I lost my taste for rhapsodies to the power of reading—rhapsodies like Teju Cole’s—around the same time I became a halfway competent reader. It was two months into what would become a twelve-month period of unemployment, and I had come to realize that the reading style that got me through college and young adulthood was not suitable for reading several hours at a stretch—and it was desperately important that I be able to read for hours at a stretch, both because I wanted to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to read mountains of books and because I needed something to fill the long, dragging, structureless days. (Television made the time pass, but oh, the self-loathing after!) It took several rather humiliating weeks, and I am not sure I would have seen it through if circumstances hadn’t forced me to, but I gained conscious control over my distractibility, relieved my mental tonus, and became a decent reader.
The better I became at reading, the less I felt like talking about how much reading meant to me, which may be a natural side effect of coming to love something that previously you only wanted to love. I used to do quite a lot of that sort of book bragging, I’m sad to say, and I don’t suppose the victims of my tediousness will be much consoled to know that I believe those years of pretension were a necessary prelude to what followed. It was also around that time that I stopped thinking that whether a person read books was the most important thing about them, or the best indication of whether we would have anything in common or whether I would like them—all of which are things I believed back when reading was more of a tribal affiliation than a passion.
The thesis of Teju Cole’s New Yorker piece is that President Obama has undergone some kind of transformation from “an elegant and literary man” who relaxed with the poetry of Derek Walcott to someone who can order drone strikes. (The title of the piece is “A Reader’s War.”) The assumption here is that Obama was much of a reader in the first place, when really it’s more likely that he’s simply fluent in the language of intellectualism. It’s easy enough to mimic if you spend enough time with the right crowd. The president certainly seems like the sort of person who likes to read, but that’s not the same thing as being a reader. He has made excellent tactical use of the power that dropping semi-obscure book titles can exert—I saw many jaded, pox-on-both-your-parties libertarians swoon when, early in the 2008 campaign, Obama mentioned Hayek in a Time interview—but all that means is that he’s a smart politician.
The evidence Cole puts forward as proof that Obama is, or was, “a reader in chief” is rather flimsy. He says “a man who names among his favorite books Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon,’ Robinson’s ‘Gilead,’ and Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ is playing the game pretty seriously.” Cole really ought to have learned by now that 20 percent of people who list those three titles among their favorite books are (as he puts it) people “for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life,” and the other 80 percent are faking it.
Frankly this makes me wonder about Teju Cole, since an awareness of this 80 percent is one of the marks of literary maturity. He’s a novelist. Hasn’t he been approached by enough “fellow novelists” to know that nine out of ten are not the kindred spirits they claim to be? Hasn’t he personally wrestled with the temptation to just relax into his reputation as a literary person while letting the actual labor of literariness slide? Doesn’t he realize how many literary-minded people have taken that much, much easier route and never regretted it, or never realized it?
Whenever I read an article about the reading life at a site like the Millions or the Rumpus, I try to assume that what the author has written is the honest truth, though sometimes I end up doubting it. If they say that reading has helped them become better critical thinkers, I say: Okay, then I hope your political views aren’t a carbon copy of every other artsy Brooklynite’s. If they say writing has enhanced their empathy, I want to ask whether they can imagine themselves inside the head of someone who supports traditional marriage, or someone for whom “reading” means James Patterson and management books, or someone who doesn’t read. (Or someone with V.S. Naipaul’s politics, Teju.) You say reading has improved your own prose. Then how come your essay is so clumsily written?
Actually, I retract that last one, not only because it’s snarky but because I’m not sure it’s correct. Many people are at their most inarticulate precisely on the subject closest to their heart. When I was writing my senior thesis on Oscar Wilde, I asked my adviser whether I had to address “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” which I thought was not very Wildean and moreover not very good. He told me I could write about it or not, but that in general I should always pay close attention to little freak essays where an author departs from his usual subject matter and his usual standard of quality, because often it’s a sign that the author is being more honest and more vulnerable than usual.
