Last night, I told an acquaintance of mine that I don’t really think there are any writers which I would call a “must-read” for anyone, because I do not believe that is particularly good for a person. I clarified by saying that: a) I think that reading books yields few practical benefits; and b) reading books does not tend to make people happier.

(At this point I feel the need for a clarification. Clearly books are really useful things that collectively contain pretty much all of mankind’s knowledge to-date and alot of that knowledge can definitely make you happier and lead to some pretty awesome practical benefits. What I am talking about when I say ‘reading’ refers to literature: mostly fiction, but also any nonfiction works that people read primarily for their literary value like, for instance, St. Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions. )

The first of these points is the one I have believed in for the longest time: probably since high school English class. In every English class I took , the teacher would attempt to convince their students that reading and discussing great works of literature would improve their ability to think. This seemed kind of specious to me. Most of the thinking a person needs to do in life involves solving fairly concrete problems: How can I program a computer to perform this task? How can I convince this person to sleep with me? How can I score some cocaine at 3 AM? How can I get my boss to promote me? How can I get my teacher to give me a good grade?

How does discussing books help with this kind of thinking? How does it make me better at solving these problems? At the time, I didn’t think that my English teachers had actually managed to make the case that finding examples of foreshadowing in The Great Gatsby would ever help me do anything.

However, I will admit that it is possible that doing the kind of critical analysis involved in certain kinds of reading could make a person into a “better thinker” through some non-intuitive channel: maybe the same intellectual muscles are involved in both kinds of thinking.

But in my observations, I have not found that to be true. I have found that people who read a lot, and read deeply, and think about what they read (the best kinds of readers, in other words) tend to be very articulate. They tend to be good at putting words together in a way that sounds good. Often, they’re even pretty good at constructing arguments.

But, professionally speaking, they do not seem to be significantly better at their chosen fields than people who do not read very much. They do not seem to be blowing anyone’s minds with the strength and originality of their thinking. While we can all think of good readers who are also doing well professionally, we can probably think of many more good readers who are underemployed (they’re bartenders, waiters, clerks, etc.). And we can also think of many people who seem to be doing very well in their profession, but who do not read very much at all.

Of course, this is absolutely anecdotal. I have no proof that reading doesn’t improve a person’s thinking. It is possible that all the good readers I know would be significantly less intellectually fertile if they did not read. And it is possible that all the successful non-readers would be much better off if they did read.

But to me it seems like that whole renaissance-man ideal – that notion that excellence requires a mind well-versed in many things – is not how we think about intellectual productivity nowadays.

Nowadays, we are all about specialization. We are about 10,000 hours of practice. We are about working for something for five hours a day from the age of 11 onwards. We’re about genius being the result of hard work. And to my eyes the most successful people I know – the most economically productive people I know – are the ones who spare the least time for cultivation of artistic sensibilities…because they spend all their time working in their chosen field.

This is in no way a bullet-proof argument. It’s merely the way the world seems to me. I’d be interested in knowing whether it looks the same way to other people: do you think that being a good reader (or an appreciator of art in general) makes a person better at solving the intellectual problems they will encounter? Does it make them more creative in non-artistic field of endeavor?  Does it make them more economically productive? To me the answer to all these questions seems to be no.

Okay, so that’s the part about whether reading (and remember, I am talking even about being a ‘good reader’: someone who savors every word of Proust and heavily annotates his Joyce) will be practically beneficial. But we all know about Wilde’s aphorism that all art is quite useless. Who cares about that practical stuff? What about the spiritual effects of reading?

First of all, I’d like to say that I think that what a human being aims at is to be happy. Of course, there’s all kinds of kinks involved in this objective – the hedonic paradox and all that – and who even knows what happiness is, right? Maybe happiness is not the real goal after all, but it’s just the currency our bodies and souls are paid in whenever we do the right thing. Okay, but in that case, happiness is still meaningful somehow. It’s still how we know what we want to do.

So, does being a ‘good reader’ make people happy? Well…in my talk with my acquaintance, we thought about a few different aspects of this.

