digression via Ohio

I changed my mind - I want to talk about the former for a second, not the latter. I want to talk about the person - the people, you know who you are - who, though capable of more, choose to read only crap, or mostly crap.
I'm not talking here about the intelligent people who read crap and call it good - I'll get to you in my own good time, so stock up on bandages and plaster of paris - I'm talking about all the bright people out there who read what they know is crap but don't bestir themselves to read better. They frustrate me. I know they epitomize one of my Top Three Rules of reading (you'll learn the other two when you've earned them, my young turnips): any reading is better than no reading at all. And you'd think that would earn them immunity from my ire, but alas, such immunity is given only to old, white-faced beagles, and they don't read, the blessed creatures.
I knew a man once - a great man, I don't hesitate to say it - who had, with apologies to Dame Christie, a mind like a bacon-slicer. If you presented him with a legal problem as tangled as a hedgerow, his brain would set to work, with gears and weighted wheels and ultimately, a ponderous but beautiful eloquence, and when he was done, his worst enemy on Earth would sit back and say, grudgingly, 'well, that's certainly the right call.'
Fortunately, sometimes the exact right people get the exact right jobs, and sitting in judgement was this man's job - a strenuous one, which was all I ever heard from him whenever I took him to task for the crap he read (universally murder mysteries - sometimes - often - the same one many times over, unknowingly): 'Thunderation, sir! I slave like Sisyphus all day long, I hardly need to rack my brains in my after hours!'
I know that's true for many of you - you work much harder than you should, and of course on top of that there's your social life, parents, friends, homework, etc ...when you finally get time to read, the last thing you want to do is ram your face against 'The Man without Qualities' when you can re-read Carl Hiaason's 'Tourist Season' for the eight time, smiling at all the old familiar places. I sympathize, I really do.
But I suggest you're operating from two false assumptions. First, that new or 'hard' literature represents work, in the purely pejorative sense of the word. The falsity in this lies in the fact that reading is a muscle, not a birthright: it only gets stronger if you exercise it, and the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Musil or Dostoevsky or Woolf don't represent work - they represent a level of pleasure for which you're a little out of shape, just like a seven-mile run tonight would, for most of you (roasting tobacco addicts that you are), represent a traumatic, possibly fatal experience, whereas really in-shape runners look forward to it as the greatest pleasure of their day. A much, much greater pleasure, I guarantee you, than happy re-reading alone can ever give you.
The second false assumption is that eventually you'll get around to all that 'serious' reading you're putting off. In this instance, the numbers don't lie: most readers can knock off between 30 and 50 pages and hour (insider tip: if anybody under the age of 25 tells you they can do much more than this, it means they haven't actually finished even one book since high school); most readers read a maximum of one hour a day (always telling themselves they'll catch up on the weekend, but of course on weekends the amount of time actually goes down a little); all calculated and rounded off, that means the average reader finishes one book a week. One book a week. There are close to three hundred absolute must-read works in the world's canon (yes, I will of course furnish a list in due time ... patience, my young turnips, patience); there are three hundred thousand new books published in the US and the UK each year, and that's not even counting the thousands and thousands of entirely worthy titles published last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
And newspapers. And periodicals. And weblogs (!). And the wretched writings of our friends.

You can see my point, no? One book a week is 350 books a year. 350 books a year is a wildly generous maximum of about 20,000 books in a normal lifetime. My point is this: you won't get around to all that good reading you're putting off. Even if you don't put it off, you won't get around to it. You're going to die with a great book half-read on your nightstand (this happened to my own father, and I remember having overheard him years before say it was one of the things about dying that most bugged him) ... which is, contrary to what all you slackers are saying to yourselves right now, all the MORE reason to dive in, to waste no time, to steadily increase the strength of your reading muscles to the point where Harry Potter just won't satisfy even down-time hours.

The kid who started all this - the kid walking down the sidewalk reading 'The Alchemist' - might be in just this situation, re-reading Coehlo out of comfort, having genuinely liked it the first few times. But I think it's far more likely he was reading it for the first time, almost certainly at the urging of somebody he knows who called it 'great.' The likelihood of that makes me blood boil, and it brings us back handily to our abandoned topic: crap.

