The clever person who wrote that reading books is a waste of time clearly has missed the entire point of reading— at least, of reading things other than self-improvement books. Sounds like a person who doesn’t know how to live.
Weighing in as an ADD disaster zone on legs, high school dropout and, honestly, a once prideful ignorant tit, I didn't start reading daily until age 28 when I set out on a five-year grand tour, funded with money made selling office furniture systems. As a farewell gift, a Russian girl from work gave me a travel diary, wrote "Do. See. Write." in the inside cover. With those three words she changed my entire timbre from an intent to seek only unending debauch to testing my limits through all types of rough travel, hardship and adventure -- land, sea, mountain, linguistics, cultural immersion, etc. -- and, of course, much debauch in the off hours.
I spent those five years reading everything I could grab, trade, steal, occasionally buy. Many classics (Melville, Dickens, Defoe, Sartre, Kafka...) some modern fic (the Amises, Ludlum, Elton, McEwan, McCarthy, most of the Indians), Asian history and historical fiction (Burgess, Raffles, Levathes, Seagrave, Godshalk, GM Fraser, Gide, O'Hanlon), as I devoured Earth's wonders, often hunkered in the shade on yachts being delivered up the South China Sea, down the Tasman Sea, through the Flores Sea, edging the Malacca Straits and both sides of the Pacific. I inadvertently developed my own language learning system, mastering enough spoken Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Lao and Spanish to make travel twice as sweet and meaningful as having not done so.
Washed up broke in Singapore in '93. After a year varnishing yacht teak under the sun, found work writing copy with ad agencies for literate Brit and Aussie misfits. Remained almost seven years, kept reading, kept writing -- long letters, non-ad prose for fun, took a screenwriting course, had a fake news email circular mocking Asia's dictators. Some 30 years later I've just been hired to edit a succulent first novel and a much needed book on getting infrastructure done, have maintained my own unending travel story here on the Stack, and am on my 9th screenplay in five years' jamming with an LA writers group over Zoom. Still writing ad copy, which I love as much as ever.
Useful thing #1 I've learned: Curiosity's a perpetual motion machine; it is all it needs to keep going, growing.
Point is, if I can rise from idiocy to semi-usefulness, any fool can -- at any phase of life. The world of letters is as accessible as you let it be. Main thing is to read, write, think, connect ideas and histories and personae and the human-natural world trajectories and enjoy the absorptive brain you've been issued, no matter how pitted, dented and unmoored it might be. Because it will surprise you. You're much smarter and far tougher than you think.
Take the pain of device withdrawal however you need to -- aided by friends, sites like this one, booze, drugs, reading aloud, whatever's viable. I've taken to mixing up a double voddy martini at 7pm, closing the study door, then shouting out Lanchester's "The Last Lion" for a couple of hours in my best over-the-top poncy British accent (I'm from Toronto). I am having the time of my life with this, and my accent is improving with each of William's gorgeous sentences (I decided on this approach upon remembering that my long-dead dad, a WWII RAF Spitfire pilot and Churchill contemp, had told me Lanchester recited both volumes aloud to his secretary from memory, on the fly, who jotted it all by hand, then later typed it out. How fucking badass is that?
Useful thing #2 I've learned: Literature need not only be gazing into some fat old dusty book, hoping with dread or fear that it sinks in. Engage it like a lunatic, a terrorist, and you'll get something out of it, if only a laugh, sensations of elation, a set of exhausted vocal chords, an overtaxed mind.
I was intimidated by the smart kids and English teachers and books I couldn't read while I failed through my 12 years of school. Only one of those brats, besides me, is a working writer today, and he's a pretentious nutcase who writes abstruse books three people on earth can understand. I'm neither famous nor celebrated, and pretense eludes me despite my boldest efforts, but reading and writing's paid my bills for 30+ years and made me slightly less of a twat than I used to be. That'll do just fine.
After Lanchester, it's all of Shakespeare aloud, then all of Gibbons -- they're flanking me on the shelves, daring me to try. That ought to about see me out, or kill me. What great way to die.
I love this! Great late bloomer story! Great account of reading. And Shakespeare out loud... perfect! Glad you are enjoying Lanchester. Some good moments in those books
Agreed. Been saying the same thing myself for years. It's always at bottom about individuals choosing to make themselves readers of serious literature. Established institutional support is always a double-edged sword. Are we sure the purported death-throes of the humanities aren't actually their liberation from careerism? I suspect even large-scale and rigorous scholarship can endure without established institutional support.