Wilde really did think of himself as a socialist humanitarian—it was the secret of his private self-image—but when he tried to write about it, he couldn’t get enough distance to be clever about it. He couldn’t even come up with good arguments, maybe because he couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to believe in it. Even a genius like Wilde had to write where his ideas were, not where his heart was. (My adviser had other examples of this anomalous-essay-as-secret-decoder-ring phenomenon. I wish I could remember them.) Maybe overly ingenious testimonies to the importance of reading deserve as much skepticism as overly insistent ones.
The consensus rebuttal to the Teju Cole piece has been that he was wrong to assume that reading makes people more morally sensitive; the Nazis read Goethe, etc. I’m not sure what I think about that. The relationship between reading and conscience is complicated but they have something to do with each other, is my instinct. In any case, the population under examination here is not real lovers of books but vague fans of reading. Being well-read enough to bluff your way into a reputation for bookishness has many benefits—you have something to talk about with your friends, you feel a sense of belonging, often you meet attractive members of the opposite sex—but moral seriousness is not one of them.
February 15th, 2013 | 12:50 am
I was more interested in how your reading changed for the hours-at-a-stretch way. What if somebody doesn’t read for hours at a stretch? Is the hours-at-a-stretch style still a better way to read, even for minutes at a stretch? If you ever feel like going into those two different ways of reading in a future post, that would be interesting.
Personally, I’ve never especially liked self-described “book lovers” or “fans of reading.” I don’t think I’ve ever known any in person, but they sure do write some insufferable articles.
February 15th, 2013 | 10:17 am
The best technique for beginning to read for longer spans of time is to habitually read for a set amount of time. So instead of starting and setting a target for reading two or three hours at a day shoot for 15 minutes a day and eventually you will expand your attention span, reading for longer blocks of time and not realizing the time that has passed. Create a new habit of daily reading and you will began to love reading.
February 15th, 2013 | 12:55 pm
Is it ever possible for a politician to be seen as more than just a “smart politician” when they mention obscure authors?
February 15th, 2013 | 1:12 pm
It always did strike me as strange, the lament of the older educator that “the younger generation reads to get something out of it; they don’t read for its own sake anymore.” As if it didn’t matter -what- you read! If reading is just a pastime for its own sake, you might as well just turn on the TV. Otherwise, as you said, it becomes a faux-intellectual tribal flag.
February 15th, 2013 | 1:22 pm
I’m also reminded of the 2008 primaries, where at least two or three candidates listed “favorite Bible verse: John 3:16. Favorite hymn: Amazing Grace.” Fakery by osmosis only gets you so far.
February 15th, 2013 | 4:10 pm
It would be interesting if Mr. Cole considered how Pres. Obama’s reading preferences might fit with his policies, rather than taking his reading and his policies as in tension with one another. E.g., an essay called “The Drones of Gilead”; or some such.
February 15th, 2013 | 4:19 pm
Thrica, I actually find both answers very plausible. John 3:16 really is a beautiful Bible verse and “Amazing Grace” is a very beautiful hymn.
You remind me that I am often embarrassed when I’m forced to confess that Citizen Kane is my favorite film. I always start off by acknowledging the cliche and I know that some cynics may regard me as a poseur or something. But films like Citizen Kane or hymns like “Amazing Grace” have their reputations for a reason and often the choices that the “real intellectuals” make are actually inferior to the more recognizable classics.
February 15th, 2013 | 5:36 pm
Andrew, I understand what you are saying, and it’s interesting to find someone who actually likes the film Citizen Kane. I can’t sit through it and it is not for lack of loving older films. My problem is that it’s 2 hours of meaningless grandiose cinema. As a younger guy I’ve tried to go through the AFI’s list of 100 top films a couple times and had to stop on some (Birth of a Nation just is impossible for me to sit through also, but for obviously different reasons) but I found that my favorite was actually #2 on the list. Casablanca has everything that is lacking in films today. Heroic sacrifice, not just of a life lost kind, but that someone is willing to give up on “true love” for the greater good. Almost any romantic movie today ends up including characters that destroy any number of lives in their selfish pursuit of love. But Casablanca and Roman Holiday are movies about duty over self-indulgence. You just don’t see a ton of that nowadays.
