Since I moved into my new house, I’ve been reading a lot more and, because of the Algorithms watching us at all times, I’ve been exposed to people’s opinions on reading far more than I care for. I know with the less-than-stellar quality of my own writing, I’m throwing stones from a glass house. Unfortunately, my mouth is already running with no sign of depleting its fuel.
Books Are Bad For You
I’ve had teachers tell me since I was a wee lad that if I ever wanted to cultivate real intelligence I would inevitably need to be a bookworm. This worked out for my development, seeing as I already enjoyed getting sucked into a good book (by prepubescent standards) but, for the vast majority of young children, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Reading was no longer an activity of leisure, but a chore, a boulder to roll up a hill.
The school board seemed to notice this too, as starting in middle school the reading we were assigned was juvenile, sterile, straightforward, and all-around inadequate as a tool for education. Of course, the kids (myself unfortunately included) loved this stuff. I mean, I would have taken Percy Jackson over Moby Dick any day of the week. But is that what really matters?
The job of an English teacher is not to make students love reading. That’s ridiculous. Is it the job of a Physics teacher to make their students love gravity? A History teacher to love inbreeding? The primary purpose of English education is to give students an understanding of the creations that surround them, be they art, advertisement, propaganda poster, or what have you. Teaching kids about the greatest works of the English language is only a secondary objective, a nice bonus, not the summit which teachers are climbing towards.
It’s a real tragedy that curriculums have strayed from this noble endeavour in favour of meaningless measures of words, pages, or chapters read. Even more of a tragedy, though, is that people still think reading is some inherently good, enriching act. So often will I see a person brag about the 100+ books they read this year, only for their bibliography to be filled with piles of pulp superhero comics, or fluff romances, or misogynistic self-help books for Real Men. These books don’t help you! Reading them does not make you a better person!
The reason people talk about reading the classics as this life-changing experience is because those books are life-changing! Something like a Wuthering Heights, or an Iliad, or (my current read) a Moby Dick has gained the title of classic because it has stood the test of time. The Iliad, probably the best example, was read by nearly every King, Emperor, or otherwise high-status ruler to come out of Europe from ~500 BC to the modern day. Why is that? Why did Caesar stand in what he thought was Troy, comparing himself to Agamemnon? Because the Iliad is a classic. Homer’s poetry has innumerable magnificent qualities to it, PhD dissertations are published every other day about the blind poet’s opus. That’s what makes reading it enriching. Not the simple fact that it, coincidentally, has words written on paper, bound together in a single volume. That couldn’t be farther from the point.
The 20 year old incel reading Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, the girl in her late 20s downloading BookTok recommendations onto her Kindle, the middle-aged obsessive collector reading the latest issue of Spider-Man atop his throne of Funko Pops, none of these people are enriching themselves (or even, in the case of the first, actively damaging himself and society). And that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Just, please, be aware of what you’re doing.
In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, one of the foundational texts of the Dystopian genre, books are outlawed. Nobody seems to notice or care, because for only a few dollars you can buy the next best thing: paragraph-long summaries! Why spend days slogging through Shakespeare when you can learn the plot of Hamlet in half a minute? After all, they’re both reading.
Clarification
I have no problem with pulpy, trendy, mass appeal entertainment on its own. I love a lot of that stuff (curse those great comic writers and artists that got me hooked on this terribly commercial medium). My problem lies entirely with a lack of awareness. When I read a trashy comic, I’m aware that I’m reading a trashy comic, that I only enjoy it for it superficial reasons, and that, with the slightest scrutiny, it diminishes in quality rapidly. I’m aware that, when I get excited about The Batman 2, I’m giving my goodwill to a billion dollar company that deserves none of it.
My concern is with those who aren’t aware. Fascistic meatheads that think Ben Shapiro is their lord and saviour. Aforementioned late-20s-BookTok-girls that stick their head in the ground when real-world issues are brought up in their books. Middle-aged Star-Wars worshippers that only like the franchise for its surface-level aesthetics. All these types of people, and the many, many more that fall victim to their own mindlessness have genuine negative real-world consequences. It’s this same lack of clarity that has allowed the cultural pendulum to swing conservative again. That’s what I care about. I don’t give a fuck if some crusty man prefers playing with LEGOs to showering. I give a fuck when he neglects his duties to his fellow humans. We’re all we’ve got.
That would be a depressing note to end on, so I want to impart some more advice. Go talk to your librarians. Damn near everybody has a library near them. Librarians live for helping people find books they want to read. If you can’t go to the library, free PDFs are dead simple to find. Piracy is awesome.