On reading – Dinah Birch in TLS:

‘Reading is a harmless means of self- improvement. Or is it? Opinions have always been divided. For habitual readers, who are by and large a well-behaved lot, it’s flattering to think that sitting with a book might after all be a transgressive activity – wayward, promiscuous and heroic, as this group of studies is inclined to suggest. Or are books, as Rob Doyle speculates, “like drugs or alcohol”, primarily written for despondent outsiders? Doyle quotes Michel Houllebecq’s thoughts on the matter: “those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is almost entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with life”. Although the alternative realities of books are seductive, they can be seen as a withdrawal from life’s challenges. But they also offer, and Doyle makes this point too, “sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination”.’

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‘Novels allowed Victorian readers to imagine the possibility of leading different lives, in a pattern of unruly reading which meant that “Victorian women could consciously experiment with their own ‘self-development’ and recognize their potential for action outside the bounds of fiction”. Knox, with an academic readership in view, concludes her study with an abrupt shift from historical analysis to pedagogic recommendation. Turning from the Victorian preoccupation with girls’ hazardous reading to our current anxiety about boys failing to read anything at all, she urges, in a spirit of wary optimism, that we should teach young readers about identification as an empowering reading strategy for any gender, as a way of restoring what she suspects to be the fading appeal of books.’

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‘Ricks doesn’t instruct his readers as to how we should think, behave, or feel, but his critical approach is based on a lightly worn assumption of shared ideals. This is an assumption that ties these books together, though their authors’ values are differently inflected, and are often, as might be expected, more sharply pointed in the work of a younger generation of academics and writers. The demonstration of virtue, variously defined, is now more central to mainstream critical discourse than was the case among the postwar generation of academic readers who influenced Ricks’s precisely focused methods. It remains true, however, that none of these reflections on the nature and reach of reading claims that reading is in itself a virtue, or that its primary purpose is the promotion of righteousness. The expansion of knowledge is often the point. Doyle, citing Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel (1986), claims that reading is essentially a revelation of new experience, at least as far as fiction is concerned. From Kundera’s perspective, we read in order to know. “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” White is forthright on the distance between reading and virtue. “Reading may have benefits (we hear often about a heightened sense of empathy, an alertness to logic and nuance, and a lengthened attention span) but it is not a virtue. Goodness (a refusal to inflict suffering, a curiosity about the lives of others, and inclination to serve?) has never been associated with the literary mind more than any other. Violence is perpetrated by and in the name of readers. Reading conduces to inwardness, but many good people are not inward, and many inward people are not good.” Books may or may not be good for us, but they will not serve as a substitute for moral discipline.’

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‘Most serious students of literature, in schools and in universities, are now female. In the context of centuries of male literary ascendency, the shift is both startling and exhilarating. No one, however, would wish to see the presence of boys and men evaporate entirely from the community of readers. Shared experiences, thoughts, ideas, worries and possibilities are not confined by the supposed boundaries of gender. Again, White is explicit in her recommendations. “If we are lucky, and resilient, and vigilant about respecting our instinct for what feeds us best, grown men and women can practice reading like girls. It goes like this: pick up a book and forget who you are.” White’s tone is unremittingly high-minded. Like Knox, she is issuing a call to arms, arguing for the need to renew literary culture. There are, however, less exalted reasons for turning to books. In one of the more engaging passages of his composite autobibliography, Doyle considers his own reasons for reading. “What is it we’re reading for?” Taking the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño as his example, Doyle’s answer is simple: “what I’m primarily in it for is friendship. That may sound corny, but there is no word that better conveys how I experience my relationship to his books. Admittedly it’s a capacious, sentimental, not very literary-critical word … I just like being around his books, in the same way that you cherish the company of a person you love, a friend”. That summarizes something fundamental to the appeal of reading. White reaches for a grander word – communitas – to describe a comparable phenomenon: “Reading is a way to keep asking vital questions in the company of others”. No one, while absorbed in a book, is alone.’

Read the article here.

Books won’t substitute for moral discipline, yes. Literature as the continuation of preaching is literary suicide. There were great authors that longed to be preachers, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, but their literary talent was bigger than their preaching capacities. The end of ambiguity is the end of the novel.
Even a psalm cannot survive without ambiguity.

Whether one is alone while reading a book? It depends on the book.