1) I was not expecting a Gilmore Girls shoutout on The Common Reader.
2) I am far too amused by the fact that you spelled it Gilmour Girls.
3) As far as late 20th century WB dramas go, Gilmore Girls is obviously a minor work in comparison to the true greats, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I suspect people who say they read for pleasure usually just want to cordon their reading off from self-improvement or anything that might smack of duty, practical value, or social advantage. For some, that makes reading a guilty pleasure, and for others, a welcome reprieve. No doubt some have reflected on the matter, found the effort unrewarding-- and who can blame them? "intrinsic value", "the value of the experience afforded by an attentive openess to the text", "confronting greatness", "a non-religious substitute for both the numinous and mystical religious experience", and so on-- and settled on a simple formula of cozy evasion. For certainly it is an evasion, as your comments indirectly make clear. In other words, I don't think they really mean what they say. What they really mean is probably something like "Please, let's not think too much about it." That is not a sentiment I can relate to or respect, but neither is it one I find objectionable. It seems preferable, at any rate, to what is on offer from the ponderous moralist, the political ideologue, or the sort of clever, arid interpreter Susan Sontag rightly railed against.
In the arts/humanities institutional world, one thing that many years of surveying has discovered is that the general public uses the word "fun" as an enormous bucket in which they include a wide range of positive feelings and experiences, many of which far transcend shallow entertainment. In many cases, what they actually mean is what arts educators would call "engagement," that is to say--experiencing a flow state, having experiences that contrast with the workaday world, having the opportunity to interact and spend time with friends and family in new and different ways, etc. I suspect that may be part of what is going on with these responses.
I think it’s reading for pleasure vs. something else - like “developing empathy.”
I’m in the pleasure camp - pleasure being broadly defined.
“Lolita” is a mind-bending case. When I read it in my late teens, I set aside the subject matter and reveled in the language. I have a feeling that’s what many readers do. Or, like Lionel Trilling, don’t come to grips (it’s “about love”) Is there a moral purpose? I’ve come to have doubts.
There’s a troubling essay by Martin Amis where he grapples with Nabokov’s treatment of little girls in the later novels. He calls the failings aesthetic, not moral - but the drift of his argument suggests otherwise. The later books cast a shadow backwards.
The Problem with Nabokov
Martin Amis
Originally in The Guardian (oddly not on the website, as far as I can tell)
“One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.”
I woke up actually thinking about this. I love reading, but what makes it even better is taking the time to consider why is something so enjoyable? What did we connect with?
I'm one of the read-for-fun people. Do I read for fun? Yes, but for a lot more than that also. And I read things that are not (mostly) fun, like Joyce.
But those of us who find reading to be of value on many levels need to do something to convince large numbers of other people to read, and telling non-readers that reading exists for a higher purpose is wholly ineffectual. I started my Substack with the objective of trying to draw people in, for entertainment at least to start. https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/dickens-dracula-and-djinni-literature. I also wrote (yesterday) about the barriers to reading that thwart people, and the notion that reading is something good for you - like eating your vegetables - is a barrier. People are not going to do it just for that reason. https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/not-so-bleak-really-the-bleak-house
My dad reviewed novels - thousands of them - for the NYT in the 60’s and 70’s.
He always said - reading is for pleasure. So I’m all in favor of your approach. Keep at it! (Though I fear, as Reagan reputedly said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”) But I do think reading is good for you and that’s something to push in a gentle way. See Matthew Yglesias’s conversation with HO a couple of months ago. He said spending time with great literature calms him down, it’s a de-stressor. Maybe that’s a low-key argument to make. And I think it’s true.
Also, your take on the Bleak House experiment is spot on. People should check that piece out.
Your spelling of Gilmore Girls indicates that you are not familiar enough with it to realize that it, too, can be "more than pleasure" (despite, also, being *extremely" pleasurable).
“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of 'obligatory pleasure'? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. 'Obligatory happiness'! [...] If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is 'Paradise Lost' — which is not tedious to me — or 'Don Quixote' — which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write— I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers' reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.”