If the acquisition of knowledge is something you value, then reading a lot (and reading ‘well’) will make you happy. I think that is true, and it’s part of the reason why I read. But, on the other hand, all that knowledge is just knowledge of books. Many of those books are novels which don’t contain much knowledge about the real world. Viewed this way, reading is a somewhat arbitrary game. I think that a person would derive much the same sort of pleasure from having a knowledge of chess strategies, or of fishing techniques, or of great bars in cities around the world, or of innovative international development programs. Connoisseurship is a real pleasure: but I think that the pleasure is the same no matter what one is a connoisseur of.

And finally, there is the simple pleasure of reading. Reading itself is a lot of fun.

But there are a lot of things that are fun. Is reading more fun than walking through the woods? Is it more fun than watching TV? Is it more fun than imagining oneself as Emperor of the Universe? For me the answer to all these questions is “sometimes”.

Sometimes, for me, reading is the most fun thing I can do. But other times it isn’t. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s the last thing I want to do. And I find it very easy to imagine a person for whom that ‘sometimes’ is ‘most of the time’ or ‘all the time’.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. People are different from each other. If a person doesn’t derive pleasure from reading then I would advise them not to read.

There are so many people in the world who feel so guilty about being poorly read, or about not having read enough, or not reading at all. Sometimes I think that the unhappiness resulting from these insecurities (as well as the sheer drudgery of hundreds of millions of children being forced to grapple with ‘classic’ novels whose consumption will lead to no spiritual or intellectual benefit) exceeds the gross total of pleasure that people get from reading, and that the result is that this pastime actually increases the net amount of misery in the world (as opposed to pastimes that, I think, cause more widespread pleasure and carry less cultural baggage, like popular music or television).

But the question was whether reading makes people (who like to read) happier. And I don’t even know if that is the case. It doesn’t appear to me that good readers are happier people than non-readers. I am not even sure why they would be. Readers don’t seem more subtle. Their taste for pleasure does not seem more refined. They do not seem to fall in love more easily or stay in love for longer. They do not seem more compassionate or more moral. I am often unable to tell whether a person reads frequently or not at all. There doesn’t seem to me to be any difference in the characters of readers and non-readers. Readers, if anything, often seem somewhat gloomier and less content than non-readers. So then what is the spiritual benefit?

Again, this is a totally open-ended question. It is just the way things seem to me. How do they seem to you? What attributes can you see in good readers? Do they seem happier to you than non-readers do?

The most I am willing to commit myself to on the question of the spiritual benefits of reading is that a certain kind of person can derive a lot of pleasure from it. But, again, I am not sure that this pleasure either leads to greater happiness or that it is a greater (or even a particularly different pleasure) from that which other people derive from walks in the forest or from watching TV.

All of this philosophizing about the role of reading is something I am free to do, of course, because it has very little practical effect for me. I decided a long time ago that I was going to devote a significant portion of my time to writing fiction. The decision was not one that was made on a wholly rational basis, but it is a decision that I have not questioned. And one of the things that reading definitely does do is improve one’s writing, so whether or not reading is a good idea for y’all…it’s definitely a good idea for me.

And I do also think that reading is fun. It’s a very complex, very immersive game: something that is much better than World of Warcraft in terms of quality but not morally superior to it. Reading involves entering into thousands of fantasy-lands that are connected in very strange and subtle ways and then navigating those fantasy lands using a variety of techniques: different reading styles, different modes of thought, different moods and viewpoints.

For me there is nothing in reading that is particularly like the real world. The emotions I feel while reading don’t seem to me to be particularly like the ones I feel when something happens to me in my own life. The joy I get at reading about a courtship is not at all like the joy of witnessing the courtships of my friends, for instance.

But I’ve come to see that fiction is not really about the real world. It’s not really about psychology, or extrapolation, or how things would play out in reality. It’s about something else. It’s a kind of learned commentary on the real world. It bears more resemblance to our inner landscapes than to the outer landscapes. I can’t be more specific than that, because…well…this is a blog post. You’re not going to get all the answers here.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my viewpoint pretty clear. But how do you all feel about reading? Would you consider yourself a good reader? Do you have reading-related insecurities? Has reading made you happier? Do you think that the lives of non-readers would be improved if they started reading?

