If you are a fan of books about books and reading then you need to find a way to fit Damon Young’s slim volume The Art of Reading onto to your reading pile. Books in this genre tend to be chatty and cozy. Sure sometimes there are the doom and gloom evils of e-books and no one reads anymore rants, but most of the time I expect a warm and fuzzy kindred spirit. I was a bit put off by Young at first. He is a philosopher and takes a philosophical approach to his book – Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato, Aristotle – where’s the cozy? But I kept reading and I am glad I did!
Don’t let the philosophical perspective scare you away. He reads e-books and print books and he likes Batman comics as well as Star Trek novels. He doesn’t write in jargon or obscure sentences and concepts. On the contrary, he has a clear, low-key style and a light touch. In fact, I ended up liking his writing so much I have requested another of his books from the library. He also left me wanting to make a deep dive into philosophy, or rather a few particular philosophers, and he has cruelly added quite a number of books to my TBR list.
Young believes the reader’s freedoms have been forgotten, their potencies denied or repressed. We and our books need to be liberated and to this end he proposes six virtues. Virtues makes it sound moralistic in a way that it is not (though in some ways it is our duty to be good readers), the virtues are more qualities of a good reader, the art of reading.
Each chapter focuses on one of the virtues: curiosity, patience, pride (“Not arrogance or hubris, but a carful, critical intellect, unhampered by deferential lowliness.”), courage (“deliberately chase texts that challenge easy resolutions”), temperance, and justice (“a just reader distinguished between emotion and estimation; pauses between judgment and proclamation…gives dues, not always by interpreting perfectly, but by admitting that dues are deserved and lacking.”). He sometimes takes a long meander to get to the point, but I really enjoyed the ruminative qualities. This is not a good book to sit down with if you are feeling rushed or distracted. Take an hour or so of slow reading for a chapter and then put the book down and come back later or the next day for another chapter.
I found the temperance chapter with a subtitle “Appetite for Distraction,” to be the most brain sparking. Young defines intemperance as
a lack of mental order. This adds an aesthetic dimension to the ethical criticism: not merely an appetite for nasty things, but a misshapen psyche.
He uses himself and a Star Trek novel binge as an example. He zoomed through a series story about Captain Will Riker, one e-book after another. Not five minutes after finishing one he would have the next one downloaded. He couldn’t get enough. It’s not that the story was amazing or the writing was all that great — he provides an analysis of what is good and not good about Star Trek in general and the novels he binged on in particular. But he read them to the exclusion of everything else. He couldn’t stop. They were like that bag of potato chips that start off tasting oh so good, a little salty and greasy and crunchy, and you are only going to eat a few, and before you know it you have eaten the entire bag and you feel a little sick.
We’ve all done this with books and probably potato chips too. There is nothing wrong with reading Star Trek novels or romance or thrillers or even, as Young once binged on, Dostoevsky. It’s not the novel. The problem is the indulgence that “warps” the senses. It’s that we read mindlessly and without control.
What unites these readers is a failure of desire: craving misguidedly or without restraint. The consequence is not, as in Aristotle’s conception, obesity, weakness, unpopularity or poverty; not loss of health or station. What suffers with intemperance is consciousness…pages are used to avoid what is pressing or precious; to feed delusion instead of starving it.
On the other end of the continuum is a sort of literary anorexia:
Anorexia can actually arise at moments or sharpest concentration, when perception is acute and intellect keen. It is the feeling that, whatever we are reading, it can now offer nothing more.
It’s that moment when you look at your pile of books and don’t want to read any of them. The reading slump, when nothing appeals and sometimes you don’t even want to read. It can last for a few days or a few weeks and when it’s really bad, a few months. Horrors!
Young doesn’t say it, but I wonder if the binging doesn’t in some way lead to the anorexia, putting us as readers on a sort of binge-purge cycle.
By talking about the two extremes, Young suggests that temperance might save us from mindless binging and the lack of desire to read anything at all. This does not mean we cannot indulge in a Star Trek novel. Some days, Young says, he needs a little Captain Riker to balance out his “harassed pessimism.” What it does mean is that we choose our reading consciously, that it doesn’t become a crutch or distraction to keep us from thinking or feeling. We must be aware and careful to moderate our habit, to not be unrestrained in either consumption or deep concentration.