The taxology continues tomorrow.

taxology of crap, part 1

I could just take the easy road and say, 'crap is whatever I say it is' - Lord knows, I've read a helluva lot more of it than any of you have, so I am an expert. But that kind of approach wouldn't get either of us any further toward our goals, would it (yours, to better your reading, mine, to control your every thought)?
So let's star in our best Jesuitical manner by defining the scope our our inquiry, shall we? Our first step should be to clarify what crap is NOT:
1. Crap, for the purposes of this blog, is not anything but literary. If you people want crap-counselling on your personal relationships, your parental relationships, your school-woes, your work-woes, your taste in art or music or TV or movies, you'll have to look elsewhere. After all, I'm only one (albeit superior) person; not only do people more important than you regularly need my guidance, but also yelling at my basset hound takes up a lot of my time.
2. Crap is not a matter of individual taste. I can't stress that enough: crap is not a matter of individual taste. The art of writing is highly artificial, highly mannered, and highly difficult; it's just simple common sense that not everybody who tries it does it equally well. Here at Bookrant we'll brook none of the mystical nonsense that allows a bad book to be good if only, ala the Great Pumpkin, some laptop-wielding Cantabridgian believes it is. The minute you say all quality is in the eye of the beholder, you invalidate the idea of literary greatness and allow morons to run the show.
3. That having been said, we should hurry and add: crap is not necessarily bad. Certainly not in and of itself - there are crappy books that merrily ignore their crappiness and sweep us along, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My heart still thrills to the epic sword fights of the first three John Carter of Mars novels; I'm still page-turningly gripped by the brutal hand-to-hand combat between Spock and Omne at the climax of 'The Price of the Phoenix;' who among us (including a certain former Supreme Court Chief Justice who was in all other respects no slouch in the brains department) doesn't enjoy a good whodunnit? There is and always has been a thriving and necessary under-culture that caters only to our most visceral yearing for what-happens-next, and there's nothing wrong with that. What bugs me is this: minorly, when people capable of more read only that kind of crap, and majorly, when crap tries to pass itself off as something more.
The latter will probably be the subject of tomorrow's rant ...

inauguration day

The other day I was being given a ride somewhere by a long-suffering friend of mine (I could be the Walrus, I'd still have to bum rides off my friends) when I saw a college youth walking down the sidewalk, and he was reading while he walked, reading with a near-total absorption that made me wonder how he was avoiding other pedestrians and fire hydrants and the like (the long-suffering friend I was with manages to collide with things even when he's specifically on the watch for them, so I guess it takes all types).

The book he was reading? 'The Alchemist.'

So yes, what I'm saying is, the Proustian tipping point that finally prompted me to start my very own blog was the sight of a college youth absorbed in reading a steaming little pile of crap.

As I was musing on the little spurt of frustration I experienced at this sight, it occurred to me how often it happens. I live in a college town full of educated people, readers, and yet, hardly a day goes by when I don't see somebody reading crap. Part of this is surely willful - people who've decided that Marquez, for instance, is actually good. But surely also a great deal of it can be chalked up to simple ignorance, to people not knowing what's good, not knowing - and never having been shown - where to go for good stuff. Sometimes it's a cherished teacher; sometimes it's the heaven-blessed luck of the autodidact; sometimes it's a process of mental brachiation, going from book to book like a gibbon goes from tree to tree - but no matter what it is, you're lucky, in this life, if it happens to you. And if it doesn't, you're left like that poor schlub on the sidewalk, wasting your precious, brutally-limited reading time on crap.

So I've decided to add my voice to the distressingly-termed blogoverse, in an attempt to give all you readers out there another source - the best source - for book-chat.

The basics, before we progress much further:

1. Yes, I've read more than you have. A lot more.

2. No, literary taste isn't 'personal' ... if I call something crap, it's because it is crap, not because I think it is. Obviously, obviously, obviously, literature has objective standards of quality - no artistic endeavor (indeed, no endeavor of any kind) gets a free pass. If I pointed to a wobbly table and said, 'that thing is poorly made,' would you say 'well, in your opinion'? Hardly.

3. I'm on your side. Despite the fact that I probably hate nine-tenths of what you like, my ultimate goal - well, in addition to venting, which is always nice - is to add to your reading enjoyment. All I require from you is that you surrender your free will and take my word as law - and really, is that so hard? Are you really that attached to your free will? I didn't think so.

So let's begin our journey! A journey in the best sense of the word - i.e. there'll be lots and lots of digressions, and we'll never actually arrive at our destination.

Tomorrow: what I mean by 'crap.'