Sometime circa January 2017 I was sitting alone in a college dining hall when a nearby conversation caught my attention. At the table beside mine, a stranger spoke to his friend about a book called The Novel Cure.
If you’ve seen this book before — as I had in Barnes & Noble two years earlier — you likely remember it. It provides an “A to Z of literary remedies,” for everything “from abandonment to zestlessness.” It offers a romantic notion of literature as a cure-all for anything that might plague you — romantic not least because it’s an idea already recognizable to most readers. Many of us are familiar with literary ‘self-medicating’ already. But Susan Elderkin and Ella Berthoud took this idea and codified it, resulting in a type of reference book comic in its literalness and optimistic in its premise. If the hardcover edition hadn’t been so expensive, I might have gone home with it myself.
But this person, whose voice carried far and contained that special timbre of confidence that accompanies persuasion, was criticizing The Novel Cure. “It tells you how to read a book before you’ve read it,” he said. “It’s prescriptive. Which is, like, its premise, but it’s also intellectually reductive. It’s reductive to take a book and say, ‘this is what it is about, now read it for this purpose.’”
I don’t think I would’ve challenged him even if we’d been sitting around the same table. Partly because I found it difficult to spontaneously articulate my opinions out loud as an underclassman (and an upperclassman, and, honestly, even now). And partly because though I could still recall that sense of fascination and delight when paging though The Novel Cure, it wasn’t so strong I needed to defend it.
Even so, there was something in his logic that chafed me. Something that felt subtly off-mark.
Part of what I liked about The Novel Cure was the guidance it could provide. I was nineteen, and slowly coming to terms with just how blind I was in the face of this question of what to read.
When I was younger — ages thirteen to sixteen — I used the idea of literary classics to answer this question for me. It first came to my attention via a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that I found in a bookstore. I was confused by its lack of a one-paragraph teaser summary like what I was used to seeing on back covers. My mom told me it probably wasn’t there because it wasn’t necessary — most people already knew what it was about. Its legacy preceded it; it needed no introduction.
I experienced this as a revelation: that there existed books apparently so well-known you could utter a title and their whole contents would appear in others’ minds. I felt as though I was standing on the edge of a great frontier.
I researched online and visited used book sales, searching for the titles and names that Wikipedia and “Top 50 Books in English Literature” listicles told me to seek. Faulkner, Hemingway, Catch-22, Steinbeck, Dickens, Pride and Prejudice. The source of this fascination is clear to me now in hindsight. As a young and often isolated reader, I wanted access to a larger story — the story of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-American culture. I wanted to participate in that narrative; I wanted a seat at the table.
Of course, none of those reading experiences were altogether rewarding at that age. I didn’t yet have the critical reading skills or historical understanding to really reap what was there. But still, I struggled, and I read what I thought I ought to read.
I know I’m not the only one who felt this way as a young reader. I have a friend who tells the story of being a literary “late bloomer,” not learning to read until she was ten, so that by the time she was able to read on her own she felt a need to overcompensate. Instead of diving into the Harry Potter books all her friends raved about while she was still illiterate, she reached for the Oedipus Cycle instead. The way she tells it, even without understanding a word, she felt accomplished because she knew it was distinguished, and she felt she was acting as people who read are supposed to act.
Why do we read what we do? Why would any of us reach for Oedipus the King over The Prisoner of Azkaban, or vice versa — or neither? Why, given the deep seas and towering mountains of printed text the world has produced thus far, do we choose to pick up the books we do, when we know our time is limited and any decision is made at the price of something lost?
Even if you don’t believe in reading classics, you still rely on other guides. The judgment of publishers and editors who feed you from their slush piles, for instance. Or the discretion of your local bookstore choosing which new releases to place at eye level, which books to highlight as staff favorites. Or the opinion of your better-read friend who encourages you to pick up whatever blew her away last week. All these influences have put you on the path you’re on now, coerced you to read the texts you have, turned you into the reader you are today. And that’s not even including that other machine of influence: brand-name reviews, awards, accolades.
But those influences are vital, because of course you want a compass in this sea of text. John Milton apocryphally read every book in print in his time, but those days are over. You rely on others to sort out the wheat from the chaff so you can maximize what little time you have among the best company you can find. This mirrors one argument I’ve heard for the legitimacy of the canon, an argument I consider sound at its core: the belief that some texts are more worth reading based on literary merit, combined with the fact that the time we have is finite.
