incredible read. (Nonfiction category) Best 🤓
Did you know Somali is considered to be the nation of poets ! Yes the problem is the classics are very limited to the thoughts of white western men . The world now has opened many more languages and cultures. The importance of the old limitations are over
and the reading of
‘Great Expectations’ is not required to become informed and intelligent. I myself thought Pip made a mistake at the end and should have continued his legal studies in the city instead of retrograding with guilt back to the black smith forge .
The flourishing of the English-language memoir since the '90s, also. If undergraduate literature curricula had required classes that started with Augustine's Confessions, moved on to large selections from Margery Kempe's and Julian of Norwich's writings, and so on, I'm convinced the young people would know what to do. Memoirs are beloved, inspiring and often beautiful. Even the ones that aren't necessarily beautiful can be entertaining or informative in meaningful ways. I'm always saying that in two or three generations, life writing is going to be a key area of specialization for academics coming up. Right now life writing is still a thing people write their second or third book about. But there's a solid body of theoretical literature already out there, starting with structuralist work in French (their memoir tradition has deeper philosophical roots in the Enlightenment). And Oxford UP is gradually putting out a hefty 6 or 7 volume history of life writing, which I think will be some kind of tipping point.
I didn’t know about that history of life writing how exciting
As one of the authors who wrote about Middlemarch on Substack, I can say people are hungry for literature, very glad you and others are out here championing it.
Funny, a quote stuck in my mind from Agnes Callard about her students not being “in the habit of reading.” Google reminded me it was in an interview with none other than “The Common Reader”! So maybe it’s just reality that college reading lists need to be pared down. I mean, this is the University of Chicago.
Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it?
https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/agnes-callard-what-is-the-value-of
I tend to agree. I do wonder if conditions for writers are negatively correlated with those for readers i.e. exponentially more books published (and printed - pretty easy to buy anything non-rare for a fiver or less), huge self publishing boom, the tail end of the internet being word dominated and largely free. All of those put downward pressure on writing (with AI doing it for a lot of professional non-literary writing).
Having read Rejection, Flesh, Dear Dickhead, Parade, Perfection, Intermezzo, Children of The Dead and The Maniac this year, I'm also pretty sanguine about the state of the books that are coming out now.
Interesting post. I know tons of people who read — unfortunately, I only know a few who are interested in reading the classics, or even a moderately challenging contemporary novel (with the exception of Sally Rooney, maybe). It can feel lonely sometimes. I agree that great novels are being written. I just wish that more people would read them. I hope you’re right about tech bros discovering Tolstoy, because I would *love* to chat about War & Peace with a coworker and not the latest Emily Henry. :)
There is some misunderstanding on the value of reading to bring peace to the world .
AI Overview
“Yes, many Nazis were prolific readers, and Adolf Hitler, in particular, had an extensive private library and was an avid, though unsystematic, reader. However, their reading was often driven by a desire to support their ideology, with some Nazi leaders actively suppressing and burning books they deemed "un-German" or subversive”
Misunderstanding? Bad people read too? Amazing.
"Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas." Perhaps there is interplay between comfort with technology and an ability to appreciate the classics. I am often embarrassed to admit out loud that, on reading Middlemarch last year and making my way through the Austen and Shakespeare book clubs with you this year, an LLM has felt essential to the process. It is tremendously helpful to be able to ask any question about complex passages, historical context, or even something as basic as clarifying the social status of a person whom Austen describes as having x pounds per year, without fearing judgment for my ignorance. If anything, the LLM overdoes excessive praise, which often strikes me as ridiculous but isn't discouraging. The more I use an LLM for this purpose, the more I have learned to tailor my questions to make the most of the experience.
In contrast, a room full of literary people, at least some of whom are battling to prove they are smarter than everyone else in the room, can crush curiosity. Ignorance in such a setting (even with a strong desire to learn) can feel painfully vulnerable.
As a contemporary literature pessimist and Tessa Hadley fan, I feel called out. Lol
A heartening and logical perspective. Thank you for the excellent piece.
This is not about reading but about protecting the Western Canon similar to the adamant position to maintain Christianity as the Major religion.
