> Why do you think that reading in general is good?
It exercises your imagination, your vocabulary, and ironically your writing ability. And that doesn't even count any new knowledge gained from books - not guaranteed with fiction, but it still happens quite often.
All skills which are valuable for the rest of your life too.
The bulk of what actually sells and gets read is deliberately written to be very easy to read and follow, to maximize potential market size. It’s a reaction to the shrinking size of the total market, and why YA and YA-reading-level books (if not nominally YA) now dominate. Been trending that way for 20 or so years.
“Any reading is good reading” is an attitude that’s true and useful for young kids, but is less true as they get older, and not true for most adults. At some age and level of development, reading the next Harry Potter prequel book isn’t any more improving than binging a middling TV series.
> is less true as they get older, and not true for most adults
Speaking anecdotally, many adults I know do not have the patience to read a book. Any book. (Of course, it’s because the book was badly written or facile or whatever.)
Oh yeah, the market’s dead. And what were the popular works before it died? Doorstop literary novels? Ovid in the original Latin? Nah, thin, trashy sci fi books and detective novels. Itty bitty black-hat-white-hat westerns. Plus romance, as ever.
Home video media took most of that market, by being a superior replacement for most of what people were buying and reading, for the purposes they were buying and reading it. Smartphones put the last nail in the coffin. Romance remains, and the rest of popular fiction can’t afford to limit its market if the publisher hopes to make money. You need to appeal to a lot of the remaining market, to make money, these days. These shifts in what gets published haven’t happened for no reason, they’re market-driven.
[edit] and, to head it off—I’ve evidently not done a good enough job of naming all the things I’m not claiming, in this thread, simply not-claiming them apparently being insufficient—no, I’m not especially worried about some crisis of literacy or moral or intellectual decline because of this. My whole point is that reading as an activity isn’t necessarily special or worthy of reverence. Replacing Zane Grey with Bonanza reruns is simply not an indicator of… anything important, really. Hell, even if film and TV are drawing, say, Woolf readers away from their books—what of it? It’s not as if there aren’t some sublime-as-hell, amazing films out there waiting for literature nerds to deep-read the shit out of them. That’s fine too! Reading. Is. Not. Special. Not inherently. And it doesn’t need to be. It can just be reading.
This attitude is why people stop reading when they become adults. It's no wonder people burn out of it so fast when you want it to literally be homework.
Like good god, easy to read should be a compliment to the author's ability to effectively communicate. They're books not puzzle boxes, calling "not easy to read" a virtue is absurd. Go read some bad fanfic and see for yourself how difficult to read and follow doesn't mean good.
Nobody said all reading had to be terribly beneficial. I just object to the idea that it necessarily is. That it’s not is fine.
Some folks claim it’s virtuous and better for you than, say, watching so-so TV shows, just because it’s READING, and I happen to think that’s plainly silly. And also that it’s fine that it’s largely not.
There are multiple ways I could have intended “easy to read”, and I mean that this, from the post I was responding to:
> It exercises your imagination, your vocabulary, and ironically your writing ability.
Is readily sacrificed, in most salable books, to avoid challenging the reader, because readers who don’t like to have any difficulty with a book are a much larger market than those who want that.
You would agree that “See Spot Run” may offer little improving to most adults, even if they enjoy reading it, yes? Then at most we disagree about where that line falls. But, again, it is fine if 40-year-olds like to read See Spot Run. There’s not anything wrong with it, it just bothers me when people paint reading as always some wholesome activity. It’s not—not always, probably not most of the time—but also that is OK.
> it just bothers me when people paint reading as always some wholesome activity
I'll actually take this position, I think reading (at least narrative) is always wholesome because it's necessarily an incomplete work of art that requires the reader to do a very real act of creation to make it whole. For some reason people decided that art -- drawing, dancing, making music, storytelling, writing poetry isn't just a thing humans do for leisure unless you're trying to get good at it. But reading as guided imagination and leads you to create whole worlds at every level at or above magic treehouse and flex those muscles.
And in exactly the same way because reading is an artistic endeavor you find people arguing that the only value in reading is to get better at it. Why? To what end? Do you talk about people's painting level being at a 7th grade level as telling of societal decline No, that's absurd but that's nonetheless the argument. And I guarantee your ability to understand and interpret fine art is at a grade school level but we've just decided that that's fine and you don't get judged for having art on your walls.
