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.