Reading for pleasure? Oh the horror…

Giving a book talk recently, I was asked most severely by a member of my audience whether my last book had a message. “It is surely not written just for … entertainment.”

I know we read for all kinds of reasons, but seeing books purely as the means to enhance moral virtues is, in the end, going to make reading unsustainable. It works against the idea of building a strong culture of reading.

There’s nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. I know I’ve touched on this in recent blogs, but I thought it worth returning to, not just because I feel strongly about it, but because I wanted to show that it’s not just my own lonely crusade.

In a recent book of essays on reading, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, Michael Chabon says : “The idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word ‘entertainment’ and along with pleasure came disapproval … Pleasure is unreliable and transient.  Its benefits do not endure and so we come to distrust them, or our taste for them.”

He makes the appeal for a return to the “thrill and chill” of the real story. And he says that, as readers and writers, we should reclaim “pleasure” and “entertainment”.

Books have become tainted by the prejudice that entertainment is passive, he argues. That the entertainer stands on the stage and performs while we, in the auditorium, laugh.

The intention to entertain has become suspect. “No self-respecting literary genius would describe him or herself as an entertainer. An entertainer is a man in sequined dinner jacket singing ‘She’s a lady’…”

Yet entertainment as he defines it, pleasure and all, remains the only sure means we have “of bridging… the gulf… that separates each of us from everybody else.

“The best response to those who would cheapen it is …  to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience and the universal hunger for connection.”
And to put the seal on this issue, I’ll finish with a writer called Alberto Manguel, who recently also wrote of reading as a place of refuge and escape.

“For a reader, this may be the essential, perhaps the only justification for literature: that the madness of the world will not take us over completely though it invades our cellars . . . and then softly takes over the dining room, the living room, the whole house.”
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