Life’s Too Short
So Live and Let Die
Today is a rare Shelf Life for readers instead of writers. Well, it’s also a Shelf Life for writers, as usual, since most (but not all) writers are also readers (discussed at length last week’s Story and Medium). Take off your writing hat and put on your reading hat, or your reading glasses, or your reading fuzzy socks and cozy blanket. Whatever your reading gear is. Get it out.
Welcome to a screed.
This essay is on what kinds of things people should read to live a full, well-read life. We all have a limited amount of books we’re going to read in our lifetimes. Unless science finds a way for our brains to live on after death, reading forever in the afterlife, then eventually we’re all going to run out of time for reading.
To that end, I have written some guidance on how to make sure you are choosing the right reading material and how to make sure your friends and social acquaintances are doing likewise.
Premise 1: Let people like what they like.
This means don’t harass people about the things they like, even if you think those things are bad, and it also means don’t try to convert others to like what you like, even if you think your taste is better than theirs. Acceptance is the first step in transformation. Accept that people like different stuff than you do. Become a butterfly. It also means letting yourself like what you like and not applying pressure to yourself to enjoy things you just don’t enjoy.
Do people tell you what you should or ought to read? Is “people” you? Do you tell yourself what you should or ought to read? Worse, do you tell others what they should read? (If the latter, you better be an English teacher.) Listen, do tell people they should read Shelf Life. Shelf Life is the exception that proves the rule I didn’t state yet. Here’s the rule: Don’t tell people (including yourself) what to read, and don’t let others tell you what to read.
Giving book recommendations to others is a great joy. When you recommend someone a book and they read, love, and then discuss that book with you, it’s a great feeling. I’m not saying you should not recommend books to others. That’s totally a fine thing to do. But ensure you are actually making a recommendation and not a demand.
Yes: “I read this book I think you might like.”
No: “You’ve got to read this book.”
Further, when recommending, consider whether you believe the other person will enjoy it or whether you are suggesting it to them simply because you enjoyed it. Most of the time when we recommend books it’s because we liked them—although I do sometimes recommend books I didn’t especially like, if I think they are up the other person’s alley—but liking a book, even a lot, on its own is not enough to recommend a book to another person. You have to have a good-faith belief that it ticks some of the boxes for what they like to read. Unless you are recommending to someone whose book taste is very similar or identical to yours (tis a blessing when you have people like that), then you can’t just willy-nilly shove your faves at them.
Don’t recommend science fiction to someone who has told you they don’t like science fiction. Don’t press your favorite sci-fi on them to try to change their mind. Maybe they only like realistic fiction. Maybe they don’t like fiction at all and enjoy reading biographies. Maybe you think they should read more fiction. Guess what? They shouldn’t. Not unless they want to.
Here are some things different friends and loved ones of mine have told me about their book tastes:
I don’t like anything YA.
I don’t want to read anything where things happen that couldn’t happen in real life.
I only read romance novels.
Don’t like YA? Then I am not going to tell you that you should read some YA because I have found the perfect YA that will change your mind. Regarding person number 2 above, she only wants to read realistic stories and I primarily read speculative fiction, and that meant I don’t recommend many or any books to her—and that’s fine. Personally I don’t enjoy romance novels but I don’t have a problem with someone else reading romance novels—even only romance novels. People should read what they like.
Do you have a friend or acquaintance who gets personally offended if you admit you don’t like something that they like? If so, you should recommend they read today’s Shelf Life. Someone once told me I was dead to them because I don’t like Star Wars. That’s fine. I’d rather be dead to them than sit through even one more minute of Star Wars content.
But shouldn’t you read things for enrichment? Shouldn’t people make an effort to read serious literature, classics, to learn from them? No. Not unless that’s what they like doing.
I enjoy science fiction (all kinds), fantasy (most kinds), YA, adult contemporary, literary, all kinds of stuff. But I don’t like reading anything written earlier than around the 1970s. Look, I’ve tried. I have an English degree, I’ve read world lit and lit in English (American, British, other-Anglophone, lit- in-translation, and so on) from the dawn of writing forward. I’ve read Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders and Dickens and Austen and all that stuff. I do not like it. I know this about me. I don’t enjoy reading old books. If it’s much older than Wide Sargasso Sea or One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m just not going to like it.
But what about—no, I did not like Nineteen Eighty Four. But if you like science fiction—no I did not like Frankenstein. Well as a feminist—I’m sorry but, no, I did not like any of the four (4) Virginia Woolf novels I read (Flush, the one about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, was closest to enjoyable). Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these books and I recognize their importance and I agree they are meritorious. But I did not enjoy reading them.