I would love to join the Jane Austen Zoom, will the link get sent out as a regular email? Is there some other system to track when you host Zooms, such as by joining some email invite list?
the better the story, the more pleasure and the more different kinds of pleasures my brain is getting from it, but the point is i expect to get some kind of pleasure from reading a novel over a summary
If i say that one history of slavery book was better than another, i don't mean that one book made me wish i was a slave or made me want to bring back slavery. I mean reading one book was a better experience than reading the other, that better reading experience i describe as the pleasure of reading. No reading should be without it
Stories should at least be enjoyable, and once you've made them so, then you can also put in all of the other things like prose, characters, world-building, poems, etc.
At one level you can end up with a circular definition of fun - I love a 10k run before breakfast, but for most people that is in a similar territory to saying you love Tolstoy or Pynchon - it sounds like high effort for a low reward, rather than enjoyable in itself.
I was discussing literature with a friend, and why - for me - Mick Herron is ‘reading for pleasure’ while le Carre was a literary writer - and I came to realise that it’s more a map with vague borders.
It’s not complexity of language - Hemingway shows us that. It’s not realistic characters - the thing I think lifts le Carre away from genre. Borges is clearly literary with barely a character to be seen.
Poetry can do away with both plot and character.
I cannot pin down what makes some work have more literary value than others, but I would 100% say le Carre outranks Herron who outranks Dan Brown.
The other thing that strikes me is that most young people understand the concept of ‘levelling up’ - from The Golden Bough through Dungeons and Dragons to video games and their influence back into film and pop music, even young people who don’t play video games use terms like ‘boss fight’, ‘end of level’. There is an understanding of the cycle of performing a challenge, which will unlock the next challenge.
(I asked Claude “Is ‘Finnegans Wake’ the final boss” - 6 words, from which it was able to unpick exactly what was intended. It also suggested Ezra Pound ‘The Cantos’, Zettels Traum, and ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ as Final boss alternatives)
1) I was not expecting a Gilmore Girls shoutout on The Common Reader.
2) I am far too amused by the fact that you spelled it Gilmour Girls.
3) As far as late 20th century WB dramas go, Gilmore Girls is obviously a minor work in comparison to the true greats, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
lol I agree that Buffy is superior
I suspect people who say they read for pleasure usually just want to cordon their reading off from self-improvement or anything that might smack of duty, practical value, or social advantage. For some, that makes reading a guilty pleasure, and for others, a welcome reprieve. No doubt some have reflected on the matter, found the effort unrewarding-- and who can blame them? "intrinsic value", "the value of the experience afforded by an attentive openess to the text", "confronting greatness", "a non-religious substitute for both the numinous and mystical religious experience", and so on-- and settled on a simple formula of cozy evasion. For certainly it is an evasion, as your comments indirectly make clear. In other words, I don't think they really mean what they say. What they really mean is probably something like "Please, let's not think too much about it." That is not a sentiment I can relate to or respect, but neither is it one I find objectionable. It seems preferable, at any rate, to what is on offer from the ponderous moralist, the political ideologue, or the sort of clever, arid interpreter Susan Sontag rightly railed against.
In the arts/humanities institutional world, one thing that many years of surveying has discovered is that the general public uses the word "fun" as an enormous bucket in which they include a wide range of positive feelings and experiences, many of which far transcend shallow entertainment. In many cases, what they actually mean is what arts educators would call "engagement," that is to say--experiencing a flow state, having experiences that contrast with the workaday world, having the opportunity to interact and spend time with friends and family in new and different ways, etc. I suspect that may be part of what is going on with these responses.
Oh sure but as the literary people should we be a bit more careful about what we mean?
I think it’s reading for pleasure vs. something else - like “developing empathy.”
I’m in the pleasure camp - pleasure being broadly defined.
“Lolita” is a mind-bending case. When I read it in my late teens, I set aside the subject matter and reveled in the language. I have a feeling that’s what many readers do. Or, like Lionel Trilling, don’t come to grips (it’s “about love”) Is there a moral purpose? I’ve come to have doubts.
There’s a troubling essay by Martin Amis where he grapples with Nabokov’s treatment of little girls in the later novels. He calls the failings aesthetic, not moral - but the drift of his argument suggests otherwise. The later books cast a shadow backwards.
The Problem with Nabokov
Martin Amis
Originally in The Guardian (oddly not on the website, as far as I can tell)
November 14, 2009
https://martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/MA_Nabokov_2009.pdf
“One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.”
