Reading should be one of life’s joys, not a duty

Nick Hornby, who knows a thing or two about the subject, has been holding forth on books and how to make them a part of one’s life. “I’m passionate about reading and what reading can do for you,” he said, before going on to suggest that this should not be undertaken in a spirit of “duty”, rather with the same sense of pleasure with which one watches the television.

If people are not enjoying a book, said Hornby, they should close the damn thing and stop reading it.

My instant reaction to this was a sense of laughing relief, that somebody had not only admitted to doing such a thing, but had portrayed it as a positive act.

Why on earth should anybody read a book if it is not fulfilling its most basic requirement, which is to entertain?

Then doubt crept in. Advising people to cast aside a book, simply because they are not “loving” it? Comparing the sacred act of reading with that of box-setting one’s way through Lewis? Is this not a certain way to render the classics obsolete?

Who, taking on such a mindset, would grind their way through the opening chapters of Bleak House or The Return of the Native, or refrain from skipping to the more obviously attention-holding passages in D H Lawrence? As for books such as Clarissa, To The Lighthouse or Ulysses: surely their continued life depends upon a touch of masochism in the reader?

Nick Hornby knows this quite as well as anybody, of course. What he is actually saying is serious and sensible. There is absolutely no point, no long-term gain, in turning reading into a duty, when it can be one of life’s greatest pleasures.

At the same time, I am extremely glad that I read “difficult” books when I was young. They form part of my internal furniture, as it were.

I am glad that I was obliged to think about Jane Austen rigorously, and therefore do not subscribe to the idea that Pride and Prejudice is simply Bridget Jones’s Diary in bonnets. This is the danger with any quick, reductive interpretation of Nick Hornby’s remarks. If I had seen them, aged 14, I would have thought: Great. Goodnight, Middlemarch. Now I can get back to my close study of the NME.

In other words, I think that there does need to be a degree of benign compulsion when it comes to young people’s reading. This has to be intelligently done, with encouragement to find pleasure where it is not expected. And there is nothing wrong with using television, that easier route to enjoyment, as an entry point. The Charmer, ITV’s loose but excellent version of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, started me on an enduring love affair with Patrick Hamilton’s glorious novels. If I hadn’t already done so, I would certainly have read Middlemarch and Bleak House after seeing them on television. The screen supplies a sort of familiarisation, a means to break down the potentially impenetrable barrier between reader and text.

Death in Venice, though… I saw the film. Then I progressed to the book. After 50 pages I took the Hornby route and gave up. Even the passionate recommendation of Clive James, in his magnificent Cultural Amnesia, could not make me enjoy Thomas Mann.

This was by no means the only time that I abandoned a novel that I felt I should read.

It took me years of false starts to get through Wuthering Heights. Does it matter that I can now say I have read it, even though I didn’t enjoy it? Not really. What have I proved, what have I achieved? Nothing, except that if the book comes up in conversation I can put in my ha’p’orth of knowledge.

And that attitude to reading has no essential value. Reading for the sake of it, in order to say that one has done so, is all too common. It is a sort of intellectual herd mentality, peculiarly inappropriate to the private joy of communing with a book.

The contemporary equivalent of feeling one ought to read Wuthering Heights leads people to plough through the Booker Prize shortlist, only rarely an activity that brings pleasure.

Indeed, much of the problem with books today, is that there is such a gulf between “literary” novels – often unreadable – and supermarket-shelf novels, readable but awful. There are some authors who bridge this gap, Hornby included. They manage to say salient things without sacrificing the pleasure principle. They understand that writing is supposed to be about life, not about creating a post-modern world unto itself.

Nevertheless, the sense that novels are a natural part of our collective cultural landscape, as they were until around the middle of the 20th century, has surely gone. Recognising this brings me no pleasure at all. In such a context, Nick Hornby’s reminder that reading is enjoyable, or it is nothing, is a necessary one.