Which brings me to my next premise:
Premise 2: We need to practice noticing the difference between “wasn’t for me” and “objectively bad.”
I don’t think any media or art is inherently, objectively bad, unless I personally created it, in which case yes it’s inherently, objectively terrible.
I went and looked up “what are the worst books ever,” “worst books,” “all-time worst books,” and a few other phrases because I have this theory, you see, and I wanted to shake it out. I found the books that come up again and again in the search results fall into one of three categories, which are:
“A monster wrote this manifesto,” for example, Mein Kampf.
“Making fun of people’s self publishing efforts,” for example, Moon People.
“Of interest to women and/or girls,” for example, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, Valley of the Dolls, and so on.
Lots of people will tell you that Twilight and its sequels are objectively bad in a way that, for instance, the Harry Potter or Dresden Files series are not. Honestly the only difference I’ve noticed is that Twilight is girl- and woman-focused while the other two are boy- and man-focused. This doesn’t mean that girls have to like Twilight or can’t like the Dresden Files. It just means a lot of the time when we deem something “objectively bad” what we mean is “this doesn’t appeal to men.”
Additional to premise 1, above: Several people over the years have insisted that I’m really unfair in my dislike of the Dresden Files and that if I’d just give them a chance and read them I’d see that even though they’re kind of simply-written, wish-fulfillment fantasy novels, it doesn’t matter that they’re not great works of literature because they’re just fun.
I made it through five (5) Dresden Files novels before quitting; and
When you suggest to a man that he should read the Twilight series even though they’re kind of simply-written, wish-fulfillment fantasy novels and it doesn’t matter that they’re not great works of literature because they’re just fun he looks at you like you just called his mama ugly.
If you don’t like something, that’s all the reason you need to have to not read it. Something doesn’t have to be “objectively bad” for you to dislike it. You can dislike things that are, in fact, universally or near-universally regarded as good, for example, how I dislike Pride and Prejudice. Likewise, if someone else likes something that you don’t like, or dislikes something that you like, that doesn’t mean that one of you is right and one of you is wrong, or that one of you has better taste than the other. It just means you like different things.
Yes: “I didn’t care for that book.”
No: “That book was horrible.”
Premise 3: Life’s too short to read a book you’re not enjoying.
Life is short and we all have a limited amount of books to read before we shed these mortal coils and shove off for the next life. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that a book isn’t doing it for you, that you just don’t care for it, and putting it on the did-not-finish (DNF) list.
My rule of thumb is about 10 percent of the book. That’s how much I’m willing to make myself read without being grabbed, without my attention to the story becoming self-sustaining (more on self-sustaining reading momentum in Start Me Up). If I’m at the 10-percent mark and the story hasn’t sucked me in, I’m giving up and moving on to something else. If I’ve been sneaking glances at the progress bar or the page numbers as I go because I’m wondering if I’m near the 10-percent mark yet, that’s a real bad sign. Ten percent of a book is usually an hour or two hours for me. That is the maximum amount of time I’m going to put into a book to see if I like it.
Even if it was recommended to me by someone I admire. Even if it’s a universally beloved book. Even if—even if my friend wrote it. Let me confess: I haven’t read all my friends’ published books. I have bought all my friends’ published books—but I haven’t read all of them. Worse, some of them I started, couldn’t get into, and set aside as DNFs. Even for a friend. I might not read your whole book.
This just acknowledges that not every book is for every reader, and that’s okay, and that when a friend publishes a book I will do my best to read it but I’m always there on day one with the preorder copy because you can’t go wrong with the gift of unit sales.
There’s no shame in leaving a book unfinished. It’s also not rude to decline a book recommendation if someone is pushing a book on you that just isn’t to your taste. It’s ruder for them to keep bothering you to read.
True story: A customer once brought a copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan to my store and suggested I read it. I did not have any personal relationship with this customer. It’s possible I had had a passing conversation with them about movies (this was a video rental store, for those of you who are old enough to know what that was). The customer had got it in their head that I’d be into it because they were into it, and not because of any knowledge about what kind of things I like to read.
I tried to decline the book and they pressed it on me until I said “okay, sure, I’ll check it out” just so they’d leave me alone. After they left I put it in a drawer under the cash register. For the duration of my employment there that customer would periodically come in and pester me about whether I’d read Cosmos yet. I left the book there when I quit and for all I know it was still in the drawer under the register when the store went out of business.
The moral of this story is, for the love of dog don’t be that dude.
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