Some Thoughts on Reading

Last year in my Women's Studies in Literature class, I encountered this delightful little book, The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. Now one of my favorite books, this novella chronicles a satirical and fictional account of Elizabeth II and her newfound obsession: reading.

In his novella, Bennett explores a most important question: what does it mean to be a great reader of fiction? There are, after all, different types of readers: indifferent, pleasure-seeking, casual, or, as the Queen becomes, great.

So what marks up these differences? The book provides an example I've noted abundantly in my own experience. Norman, the Queen's amanuensis, is a great companion for her, at least initially. When she begins her journey into the literary world, Norman provides encouragement and friendship. And yet when Norman is dismissed and enters school, the Queen must admit that she feels she "was outgrowing him...or rather, out-reading him." Much of this is due to the fact that Norman reads "purely for pleasure, not enlightenment, though part of the pleasure was enlightenment, he could see that." So what does this mean, this pleasure-seeking? The Queen acknowledges that "Norman's preferences could sometimes be suspect. Other things being equal he still tended to prefer gay authors, hence her aquaintance with Genet." Thus Norman, who is coincidentally gay, seeks above all to reinforce his own particular paradigm. No one can deny that having one's own paradigm bolstered is, after all, rather pleasurable. But still, literature deserves to be taken more seriously than this.

The Queen, however, tends to reject such biases in her reading. The one exception to this rule is her abstinence from fantasy and her decision to save Harry Potter "for a rainy day." Funnily, I have acquaintances of my own that read Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkein, but little else. This reveals a pronounced bias on their part. After all, these books conveniently lend themselves to a binary good-versus-evil, everything-turns-out-alright-in-the-end view of the world. The subject matter they explore is limited, and honestly, not that applicable to most people in most situations, white Mormon middle-class notwithstanding.

The professor who introduced The Uncommon Reader to me also related a funny story about two elderly women she knew who would read Gone with the Wind over and over again. Once they finished, they started it afresh. It drove my professor, and pretty much everyone else who knew them, crazy. But who could blame them? They were devoted heart and soul to a book that not only painted a nostalgic view of the world as it once had been, but it also contained racial codes that they could actually understand and relate to.

Thus, to be a great or uncommon reader as Alan Bennett would put it, we are beholden to sometimes put ourselves in contact with books that soften our paradigms rather than bolster them. I feel this is true regardless of the paradigm, though I too have to measure my reading material guardedly. On my book shelves you're just as likely to see Conservative mainstays (Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and James Madison) as Liberal bestsellers (Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope, The End of Poverty), and yet what books I actually read reveals what paradigm I'm trying to support. So, I try to vary things a bit. Even on my much-neglected poli-blog, my articles take equal turns going after liberals and conservatives. Having forayed for some time in books with a leftist bias, I plan to venture into some Ayn Rand in the near future.

Biases are difficult to avoid, but the main message here is that if we want to be great readers we need to be conscientious of them and try our best to avoid them by challenging ourselves with reading materials that fail to enforce our adopted paradigms. Otherwise we succeed only in entertaining ourselves towards a complacent intellectual and moral stupor.