I am deeply soured by the trajectory the universities have been on at least since my undergrad days in the '80s. But I want your loyalty to them to be deserved, and I'm not ready to give up yet, either. (P.S. So far, the posts I've seen of yours are almost unnervingly apt for my tastes-- first, your defense of Waugh (probably my favorite humorist/satirist); then your celebration of Middlemarch (probably my favorite English novel of the 19th century), and here your selection of Tolstoy (probably my favorite novelist) as a prime exemplar of great literature.)
How do we provide the guidance that a true professional can provide, outside of the institution? Genuine question. I dislike when autodidacts suggest that because internet and libraries (bless them) contain the sum of a higher education's parts, anyone can do it on his own (just read the books! They insist). I doubt if i could have done it without my professors. I needed the structures and habits they provided, which I internalized and adapted. In later years when I continued, I made use of resources such as Great Courses and Modern Scholar audios, but they wouldn't exist if there weren't an institution to support the professors who make the series. Or could there be? But I hate to have yo think of ways to monetize it.
I've just been re-reading Vivian Gornick (to write an essay about how wonderful her writing is and why we should all read it), and your article reminded me of an essay she writes about the dying act of letter writing. In the beginning, she intuitively reaches for the common go-to: that this is just the world she finds herself in. One where people don't write letters. Then she interrogates the passivity of the phrase "The world I find myself in".
"What does it mean," she writes, "to find yourself in the world, rather than that you struggle to take your place in the world?"
She closes the essay mentioning a letter from Edmund Wilson to a friend: "'We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them,' Wilson wrote. 'The only thing that we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand [...] in the long run remakes the world.' Conversely, work that is not done — deliberateness avoided — is also world-making. Every time the urge to write a letter dies stillborn in me I am making the world I rail against."
That's what I take from your essay, Henry — a reminder to remake the world as I'd like it through good work, rather than reinforcing the world's failures as they are.
What a brilliant speech about books! You know, when I lived in the Soviet Union, a book was a primary connection with the world and with yourself. Everybody read a book in the metro, on a tram, on the bus, in the park, sitting on a bench. You saw books everywhere. Thousands of people came to the poets' readings. I came here; I haven't seen the books. But at Substack, I learn that thousands of people read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in a slow reading. I was happy to know about it. Books are alive! And will be, especially after your advocacy. Thank you.
I think I answered with the comment on it, but it disappeared. I am not sure that the Russians are still continuing to read. Before, it was their only freedom; now they are too busy to survive, and they don't have time for spirituality.
I have a science background. I recently asked an AI platform a question relating to my research interest, and it got it wrong. When challenged, it agreed and re wrote its answer. So humans are still needed but AI can learn, and the future is unclear….
The great irony in all of this, is that AI actually responds best to highly literate people. It's technology that demonstrably delivers its best results for people with a liberal arts and humanistic background. AI can't read a book for you, but it can help you understand a book better, or clarify references or make further recommendations. What a powerful and personal tool! A return to the humanities is in fact the route to both greater happiness and abundance.
Hear hear! (Or, as someone explained to me, it should be 'Here here!'
Just finished Eugene Onegin in Charles Johnson's excellent translation.
Last year, read Moby Dick, then Clarissa (yes, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, a huge novel in letters; Pushkin, I discovered, read Richardson! You can read my account of it on my substack, 'The Great Tradition...')
This year so far Dostoevsky The Idiot, Adiche's Dream Count, Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Lined up, Racine, dual-language version of Phedre. You can read my account of it
In Pickwick, Dickens makes it clear it should be "hear, hear," because he laments that Pickwick's audience is so busy shouting it that they are failing to do it.
I am slow reading Anna Karenina and every page in that novel could be a conversation. I will happily chat for hours about Kitty at the spa, and her spiritual awakening then crash. A tidy novel within a novel! I just need to find others who are interested.
Recently read and loved Howards End. Always a pleasure to find a book that really makes your heart race - it's such an exciting book. Currently reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which is fascinating and makes me laugh out loud.
Hey Henry, this is a great and much needed reminder for us to share what we believe has value, rather than just rail against what we believe has no value (which I'm definitely guilty of as well).
Appreciate you screenshotting my note about Moby Dick too. It is by far and away the most popular thing I've ever shared online anywhere, which shows that people do have an appetite to talk about great works, and are receptive to conversations about them. All is not lost!
My entire Substack is dedicated to precisely this issue: that handwringing is useless, and it's time to enjoy literature because it's inherently interesting and fun!
The clever person who wrote that reading books is a waste of time clearly has missed the entire point of reading— at least, of reading things other than self-improvement books. Sounds like a person who doesn’t know how to live.
Amen to that, Sir Henry.