I have to take to heart the bragging aspect of book reading (I promise dropping those names above were not for bragging reasons) but I know I’ve dropped book names for no other reasons than to try to sound impressive, although just like the AFI 100 best, I have a couple of the 100 best novels/books that I am trying to get through, although I don’t have the mental capacity to slog through them back to back, so I’ll put lighter fiction between the classics. I will take the author’s comments about that to heart and try to only name drop books if I think they would be a good fit for the audience, not to impress. I also commit to stop using the phrase “have you read the book, it’s so much better” because we’ve all heard that and rolled our eyes at least once. Not every time, but the obvious times when it’s clear the person is trying to impress.
February 15th, 2013 | 7:55 pm
Andrew: True enough, and to be fair none of them got the chance to defend their choices. But I can’t imagine you trying to ingratiate yourself to a Citizen Kane Fanclub with that line, and I wouldn’t give it a second thought if someone gave me those answers in conversation. Theirs just struck me as a bit of disingenuous pandering.
Then again, I suppose they couldn’t well answer “I don’t have one”. They’re just responding to demand, so I guess my ire should be directed at Christians who feel the need to be pandered to by politicians.
February 15th, 2013 | 8:54 pm
I don’t know, _Moby Dick_ being the favorite book of someone who orders drone strikes as part of some eternal struggle seems kind of apt.
Having been in grad school, I feel some certainty when I say that being a “reader” doesn’t make you a good person or even a moral person. It just means you’re able to read.
February 16th, 2013 | 9:44 am
MOBY DICK? I cheered for the whale.
February 16th, 2013 | 4:32 pm
Robert, Casablanca is a great film and I love it. The reason I think Kane is better comes down to visuals, the performances, and the emotional impact. But if Kane didn’t resonate for you – if you weren’t simultaneously drawn to and repelled by Charles Foster Kane and felt a genuine sympathy for his human tragedy – then I’m probably not going to be able to convince you it’s a great film just by nattering on about its technical achievement and visual style.
I throw myself on the mercy of the court when it comes to its being “meaningless.” I agree that there is no deep message to Kane, no riddle that needs unraveling. Since it was made in the era before video, this was appropriate. Film was not (in those days) written like books to be watched over and over again and for good reason. Of course, it is possible to watch the film over and over again (and I have done so), but it doesn’t yield up secrets that weren’t there on first viewing. I would argue that this too is part of its brilliance, but I can sympathize with the desire for something “meatier.”
Plus, the technical innovation is probably meaningless nowadays and perhaps you are right to disregard it. The many techniques that Welles and his cinematographer invented are so commonplace in the movies since (even to this day) that you can be forgiven for not giving them credit for doing it first. Kane is one of those works which has been so frequently copied that nowadays it seems almost unoriginal.
February 16th, 2013 | 11:41 pm
While I agree that Obama may not live for reading the way so many of us with more spare time do, it is important that he at least values books and writers enough to convey this impression. Bush just delegated literature to his librarian wife, who was never partisan in her approach to the National Book Festival, but this just reinforced the idea that reading is for women. Did he read anything while in office other than that one about the goat he was reading to kids on 9/11? Obama’s not afraid to play the role of a bookish wonk, and I appreciate that. He may just be a “smart politician,” but he shows signs of being a good thinker. And whether or not reading automatically boosts critical thinking capacity, it does provide us with plenty of food for thought. As for those drone attacks, I hope Obama is thinking those over carefully.
February 17th, 2013 | 10:54 am
Re Bush reading:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025595706634689.html
February 17th, 2013 | 10:14 pm
I feel bad about possibly misjudging Bush, although I don’t really trust Karl Rove’s account of anything! This does remind me, however, of some footage I saw of Bush’s TX gubernatorial debate, where he appeared more “intellectual” than he did years later–and he had less of a TX accent then! I can’t remember where I saw this, but the argument being made was that he subsequently realized it was in his interest to “play dumb.” Rove is well aware that his revelations will be surprising. I guess in a way then, Bush is admirable for not rhapsodizing about the powers of reading (in the manner Rittelmayer critiques).