Are people taking my posts as judgmental? Maybe I’m writing them very poorly. It’s entirely fine to mostly or only read books that one finds comfortable and easy. That’s what most people do for most things, not just reading, as you point out. Most people are bad at most things. That’s how… things work. And it’s OK.
[edit] and, moreover, not everyone who can deeply appreciate acid jazz or whatever avoids listening to top 40s hits. That might even be most of what they listen to. To be clear, not everyone who reads easy books can’t read more challenging ones, and preferring easier ones is fine. My entire point was just that reading-is-necessarily-better is both wrong and a bit snobby, and that failing to read in a way that lives up to that cohort’s suppositions is entirely OK—reading can be taken off that bizarre pedestal and it’s still a fine activity.
What would you consider a better activity to recommend to them then?
After all, if they're having trouble comprehending anything but the most basic of tropes and vocabulary, they're not going to be going for thought provoking TV shows, let alone movies, plays, concerts, or Toastmasters.
It's worth remembering that the average reading comprehension level in the US is still around Grade 7, so these "See Spot Run" books you so kindly reductio ad absurdum the argument down to are still likely to provide value for a lot of people.
And finally, this is what even a very low level of reading comprehension can do for a person. Please don't skip it just because it's on TikTok; if you read, you'll not only appreciate but feel kinship with this man's journey.
Of course books that do stretch one’s boundaries may be instructive, or really, demonstrably beneficial, even if they’re not on some college reading list! Of course that isn’t strictly tied to age (though there will be a certain correlation).
I just mean that most adult fiction reading is adults reading YA because they want something easy that they don’t need to think much while reading, that doesn’t challenge them, often to the point of being written in the first person because it’s harder to track context in 3rd, and harder to orient oneself within a 3rd person narrative voice (not to overstate the difficulty, but it does require closer attention and asks more of the reader—and I’m not joking or pulling this out of no-where, ask some readers, ask some editors, ask some agents, enough of the market considers 3rd too hard to read and will skip books that aren’t in 1st, it’s a real consideration in planning a book). Or reading bodice-rippers literally written from a template (you don’t put out five novels a year without some effort toward developing efficiency). Or re-reading their favorite Harry Potter book for the sixth time.
What would I suggest instead? Anything else that’s not very challenging and passes the time pleasurably! Watch a reality show or whatever. The latest Netflix drama. Play some Super Mario Bros. These folks aren’t working their way up to “better” literature, they’re just having a good time. Which is ok!
Again, it’s not a problem that the activity is low-value if that’s what someone wants. It’s fine and normal to want easy entertainment, at least sometimes. Lots of adults read exclusively or almost-exclusively for that kind of low-effort entertainment, and that is OK. They don’t need to replace it with reading War and Peace or doing calculus problem sets or something. Those are probably “better” activities if your goal is improvement, assuming you’re ready for those kind of things. But that doesn’t need to be your goal, and it’s ok if that’s not what someone’s looking for in the books they read.
According to what sells, most people just want an easy story with few or no words they hadn’t learned by junior high, and a narrative that’s clear and leaves little to inference (and certainly doesn’t rely on it!) They want short sentences, that don’t force them to keep much context on their head.
They aren’t working their way up to works that might stretch their abilities, they’re looking for books comfortably within their existing abilities. And that is OK. But the notion that reading may take place that’s about as low-value as trash TV, and that that’s probably the majority of adult reading, seems to bother some enough that they want to paint reading as per se virtuous, valuable, et c. Meanwhile, it’s not any more so than listening to music is. Two people listen to several thousand hours of music, one comes out the other end able to hum Mmm Bop by Hansen, and that’s about the extent of what they took away; the other is familiar with the song and can also tell you how its rhythm is connected to Senegalese folk music and the harmonies reminiscent of early French polyphonic choral hymns. The music-listening wasn’t per se equally valuable from the widening-one’s-horizon perspective, but both may have enjoyed themselves. What’s weird is deciding to plaster “MUSIC LISTENER” on your tote bag as if that by itself means anything—for either of these subjects, really.