Weighing in as an ADD disaster zone on legs, high school dropout and, honestly, a once prideful ignorant tit, I didn't start reading daily until age 28 when I set out on a five-year grand tour, funded with money made selling office furniture systems. As a farewell gift, a Russian girl from work gave me a travel diary, wrote "Do. See. Write." in the inside cover. With those three words she changed my entire timbre from an intent to seek only unending debauch to testing my limits through all types of rough travel, hardship and adventure -- land, sea, mountain, linguistics, cultural immersion, etc. -- and, of course, much debauch in the off hours.
I spent those five years reading everything I could grab, trade, steal, occasionally buy. Many classics (Melville, Dickens, Defoe, Sartre, Kafka...) some modern fic (the Amises, Ludlum, Elton, McEwan, McCarthy, most of the Indians), Asian history and historical fiction (Burgess, Raffles, Levathes, Seagrave, Godshalk, GM Fraser, Gide, O'Hanlon), as I devoured Earth's wonders, often hunkered in the shade on yachts being delivered up the South China Sea, down the Tasman Sea, through the Flores Sea, edging the Malacca Straits and both sides of the Pacific. I inadvertently developed my own language learning system, mastering enough spoken Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Lao and Spanish to make travel twice as sweet and meaningful as having not done so.
Washed up broke in Singapore in '93. After a year varnishing yacht teak under the sun, found work writing copy with ad agencies for literate Brit and Aussie misfits. Remained almost seven years, kept reading, kept writing -- long letters, non-ad prose for fun, took a screenwriting course, had a fake news email circular mocking Asia's dictators. Some 30 years later I've just been hired to edit a succulent first novel and a much needed book on getting infrastructure done, have maintained my own unending travel story here on the Stack, and am on my 9th screenplay in five years' jamming with an LA writers group over Zoom. Still writing ad copy, which I love as much as ever.
Useful thing #1 I've learned: Curiosity's a perpetual motion machine; it is all it needs to keep going, growing.
Point is, if I can rise from idiocy to semi-usefulness, any fool can -- at any phase of life. The world of letters is as accessible as you let it be. Main thing is to read, write, think, connect ideas and histories and personae and the human-natural world trajectories and enjoy the absorptive brain you've been issued, no matter how pitted, dented and unmoored it might be. Because it will surprise you. You're much smarter and far tougher than you think.
Take the pain of device withdrawal however you need to -- aided by friends, sites like this one, booze, drugs, reading aloud, whatever's viable. I've taken to mixing up a double voddy martini at 7pm, closing the study door, then shouting out Lanchester's "The Last Lion" for a couple of hours in my best over-the-top poncy British accent (I'm from Toronto). I am having the time of my life with this, and my accent is improving with each of William's gorgeous sentences (I decided on this approach upon remembering that my long-dead dad, a WWII RAF Spitfire pilot and Churchill contemp, had told me Lanchester recited both volumes aloud to his secretary from memory, on the fly, who jotted it all by hand, then later typed it out. How fucking badass is that?
Useful thing #2 I've learned: Literature need not only be gazing into some fat old dusty book, hoping with dread or fear that it sinks in. Engage it like a lunatic, a terrorist, and you'll get something out of it, if only a laugh, sensations of elation, a set of exhausted vocal chords, an overtaxed mind.
I was intimidated by the smart kids and English teachers and books I couldn't read while I failed through my 12 years of school. Only one of those brats, besides me, is a working writer today, and he's a pretentious nutcase who writes abstruse books three people on earth can understand. I'm neither famous nor celebrated, and pretense eludes me despite my boldest efforts, but reading and writing's paid my bills for 30+ years and made me slightly less of a twat than I used to be. That'll do just fine.
After Lanchester, it's all of Shakespeare aloud, then all of Gibbons -- they're flanking me on the shelves, daring me to try. That ought to about see me out, or kill me. What great way to die.
I love this! Great late bloomer story! Great account of reading. And Shakespeare out loud... perfect! Glad you are enjoying Lanchester. Some good moments in those books
Challenge accepted!
Excellent!
Agreed. Been saying the same thing myself for years. It's always at bottom about individuals choosing to make themselves readers of serious literature. Established institutional support is always a double-edged sword. Are we sure the purported death-throes of the humanities aren't actually their liberation from careerism? I suspect even large-scale and rigorous scholarship can endure without established institutional support.
I am pro the universities! But for many people there is only so much they can do about that
I am deeply soured by the trajectory the universities have been on at least since my undergrad days in the '80s. But I want your loyalty to them to be deserved, and I'm not ready to give up yet, either. (P.S. So far, the posts I've seen of yours are almost unnervingly apt for my tastes-- first, your defense of Waugh (probably my favorite humorist/satirist); then your celebration of Middlemarch (probably my favorite English novel of the 19th century), and here your selection of Tolstoy (probably my favorite novelist) as a prime exemplar of great literature.)
