On Reading
On Reading
Goodreads and bad influences, reading for emotions, Nabokov's thoughts
Illustration By Dall-E
When you read product reviews, do you only read the five-star ones, three and below, or seek a balance of good and bad?
I’m not much of a consumer, but on the rare occasion when I find myself lost in Amazon’s onslaught of options and recommendations, I ignore most positive reviews for any product. And when I used to visit Goodreads, I only read the negative reviews because most of the positive ones were gushing idolatry: fruitless words praising superficialities and rambling about nostalgic and emotional connections to characters and settings. But my departure from Goodreads had more to do with the disruptive influence some reviews would furtively weave into my mind.
For example, if I read a review saying the dialogue of a book was stereotypical and dated, then while reading the book a week later, all I could concentrate on was the dialogue. I’d pick it apart so critically that I couldn’t enjoy the novel. I’d have some halfwit’s imagined voice whispering over my shoulder, “How can you go on? The dialogue is straight out of a nineties rom-com. It’s insufferable.”
How I ever ended up on Goodreads, I can’t remember. I know better than to browse the general public’s opinions of literature. So shame on me. Honestly, I’m uncertain how this segment became a part of this post. Still, it happened, and I’m rolling with it.
Sometimes, I even allowed these amateur reviews to keep me away from a book or author, only to learn a year later that David Foster Wallace was incredible. It was after reading the first twenty-five pages of Infinite Jest that I ceased reading reviews on Goodreads.
Good riddance. Reading reviews rife with solipsistic opinions is mostly counterproductive. Not at all do I miss the rants by people who couldn’t get into a book because, as much as they tried, they couldn’t “identify” with any of the characters, or worse, people putting a book down after ten pages because a character offended them. These are asinine reasons to despise a book. If you’re reading novels only to search for characters who embody you and reflect your values and beliefs, then you are reading for the wrong reasons. This is what Vladimir Nabokov called “emotional reading.”
In The Norton Reader’s 14th Edition is an essay by Nabokov titled “Good Readers and Good Writers”. Nabokov discusses the importance of reserving our thoughts until after reading a book for the first time.
In reading, one should notice and fondle the details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected.
Preconceived notions distort perceptions.
Just as we build judgments based on gossip about somebody we’ve never met, then meet the person and shake hands with ready-made resentments and framed views, perusing emotional evaluations of a book pre-reading fabricates assumptions and mangles our experience without even turning a page.
We should never go into a novel expecting anything. Only a clean slate and an open mind prepare us for an author’s creation.
Nabokov said we shouldn’t be readers but rereaders. Because when we read a book for the first time, we are acclimating ourselves to a new world while our eyes stay busy moving from left to right. Our minds have so much to process that we cannot fully grasp and appreciate the work during the first reading.
Nabokov’s thoughts:
In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do a painting.
Once, in a “remote provincial college,” Nabokov presented students with a quiz “during a protracted lecture tour.” He gave ten definitions of a reader and asked the students to choose which four they thought “a reader should be to be a good reader.”
Nabokov’s Quiz
The reader should belong to a book club.
The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
The reader should be a budding author.
The reader should have imagination.
The reader should have memory.
The reader should have a dictionary.
The reader should have some artistic sense.
Of course, “the students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle.”
Whether film or novel, no matter, it’s easy for us to leap from one emotion to the next, weep and feel, grab the next book, find the next trendy drama, and continue basking in peripatetic emotions while envisioning ourselves in another time, as somebody else, bolder, stronger, more resilient, anyone but who we are at that moment. We absorb fictional lives and imagine ourselves amid massive challenges and struggles far greater than ours (or similar), all in the name of escapism (or relatability).
I’m as guilty of emotional reading as the next person, yet I have matured in this respect over the last two years. Emotions are okay—if you’re into that sort of thing. I find them distracting and unhelpful. I want paradoxes, double binds, and morally ambiguous protagonists shoved into scenes empty of promise, where it seems there is no script, no choice, no right or wrong, no inevitable outcome, and no solution available that isn’t without a push and pull, a touch of false hope, or a rope. Give me passionate writing and philosophical contemplations, or give me . . . a pen.
P.S. For an apology concerning the hypocrisy you may or may not have noticed in this post, click on the link below.
On Reading
I’m not familiar with Goodreads, but with film ratings, I’m surprised how often I agree with the aggregated ratings. For example, find any movie on IMDb with a rating of 8/10 or higher and chances are it’s a stone-cold classic: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Groundhog Day, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, etc.
Same with the 5-star ratings on Amazon Prime. If it has 5 stars it’s almost always a classic, 4.5 means pretty darn good, 4 stars means good, and anything below 4 can be okay, but often is fairly crappy. Perhaps I have middle-of-the-road tastes, but I find myself almost always agreeing with the IMDb and Prime ratings, the average of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individual ratings, maybe by teenagers for all I know.
Sometimes the wisdom of the crowd is just that, even though we kind of know, don’t we, that people are much more likely to rate something if they really like it or really hate it, and much less likely if they’re somewhere in between. Not sure I understand that but it seems to work even with such a skewed sample.
Yes!!! Love this. So true. Long ago, in my early twenties, I had a Brit-Lit professor who used to say, You haven’t read a book until you’ve gone through it at least three times. Not sure I agree with this literally, but I agree with the sentiment. You nailed it about people nowadays wanting to ‘see themselves’ in the work. Good ole narcissism. If it doesn’t show ‘me,’ why read it? If it doesn’t tow the right ideological line, why bother? If the author is white, does it even truly hold any literary value? Plus, most people don’t read anymore anyway; they’re captured by TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, etc.