That so many folks end up with a fairly low reading level, as adults, is telling: if they remain readers regardless, as many do, they’re probably avoiding works that might force them to get better at it, or else surely they’d markedly improve over decades. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most folks also stop getting much better at math around 7th or 8th grade, it’s just that for whatever reason we see admitting that as Ok and admitting to being a poor reader as nearly unthinkable. I think that’s about the time both get really uncomfortable for a lot of kids, and they realize they can just stop and skate by on what they have, and they’re not really wrong. I don’t think most of them who nonetheless enjoy reading are working toward tougher books any more than I think someone who likes sudoku puzzles is working toward solving PDEs. And that’s fine.
You really should write a book with your analysis of the human condition. I have never seen so many sweeping generalities and hidden stereotypes in my life.
I think I was a bit harsh in my words, sorry about that. I just see a lot of instances of "most ..." "many people" "some people" etc followed by some generic observation that I don't think always has enough supporting evidence or is just completely subjective.
Yeah, it’s mostly based on talking to a lot of readers, writers, editors, and literature teachers, and seeing how the market’s going and what players in it are doing to try to stay relevant. I’ve not conducted some kind of study on this and it’s certainly possible I’m bubble-bound in some of it (though I think my bubble leans rather the opposite way, if anything…?) but do think it’s more-or-less accurate. I dunno, I could be wrong about a lot of it. I don’t get the impression that a great majority of reading that occurs is some elevated activity any more than I get the impression most TV-viewing is—I also don’t think that state of affairs is bad, to be clear, or that it’s bad to enjoy the literary equivalent of a Hallmark movie—but it’s possible I’m wrong and there really is good cause to call out reading as a notably improving activity, without qualification.
It’s touched by subjectivity, to be sure, but I’ve tried to dial in my level of sweeping-statement so they’re only as sweeping as I think probably correct (those “some”s and “many”s and “most”s) but sure, in the end it’s what I see from where I sit, not a behavioral study.
No worries about the tone, I screwed this whole thread up by having a tone in my initial post that many read (not without reason!) as implying some stuff I didn’t write, and did not intend to imply, but did. Mea culpa.
I wish I could up vote this multiple times. I've received so many "heavy" recommendations in my 20s and 30s, from people who read (at most) 1-2 books per year. Some people I know have stopped reading altogether, since they can't find the energy to get through "edifying" material.
If that resonates, my unsolicited advice is to:
1. Read for fun. If you're you're going to nosh some brain junk food, it might as well be a book. Enjoy it!
2. Don't be afraid to stop reading one book so you can start another.
I've seen so many people try to finish a book they're not enjoying, then stop reading altogether.
3. Once you've (re)cultivated a habit of reading, you might have more tenacity for that hallowed "edifying" material. I'm reading and noodling on "Tensor Calculus for Physics" exercises as a bedtime activity, but that was preceded by months of reading YA spec/sci fiction to unwind.
> “Any reading is good reading” is an attitude that’s true and useful for young kids, but is less true as they get older, and not true for most adults.
Stop that. That kind of gatekeeping is why people don’t read.
Reading doesn’t have to be good, in the way people mean when they try to paint reading as good, is the thing. Not more so than anything else. It’s usually not, and that’s ok. I’m advocating the opposite of gatekeeping.
Nobody makes these weird claims about how great and beneficial watching TV is, but people do it anyway. I think some of us failing to over-praise reading isn’t why people don’t read.
It’s not my problem, as I’ve enthusiastically agreed with you in multiple posts in this thread.
I think treating reading as necessarily some kind of “elevated” activity is weird and incorrect. It’s not, necessarily. It’s often in fact not. And yet one can still read, and enjoy it, that being the case. Folks can, should, and do read whatever they please, for a whole bunch of purposes. And I don’t have a problem with that. It’d be strange if I did, being one of those same folks who reads for a whole bunch of purposes.
I’m rebutting the notion that books have to be improving. They often really, really aren’t. And that’s fine, we don’t need to pretend the activity’s always morally superior to binging Stranger Things or something. It’s often not, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The “readers are special” faction is who I’ve got beef with, to the extent I have any.
I have read this thread again and we are in complete agreement. I initially thought you were arguing that useless reading was pointless and shouldn't be done.
I too have beef with the "readers are special" faction but I think its a more general faction we should have concern about - people who make something their entire identity. Then self-esteem is tied to that activity and now that by default means its more prestigous or intellectual or important or what have you.