There's a lot of excellent work being done, it just doesn't get as much attention.
How do we provide the guidance that a true professional can provide, outside of the institution? Genuine question. I dislike when autodidacts suggest that because internet and libraries (bless them) contain the sum of a higher education's parts, anyone can do it on his own (just read the books! They insist). I doubt if i could have done it without my professors. I needed the structures and habits they provided, which I internalized and adapted. In later years when I continued, I made use of resources such as Great Courses and Modern Scholar audios, but they wouldn't exist if there weren't an institution to support the professors who make the series. Or could there be? But I hate to have yo think of ways to monetize it.
I am pro the institutions. I write about scholarly work all the time! But that is a separate question to this, I think.
I've just been re-reading Vivian Gornick (to write an essay about how wonderful her writing is and why we should all read it), and your article reminded me of an essay she writes about the dying act of letter writing. In the beginning, she intuitively reaches for the common go-to: that this is just the world she finds herself in. One where people don't write letters. Then she interrogates the passivity of the phrase "The world I find myself in".
"What does it mean," she writes, "to find yourself in the world, rather than that you struggle to take your place in the world?"
She closes the essay mentioning a letter from Edmund Wilson to a friend: "'We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them,' Wilson wrote. 'The only thing that we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand [...] in the long run remakes the world.' Conversely, work that is not done — deliberateness avoided — is also world-making. Every time the urge to write a letter dies stillborn in me I am making the world I rail against."
That's what I take from your essay, Henry — a reminder to remake the world as I'd like it through good work, rather than reinforcing the world's failures as they are.
This is great thank you
What a brilliant speech about books! You know, when I lived in the Soviet Union, a book was a primary connection with the world and with yourself. Everybody read a book in the metro, on a tram, on the bus, in the park, sitting on a bench. You saw books everywhere. Thousands of people came to the poets' readings. I came here; I haven't seen the books. But at Substack, I learn that thousands of people read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in a slow reading. I was happy to know about it. Books are alive! And will be, especially after your advocacy. Thank you.
I love this description of everyone reading. If only we had that!
I think I answered with the comment on it, but it disappeared. I am not sure that the Russians are still continuing to read. Before, it was their only freedom; now they are too busy to survive, and they don't have time for spirituality.
Thank you for your understanding.
Yes sad times
And I would add: read to your children. And your grandchildren.
I have a science background. I recently asked an AI platform a question relating to my research interest, and it got it wrong. When challenged, it agreed and re wrote its answer. So humans are still needed but AI can learn, and the future is unclear….
Right on! How can I be moan about a decline of literacy when I haven’t even read Melville/Austen and countless others?
Your sage advice also applies to religion. How can I complain about a decline in faith and practice if I’m not striving to be the face of Christ?
This is Austen's anniversary year, a good time to get started!
The great irony in all of this, is that AI actually responds best to highly literate people. It's technology that demonstrably delivers its best results for people with a liberal arts and humanistic background. AI can't read a book for you, but it can help you understand a book better, or clarify references or make further recommendations. What a powerful and personal tool! A return to the humanities is in fact the route to both greater happiness and abundance.
The best thing I've heard in month. I needed it!
I’m glad :)
Hear hear! (Or, as someone explained to me, it should be 'Here here!'
Just finished Eugene Onegin in Charles Johnson's excellent translation.
Last year, read Moby Dick, then Clarissa (yes, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, a huge novel in letters; Pushkin, I discovered, read Richardson! You can read my account of it on my substack, 'The Great Tradition...')
This year so far Dostoevsky The Idiot, Adiche's Dream Count, Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Lined up, Racine, dual-language version of Phedre. You can read my account of it
Very good! Do add links ...
In Pickwick, Dickens makes it clear it should be "hear, hear," because he laments that Pickwick's audience is so busy shouting it that they are failing to do it.
I am slow reading Anna Karenina and every page in that novel could be a conversation. I will happily chat for hours about Kitty at the spa, and her spiritual awakening then crash. A tidy novel within a novel! I just need to find others who are interested.
Novel of novels, book of books
Recently read and loved Howards End. Always a pleasure to find a book that really makes your heart race - it's such an exciting book. Currently reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which is fascinating and makes me laugh out loud.
Hey Henry, this is a great and much needed reminder for us to share what we believe has value, rather than just rail against what we believe has no value (which I'm definitely guilty of as well).
Appreciate you screenshotting my note about Moby Dick too. It is by far and away the most popular thing I've ever shared online anywhere, which shows that people do have an appetite to talk about great works, and are receptive to conversations about them. All is not lost!
My entire Substack is dedicated to precisely this issue: that handwringing is useless, and it's time to enjoy literature because it's inherently interesting and fun!