Nick Hornby: How To Read

Found via: kottke.org/remainder

My solution was to try to choose books I knew I would like. I'm not sure this idea is as blindingly obvious as it seems. We often read books that we think we ought to read, or that we think we ought to have read, or that other people think we should read (I'm always coming across people who have a mental, sometimes even an actual, list of the books they think they should have read by the time they turn 40, 50, or die); I'm sure I'm not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong.

Ever since late-2003, when the sudden urge to start writing again struck me after not writing since my teenage years, I have been hounded by my own sense of the barbarity of my literary taste. After all, if I was to be a "real" writer, didn't I have to read important books by important people? So, slowly, I have attempted to broaden my tastes in this area, moving away from the genre fiction I had fed my brain on for years. I didn't go out and buy the collected works of Eudora Welty or Ernest Hemmingway, but I did make a concerted effort to begin expanding the range of books that I bought.

It did not work. I began to realize almost immediately that I didn't enjoy reading as much when some of these books were on my plate. Not to say that I hated them all, some I fell in love with and began searching for more books by those authors, but I wasn't having fun.

Finally, after giving up in the middle of one of these books, I came to a painful realization. This was not who I was, and there was little I could do about it. I came to terms with the fact that I was someone who had read a lot more King and Koontz and Grafton than Faulkner or Steinbeck or Tolstoy; and I was someone who, until that writing urge gripped me again, was far more likely to pick up my well worn copies of The Foundation Series than seek out a new writer. Coming to terms with this was easy, coming to terms with being perfectly alright with me being this way was not.

This is why Nick Hornby's article struck me in the way it did. For once, an actual writer was saying the things I had been thinking. I also care little about language, little enough to make me read an entire novel for that reason. Story and character are what drive my enjoyment of reading, not the writer's use of incremental repetition or alliteration. Not to say that I want to read a badly or sloppily written story, but I would rather slog through some occasionally cliched prose in the service of a good story than the other way around.

I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what language can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possibly be...But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes, and I certainly don't have the patience to read it.

The section of the article which resonated most with me was the section where he discussed the reasons why he reads

I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.




(They're interesting people, and they know a lot of interesting things, and I'd miss them.) I'm a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how.




Sometimes, yes, I read to find things out - as I get older, I feel my ignorance weighing more heavily on me. I want to know what it's like to be him or her, to live there or then.


I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

I am still trying to expand my field of vision when it comes to the literary landscape, and I am still trying to read widely, but I am much less likely to push through a book I am not enjoying. After all, I still have those Foundation books, and they have never let me down. So far.