For what it's worth, I think a book can still be improving even if its written in simplistic language and grammer because a book has the ability to tell a story from another humans perspective. We all lack that ability and I think we all could use a bit more empathy in our lives.
Yeah, re-reading it, that first post of mine could have been better. I don’t write that reading cotton-candy fiction is bad, but it could be read as implying it. It’s not bad, it’s just that it’s also not better than a bunch of other activities just because it’s reading. Most reading that happens (the optional reading, anyway) isn’t some lofty activity that’s a ton “better” than, say, watching TV. And that is ok.
> Then self-esteem is tied to that activity and now that by default means its more prestigous or intellectual or important or what have you.
I’m sure motivations vary, but I definitely get a sense of insecurity behind a lot of the “look at me, I’m a reader! You should be a reader too, reading makes you better!” stuff. Which, fine, whatever, but I’m sure there are a few folks out there who buy that messaging while not managing to get into reading for pleasure, and who feel bad about it, but they really shouldn’t. Can you truly expand your horizons and, maybe even, a little, become a better person through reading or whatever else it is that people suppose reading does that’s good for you? Yeah, I think so. I’d agree with that. I think I’ve gotten a lot of good out of many books I’ve read. Is that what most folks are up to most of the time they’re reading? LOL no. What’s got more viewers, the latest sublime, expertly crafted, dense, soul-scouring, literary-and-literate gem of a Cannes darling (“and this one’s really good, I swear, it’s not just award bait”), or the latest Marvel movie? How many who watch the latter will watch a single film this year that really demands their full attention and yields more and more good Zen food (if you will) the harder you interrogate it? Not many. Reading’s the same. Which is Ok!
> For what it's worth, I think a book can still be improving even if its written in simplistic language and grammer because a book has the ability to tell a story from another humans perspective. We all lack that ability and I think we all could use a bit more empathy in our lives.
One of my sins in this thread is that I’ve been sloppy with implying “hard-to-read language” means “good book”. To be clear, I definitely don’t think a book must be good if the language is complex or “elevated”, and I don’t think all good books have complex language. I do think some excellent books with complex or elevated language couldn’t be much simplified without doing them great violence—that they really needed the complexity, by which I don’t necessarily mean opaque Finnegan’s Wake stuff, but maybe just something a tad trickier than Goosebumps. What I do think is that really good books are usually harder to read, and harder to appreciate, in some sense, than the average airport novel, but that can be because a bunch of what they’re doing has to do with things many readers aren’t tuned-in to (theme, careful word choice that you’ll miss if you’re not reading closely, really subtle character work, that kind of thing), or because it assumes certain background reading has been done to get the full effect, or something of that sort—and maybe, but not necessarily, also because it includes sentences with multiple clauses, and more-than-rarely employs paragraphs longer than a quarter-page with little repetition or restatement of context, in which you’ll get lost if you’re used to skimming.
Meanwhile, I genuinely love a few picture books that can’t have more than a few hundred words each, and think they’re truly great. Can they do as much as a stompin’ big novel? Can they do the same things? Nah, but I mean hell, how many stuffy literature teachers have assigned Le Petit Prince? More than zero, and with good reason. I’ll gladly read Madeline solo, slowly, drinking in the words and pictures, and kinda meditate on life—that thing’s a whole mood. Good shit. Not everything with simple language is bad, and nothing’s bad just because the language is simple.
… and, just because this thread’s been a mess in part due to my sloppiness, the above is not intended as some exhaustive exploration of all the ways and for-whom a book might be either good or bad. I have not covered every corner of that topic, and I know it. :-)
> It exercises your imagination, your vocabulary, and ironically your writing ability.
That strongly depends on what you are reading and what your average level of education is. And considering we are talking about Booktok and UK, or any other country with similar levels of education, I'm not really sure if this is even remotely true. Booktok seems to favor more trashy, silly books, not the kind of content which will enrich your vocabulary or imagination. And I'm saying this as someone who also likes to read such trashy content.
Considering that the average reading comprehension level in the US is 7th Grade, I think we're fine recommending that people read - even if they're reading trashy books.
It exercises your imagination, your vocabulary, and ironically your writing ability. And that doesn't even count any new knowledge gained from books - not guaranteed with fiction, but it still happens quite often.
All skills which are valuable for the rest of your life too.