            This past weekend I drove down to Tennessee to visit some friends (and go to Dollywood!). It was awesome for many reasons, but the main one is that whenever I drive more than 250 miles at a stretch, I have epiphanies.

I’m not really sure why this only happens when I drive, but not when I fly, or take the bus. I think it might have something to do with not being allowed to distract myself from my own thoughts; from being forced to be alone with them for hours on end. But, usually, when that happens I start thinking very fast, and begin going over and over in thought-spirals.

When I drive, that does not happen. My thought proceeds very slowly, in fits and nibbles. Sometimes an hour passes without a single thought that I can remember. But then, slowly, something starts to form, and I am left alone with it, and can build upon it, and even though it begins to degrade the moment I leave the car, something remains behind that I can carry with me forever (or at least for awhile).

During this trip, I somehow found myself thinking about Sturgeon’s Law. For those of you who aren’t in the SF world, Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer (a fairly good one). His law is: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” From Wikipedia:

The first written reference to this appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote: “I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud”.[1] Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do.

            This is often used as a sort of truism in SF. I don’t know why I was thinking about it. Maybe it was because of Larry’s series of posts at the OF Blog of the Fallen on reading and being a good reader. In one of them, he said something like, “I wish people wouldn’t just quote Sturgeon’s Law. That frees them from having to think about why they don’t like the books they don’t like.”

            And I was thinking and thinking, and it came to me: “Where are all these crap books? I haven’t read them. Ninety percent of the books I read are pretty good.”

            I’ve always just assumed that, even though most of the books I read are good, that I am nonetheless occupying a tiny plateau of goodness surrounded by crap: that there are vast, titanic mountains of crap out to get me. But…where is the crap? I can always sort of sense it in the distance, but, somehow, it never gets to me…

            I exercise only minimal discernment in choosing the books I read. I hear about it online, and then I check it out from the library. I glance through it at a bookstore, and if I like the first few pages, then I buy it. It’s not like I’m erecting some sort of super crap-proof forcefield around my bookshelves. So why do the books I read, on average, tend to be so good?

            And I was thinking, and thinking, and…ninety percent of everything I use tends to be pretty good. When I flip through the radio, I can usually find a song I like. When I’m surfing channels, I can usually find something that I enjoy watching. When I go to the theater and see a movie, I usually like it. When I buy an electronic device, I’m generally satisfied by how it works.

            And then, another hundred miles later, I extended it to the rest of my life. When I visit a restaurant, the service is usually pretty good. When I order take-out, I generally enjoy the food. When I get to know someone, I usually find that they’re fairly interesting.

            And it’s not like I am some sort of connoisseur of the finer things. I eat at Burger King. I shop at Best Buy. I watch HBO at 4 AM, and watch USA’s silly low-rent TV shows. My water comes out of the same tap as anyone else’s, and my Coca-Cola comes from the same bottling plant. If ninety percent of everything was crap, wouldn’t it, like…find me?

            I think the key here is the term, “with minimal amounts of discernment.” If I was just buying books by the boatload from the remaindering factory, then, yeah, maybe ninety percent of them would not be to my taste. If I just bashed my remote against a rock and watched whatever channel came up, then I would probably dislike it. But it doesn’t take much time or effort to not do that. It only takes one trip to a bad restaurant to be like, “Huh, not going to come here again.”

            I actually cannot say whether ninety percent of everything is crap. I am not sufficiently willing to sample things at random in order to figure that out. What I am willing to say is that the statement “ninety percent of everything is crap” has, even if it is true, almost no practical implications.

It’s like saying, “The surface of the earth is mostly water.”

            I mean, yeah, that’s true…but that’s no reason to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to find some land to stand on.

            Even if ninety percent of everything is crap, the effort required to avoid it is so extremely minimal and almost totally unconscious that the world might as well be mostly composed of good stuff. And what if the world is composed mostly of good stuff? Wow, that would be really scary. It’s a good thing that my drive ended before I could contemplate that one.