And so my instinctual rebuff of this stranger’s criticism of The Novel Cure came down to this: If you rejected advice in finding what to read, I didn’t see many options left for you. I didn’t see how you could thread the needle between receiving guidance and not being influenced. Without some sort of reference, how could you hope to find your way?
We’re left, then, with three questions.
Which sources of influence do we choose to accept?
How do we counterbalance the weight of biases that’ve been leveled against historically underrepresented groups?
And how do we learn to occasionally soften others’ voices in the interest of retaining our own independent judgment — of learning to decide for ourselves what’s worthwhile?
I’ve written this story as if at the age of sixteen, after struggling fruitlessly with classics for a couple years, I moved away from them and turned to other influences.
I did and I didn’t. I eventually saw — in one of those adolescent realizations that builds slowly and then gains critical mass all at once — that I was being pretentious. That by reading things I thought I should but which really didn’t do much for me, I was privileging image over genuine experience.
Then, at the end of my junior year of high school, my favorite English teacher handed me one large reusable grocery bag full of books pulled from his own shelves for me to borrow over the summer. Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, John Irving, Andrea Barrett. These were names unknown to me. Again, my eyes were opened to a new landscape I’d never encountered before: the American literary fiction scene. And again, the path I took through this new territory was not of my own choosing — but this time it was driven not by a desire to accrue cultural literacy, but to connect with titles picked for me by a teacher I both respected and admired. A motivation still community-oriented, but on a smaller scale.
And then in college, two months before overhearing that conversation about The Novel Cure, I declared my literary studies major. Distinct from the more popular English major, the literary studies program organized itself around a list of 123 works (novels, stories, plays, poems) written by 44 authors, meant to cover world literary history, albeit in very broad strokes. It ranged from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, to Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, to Gogol’s Dead Souls, to Faulkner’s Light in August. My peers and I referred to it as “the list.” We read as many of those works as possible in preparation for the eight-hour comprehensive exams we took in the winter of our senior year.
It might sound like I’d simply reverted back to my adolescent reading habits. It’s not altogether untrue. But what I’d gained in critical reading ability allowed me to approach classic texts on equal footing and to engage with them sincerely and earnestly. Pretension is about the sacrifice of experience for image, but I really, truly loved what I read as a literary studies major. And I felt abundantly grateful to receive an education that gifted me with so many gems, even if they weren’t chosen by me.
While at the same time, I had to acknowledge that my literary education was limited in some important ways. The list was originally formed in the ‘80s by collecting works by the three most impactful writers from each language offered at the college. As a result, the list overwhelmingly skewed European. The gender ratio, likewise, was unsurprisingly male. Though I loved my program, it felt like my academics and my politics were at odds. In fact, some of what’s included in this post is adapted from an essay I wrote for myself in college while trying to come to my own understanding of this issue at hand.
Now I’m nearly two years removed from my college graduation. Though I have much more freedom than I did as an undergraduate, I’m unsure of how to use it.
Which leads me — finally — to the outline of this project. After having spent some time directing my own reading life, I’m going to experiment with creating my own rubric.
I’ve come up with five categories for selecting books to read in 2021. I’ll spend two weeks on each category reading a book that fits its criteria and then writing a short, reflective piece on it. After moving through all five categories, I’ll return to the first, beginning the cycle again.
Each category represents one factor I’ve noticed myself considering when choosing new books to read. By separating them out, I hope to give each of them their due attention while also continuing to reflect on this difficult question.
This post is the first installment of this new project. I intend it to function as a question posed in essay form. It’s the background and foundation for why I want to embark on this project, where I’m coming at it from, and why I think it’s a question worth discussing. In my next post, I’ll list my five categories and my reasons for choosing each of them.
Reading is always about loneliness. It’s about spending time forging connections with others who are absent from you.
On the other side of that same coin, reading is also about community. It gives you the opportunity to choose who you want to be in conversation with and whose experiences you want to connect to your own.
My greatest hope for this project is that it gives me a way to use books and my reflections on them to generate connection with others and to create for myself a more intentional, rewarding community.
I hope you join me, too.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing it or the Reading Cycle website with a friend. I would greatly appreciate it.