Whether or not you agree with Young regarding his thoughts on temperance, you will likely be able to agree with him when he says,
Despite civilisation’s glut of signs, the virtues of reading are rarely celebrated. Reading well is treated as a rudimentary skill, not a lifelong ambition; not a creative talent to tenaciously enrich and enhance.
For Young, reading is not a hobby or a habit, it is something worthy of pursuit, something worth working at, worth learning to be better at. It is a skill, a talent, and ultimately, an art.
Great review. I think that I would love this book. I love books about books. I also tend to like it when such books get philosophical. It has been awhile since I read a Star Trek novel. But those can be a lot of fun. I might give this one a read in the comming more months.
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Brian Joseph, thanks! I think you would like this book given your reading preferences. If you decide to read it, I will look forward to your thoughts on it!
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The only time I’ve ever had a “reading slump” is when I’m unable to walk, recovering from surgery, and looking for books to distract me. This is the first explanation of why that I’ve ever heard about!
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Jeanne, hopefully you will never have to worry about a reading slump again, but if you do, a new strategy might be in order 🙂
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ooohhhh! This I got to have! He talks about some stuff which I have always felt and some I do not relate to at all. But this is good and its about books….so getting it! Thank You for a great review!
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cirtnecce, I didn’t agree with everything he said but I enjoyed how he sad it and thinking about it. I can’t believe I haven’t seen more people reading it. If you get the chance to read it, I hope you enjoy it!
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Hee hee. This sounds like great fun. And I’m loving the idea of a reader just needing a little Riker in the bookstacks for relief here and there. Thanks: I’ll definitely add this to the TBR.
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buriedinprint, I know! Who doesn’t need a little Riker now and then? I really loved that in spite of Young being a brainy sort of person, he enjoys a full variety of reading experiences. Made me feel like he was “one of us” so to speak.
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I’m intrigued by his thoughts on temperance and the binge/slump. I suppose reading can be like any other pursuit or hobby and become obsessive if one is avoiding dealing with issues in one’s personal life. Sounds like this book provided lots of food for thought.
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Laila, when I was reading the temperance chapter I started to get mad at him but cooled down and paid attention and thought about what he was saying and then had a aha! moment. There were a few other parts of the book like that. Definitely lots of food for thought!
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This sounds like it could be a fun read. I think like anything else, too much might be wearing. I am all for palate cleansers–and even as much as I love spending lots of time reading I sometimes just need a break to let my mind drift elsewhere. Glad it turned out better than you expected.
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This sounds like a book that encourages readers in a really encouraging way. I have a habit of bingeing on crime novels….too many and I feel rather bleughish! I like that phrase about reading as a creative talent to cherish.
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Ian, yes, it was rather encouraging and approaches reading as a serious art. I don’t think I’ve read many books that have done that for a general audience. Heh, I can binge on comics or SFF and feel the same you do about crime novels. Doesn’t stop me from doing again though! 🙂
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Danielle, definitely a fund read! Not light and airy though but still bookish fun.
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This does sound very interesting and I’d like to read it. I like the idea of a good reader being a liberated reader! And I think ‘good’ reading, by which I mean attentive and thoughtful reading, does need to be encouraged and celebrated.
Does he write about reading for pleasure at all? Because enjoyment is the first reason why anyone reads, I’d argue. To me, that part about bingeing is interesting because it brings an element of morality and even pathology into certain sorts of reading. (I think the moral overtones of ‘virtues’ is of a piece here.) In fact, just by calling it bingeing is imposing a certain set of ideas upon it that I am not sure really fit. I mean, I believe that reading is more complex than consuming, and I think that when you’re deeply in a book or on a binge you are sort of entering that flow Cszikszentmihalyi writes about. Unlike eating, reading always requires some active involvement of the imagination or the consciousness. For myself, I have always found that a spell of literary ‘anorexia’ is ‘cured’ by a ‘binge’ of what he would no doubt call ‘greasy chip’ books and I think that one should indeed strive to read ‘well’ but allow a bit of easy fun into the mix too. (Perhaps that is what he is advocating!) In any case, this looks like a book that is full of really interesting ideas.
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Wow, I like the sound of this. I know that feeling of overindulging in reading very well (both in length of time and series of books…). I try to limit myself to two in a row: two books in a series, two books by a single author, two books of the same specific type (horror, fluff, intellectual, etc). That seems to work — it’s enough to give me that sense of indulgence and bounty but I also enjoy knowing that I’ve saved some for later and have something to look forward to, or in my back pocket for when you’re stuck in bed for a few days or a long boring travel stretch.
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