I woke up actually thinking about this. I love reading, but what makes it even better is taking the time to consider why is something so enjoyable? What did we connect with?
I'm one of the read-for-fun people. Do I read for fun? Yes, but for a lot more than that also. And I read things that are not (mostly) fun, like Joyce.
But those of us who find reading to be of value on many levels need to do something to convince large numbers of other people to read, and telling non-readers that reading exists for a higher purpose is wholly ineffectual. I started my Substack with the objective of trying to draw people in, for entertainment at least to start. https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/dickens-dracula-and-djinni-literature. I also wrote (yesterday) about the barriers to reading that thwart people, and the notion that reading is something good for you - like eating your vegetables - is a barrier. People are not going to do it just for that reason. https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/not-so-bleak-really-the-bleak-house
My dad reviewed novels - thousands of them - for the NYT in the 60’s and 70’s.
He always said - reading is for pleasure. So I’m all in favor of your approach. Keep at it! (Though I fear, as Reagan reputedly said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”) But I do think reading is good for you and that’s something to push in a gentle way. See Matthew Yglesias’s conversation with HO a couple of months ago. He said spending time with great literature calms him down, it’s a de-stressor. Maybe that’s a low-key argument to make. And I think it’s true.
Also, your take on the Bleak House experiment is spot on. People should check that piece out.
Thanks! I tried to write about what I thought was intriguing about Bleak House here https://clairelaporte.substack.com/p/a-mysterious-death-metaphor-and-science-20d but I'm not sure whether it worked or not.
Your spelling of Gilmore Girls indicates that you are not familiar enough with it to realize that it, too, can be "more than pleasure" (despite, also, being *extremely" pleasurable).
I think your podcast with Tyler Cowen titled Shakespeare for Doge outlines how challenging and rewarding reading literature well can be.
“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of 'obligatory pleasure'? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. 'Obligatory happiness'! [...] If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is 'Paradise Lost' — which is not tedious to me — or 'Don Quixote' — which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write— I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers' reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.”
I would love to join the Jane Austen Zoom, will the link get sent out as a regular email? Is there some other system to track when you host Zooms, such as by joining some email invite list?
Perhaps reading literature is fun when the skill of the authors allow us to luxuriate in the language.
the better the story, the more pleasure and the more different kinds of pleasures my brain is getting from it, but the point is i expect to get some kind of pleasure from reading a novel over a summary
If i say that one history of slavery book was better than another, i don't mean that one book made me wish i was a slave or made me want to bring back slavery. I mean reading one book was a better experience than reading the other, that better reading experience i describe as the pleasure of reading. No reading should be without it
Stories should at least be enjoyable, and once you've made them so, then you can also put in all of the other things like prose, characters, world-building, poems, etc.
At one level you can end up with a circular definition of fun - I love a 10k run before breakfast, but for most people that is in a similar territory to saying you love Tolstoy or Pynchon - it sounds like high effort for a low reward, rather than enjoyable in itself.
I was discussing literature with a friend, and why - for me - Mick Herron is ‘reading for pleasure’ while le Carre was a literary writer - and I came to realise that it’s more a map with vague borders.
It’s not complexity of language - Hemingway shows us that. It’s not realistic characters - the thing I think lifts le Carre away from genre. Borges is clearly literary with barely a character to be seen.
Poetry can do away with both plot and character.
I cannot pin down what makes some work have more literary value than others, but I would 100% say le Carre outranks Herron who outranks Dan Brown.
The other thing that strikes me is that most young people understand the concept of ‘levelling up’ - from The Golden Bough through Dungeons and Dragons to video games and their influence back into film and pop music, even young people who don’t play video games use terms like ‘boss fight’, ‘end of level’. There is an understanding of the cycle of performing a challenge, which will unlock the next challenge.
(I asked Claude “Is ‘Finnegans Wake’ the final boss” - 6 words, from which it was able to unpick exactly what was intended. It also suggested Ezra Pound ‘The Cantos’, Zettels Traum, and ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ as Final boss alternatives)
Reading literature offers pleasures on many levels. It's much more than "fun," as that word is used in the common parlance.