BTW
‘The New York Review of Books’
is still the standard to excellence.
Yes it is very Liberal
as is ‘Poetry’ magazine.
Someone is reading !
Amazon still sells books
Thrift Books
Abe Books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_booksellers
Are you insinuating that young male voters of democrats are reading more literature? Surely you jest. I was enjoying your piece until you snarked that Trump voters do not read, and in particular do not read literature. Tell me how you surmise this? Is it because more democrats go to college? But in college, as you say they are not reading literature. John Muir once remarked that the quiet shepherd in Scotland was a bigger reader of literature than most educated Americans he met. Maybe the snark could be directed a bit more widely and the listening to one another could improve. Then we could know things rather than surmise on our personal biases. Happy reading 📚
Not my view channeling others
Re-read that paragraph carefully and search for the original 4chan poll - it’s interesting.
It’s difficult to parse the politics of 4chan and anonymous, although ‘South Park Libertarian’ comes close - a delight in offending for its own sake, definitely against political correctness and SJWs but largely against authority full stop.
(Angela Nagle’s ‘Kill All Normies’ is interesting on how transgressive culture shifted from anti-conservative to anti-liberal, and vice versa - the increasing puritanism on the left driving anti-authoritarian personalities towards the right)
The outside assumption of 4chan is young men largely interested in memes, games and Japanese pornography, but the poll of favourite reads on /lit was a pretty solid curriculum, including some heavy weight reads.
Obviously, skewed to the members on the /lit board who do read, but rather less SF and fantasy than the stereotype would have. Harold Bloom would have been proud of them.
And as Henry noted, the reaction to this was rubbish.
I love Austen more than the typical male, but I wouldn’t be a dick about a poll like this not containing enough women or contemporary novels.
Unlike some literary supplements and broadsheets, it had no pretence to being a definitive list of great works, just a poll of what a particular group of people had enjoyed.
It irked some literary experts - I think as it showed their 50 years of effort to redefine the canon and contemporary literary culture had little impact, and also for showing ‘the enemy’ were not all illiterate.
There is some irony when declaring Ruskin, Pound or Nabokov as problematic causes young men to seek out and read them - maybe for the ‘wrong’ reasons.
So the critique moves from ‘they don’t read’ to ‘they don’t read the approved books’.
I am saying this as someone who is not a cultural conservative - but who finds hectoring to be counter-productive.
Agreed - the comment felt unexpected and unnecessary - because as you say (I think) all this goes both ways and in ways we don’t understand or anticipate. Sorry to hector…
Some have banned John Muir because of his Racism.
That might be because they don’t read enough literature.
Don't think that is the reason .
'How to Read Now' Elaine Castillo
~~~
Obviously there is a conflict within the Sierra Club .
https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club
Read a defense of him
https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/racist-or-admirer-of-native-americans-raymond-bennett.aspx
Thank you, I do understand the controversy - I’ll read the piece as time allows but her title seems to beg the question ‘How to Read NOW,’ - (but I may be off base, I’m making an assumption); my sense is that history is a palimpsest - once you overwrite it (banning) you lose it. (Some tech can recover it in some cases) - banning or ignoring actual text leaves it to the mischief makers to explain it to us, through their interpretation. We can live with people who can’t or won’t read originals within their contemporary context, but we shouldn’t let them determine how or what to read (talking about adults here). We should encourage the actual reading, and I think that’s the author’s point. Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, among others are represented in school so often as what they are not - and often diametrically so. Which tells me scholars do not read, they just regurgitate what others who haven’t read have said. I took my Masters in Humanities in 2018 (fairly recently) … I have found the professoriate to be quite lazy in this regard. I appreciate the author’s book list - always looking for a good read. I recently read ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi about Southern Italy in the 1930s, incredible read. (Nonfiction category) Best 🤓
Did you know Somali is considered to be the nation of poets ! Yes the problem is the classics are very limited to the thoughts of white western men . The world now has opened many more languages and cultures. The importance of the old limitations are over
and the reading of
‘Great Expectations’ is not required to become informed and intelligent. I myself thought Pip made a mistake at the end and should have continued his legal studies in the city instead of retrograding with guilt back to the black smith forge .