February 17th, 2013 | 11:08 pm
Kelly: See this one as well if you don’t want to take Rove’s word for it. http://theamericanscholar.org/dubya-and-me/
Some of the critique of Bush’s narrow intellectual interests probably holds true. That he didn’t read books at all is silly (reading was his principal method of relaxation before bed on Air Force One, since he didn’t watch television), but his interests weren’t terribly wide-ranging. He seems to be a very big biography and history reader. (As President, he read 14 different biographies of Lincoln.) Most of his interest, at least as President, was absorbed by U.S. history. In that article, he mentions having read biographies of Washington, Truman, Acheson, Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Twain, Huey Long, LBJ, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, U.S. Grant, John Quincy Adams, and Genghis Khan. The only non-Americans in the bunch are Genghis Khan and Bonhoeffer. When presented with a biography of Cleopatra, he is excited to read it, but admits not knowing anything about her.
February 18th, 2013 | 11:01 am
“[B]efore bed on Air Force One” should have read “before bed or on Air Force One.” Left out a crucial word there.
February 18th, 2013 | 5:55 pm
Add my name to the folks wanting to hear about what skills you learned to become a “decent reader.”
February 18th, 2013 | 8:54 pm
The writer ravishes; the reader’s end
To know and hold the writer as her friend,
To comprehend her with a mind bespoke:
Who hints aught else is only blowing smoke.
February 22nd, 2013 | 7:13 pm
It’s also interesting to note that these type of “look how cultured I am” lists generally only include literature, and usually novels. Novels are stories. Yes, they may be magnificent works of art, but, in the end, you don’t really have to be a supergenius to read a story.
Listing good novels is only an indicator of taste, not of intelligence. I wonder if Cole has ever cracked open something like, say, Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis?
February 23rd, 2013 | 11:58 am
I too am curious to know not only what the good reading style is but what the bad reading style was before it. Maybe I myself have been doing it wrong and don’t realize it!
February 23rd, 2013 | 1:31 pm
Ah, thank you, pgk. I’ve been continually making that point for years now. Moreover, most literary literature is just bad philosophy and there’s plenty of that in the philosophical literature already, which at least attempts a certain amount of rigor.
You’re being a little unfair with Baby Rudin though, which I’m sure is way beyond Cole’s educational level. I would recommend Michael Spivak’s Calculus instead. A wonderful text and perfect for anybody who wants to discover (or rediscover) the beauty of mathematics.
February 23rd, 2013 | 4:51 pm
Just to clarify, there’s obviously nothing wrong with the appreciation of literature (and I certainly agree that the great works of literature are more than just bad philosophy). But those who have great appreciation for other arts – the visual arts, music, dance, theater, film, food, and so forth – don’t generally confuse such appreciation with intellectuality. Literary aficionados make this mistake all the time, probably because reading is also the primary way we learn, so they confuse the artistic with the intellectual.
February 23rd, 2013 | 5:56 pm
By sheer coincidence, I happened to listen today to film professor Drew Casper’s commentary on the Hitchcock film Notorious. At the very end, he says, “And so to understand ourselves and the world around us, we must study [Hitchock's] work, which is a psychic mirror of our times, a psychic mirror of our lives.” Dude. It’s a great movie and Hitchcock’s a great director. But it’s just a movie and he’s just a director. He has no special insight into the real world by virtue of being a great director. This sort of pretentiousness is fairly rare in film criticism, but nearly ubiquitous in literary criticism.
February 28th, 2013 | 2:46 am
This is the first reference to Cole I have seen since I read his Open City. Like Dr. Rittlemeyer’s loathing after watching so much TV, I am still loathing after finishing that book. Speaking of bluffing, I erroneously thought there would develop some sort of point to the rambling prose, not just another James Joyce/Kerouac novelty. Throw in bytes of high cultural references, classical music references that were lost on my dim brain, and multicultural hobnobbing, and it appears to be an intelligent novel on the surface, but the book suffers from the same problems pointed out in Cole’s essay–it only seems smart. References without depth. Or as pgk wrote–look how cultured I am! Yes! But at mid point, the protagonist (if I could call him that without an interesting plot) has a one night stand. Later, he is accused of a remote sexual assault by someone else. Cathartic justice or mercy is absent, he doesn’t feel much of anything, he is just po-mo boredom personified. But highly cultured to the point of snoring. I will not click on the links to his essays above. I need to stay awake.
February 28th, 2013 | 10:15 am
[...] In response to Teju Cole and Helen Rittelmeyer. [...]
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