[There are no] Rules for Reading
Looking to foster a love of reading in the next generation? Listen to Nikesh Shukla.
No, darling child, you don’t want me to tell you what to read. The shit I like won’t be the shit you like. I have very specific tastes. I grew up reading Marvel comics, Archie comics, sci-fi books, books set in contemporary New York, and sports dramas. A strange combo. Hard to pin down.
You also don’t want me to promise you that books will teach you to be empathetic. God, no. We both know this is absolute nonsense. Some of the most villainous people in the world are the best read. Some of the most racist, transphobic, and misogynistic people have reams of books lining their homes. It seems these books taught them nothing good.
‘read what you want, build your own personal canon, and always trust in James Baldwin’
I don’t even think you want me to promise you that a book will take you around the world, teach you a thing or two, because I read a lot of books about science and I still don’t really know how light refracts through an eye. I don’t even think light does refract through an eye. Basically, the tl;dr of what’s about to happen is read what you want, build your own personal canon, and always trust in James Baldwin.
1) Find a book that’s important to you for reasons that only you truly understand. A book that changes you isn’t a book from a list of books other people think you should read ’cos it’s going to inspire you, or from the great canon of the 100 best, most indispensable, and most important whatevers or whatever. It’s a book that arrives in your life at the right time, in the right frame of mind, with the right amount of time to be present in it. How many times have I given a book that moved me to someone else and they thought, yeah, that was fine? How many times has someone passed something on to me saying it changed their life, and I read it, and it didn’t change my life? The variables were different. The time and space were different. The arrival point was different. I guess what I’m trying to tell you is, the books that will change your life won’t arrive when promised. They will creep up on you. They will find you when you least expect it. Get under your skin when you’re at your most vulnerable. When you’re feeling most robust. When your defences are up. When you’re in a slump. When you’ve decided books are for losers. When you’ve dismissed the book. When you’ve picked it up because of a cover or a review or a quote from a solid writer or a first line. The sneak attack. That’s what you want. I can’t pass you that book. You can’t even seek to earn that book. You just have to not fight it when it arrives.
2) Find a book that makes you fall in love, just a little, with one or two or more or all of the characters. The type of love where you fan-cast an actor you fancy as one of the protagonists, and then you fan-cast yourself as the love interest in your daydreams, and you stare at the wall and think, ooooh, David-Duchovny-as-protagonist, you are a very attractive and dry man, how naughty. Oh my, Gillian-Anderson-as-protagonist, I hang on your every word, your every smirk, your every shimmy. It’s totally normal to fall in love with characters in a good book. In the same way it’s totally normal to run your index finger along the seams of the empty crisp packet when no one is looking and lick the tip like it’s a baby’s dummy. The best books are the ones filled with characters you want to spend time with. They could be sitting in a cafe shooting the shit about how modern life is rubbish, or they could be rushing to stop the lab from exploding, releasing the zombie juice into the earth’s atmosphere, or they could be falling in and out of love over quiet tender fragments of moments where everything’s unsaid over three years at a prestigious Dublin college. All we want to do is spend time with them. That’s love. The plot is irrelevant. It’s the story we care about, the emotional journey our characters take us on. It’s easier when we’re in love.
3) Find a book that makes you laugh. For god’s sake. There are many levels of literary elitist out there. They’ll give all manner of reasons why this book is incredible and this book is a piece of shit. And these are all rules these boring bastards made up! The literary elitist I particularly hate (with the close second being the gatekeeper who drones on about how ‘smart’ the author is) is the elitist who thinks funny books are unworthy. How effing dull, eh? Laugh! Laugh like everyone is watching.
Look, the world is on fire, and there is so much to worry about, and our phones are in our faces, we’ve got our noses glued to social media timelines that give you war, war, war, war, war, a nice jumper, infographic on what you’re complicitly silent about, infographic on what you’re complicitly silent about, infographic on what you’re complicitly silent about, infographic on what you’re complicitly silent about, a slimline wallet to streamline efficiency (30 per cent off). Everywhere is bad and our heads are filled with information on what’s wrong with the world, what we’re not doing enough of to stop the world being bad (hey corporations and governments, really? Us? Our sole responsibility?) and stuff we could buy to make ourselves feel better. The fact that I’ve picked up a book instead of the addiction-device, my goodness, wouldn’t it be nice to be transported into a lighter realm where I can laugh. Either escapistly (not a word, I know, but I don’t care, it made me laaaaaugh) or the world’s fucked but here’s an absurd thing we can laugh at-ly or other. With so many funny books out there, find the one that hurts your stomach as you convulse with guffaws.
4) Find all the books that James Baldwin wrote and read them. And always trust in James Baldwin. Always. I think of this quote often: ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read… It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’ It’s from his Life magazine essay in 1963, ‘The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are’. Baldwin wasn’t writing for me. And yet, on my twenty- first birthday, when two people important in my life gifted me a copy of The Fire Next Time, it changed everything. The effect that book had on me was beyond profound. Perhaps it was because Baldwin was writing to his nephew in the first instance, but the passion and the grace got me. Hooked me. Pulled me under its spell. There is a clarity, a moral fury in the text. It sent me in search of everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on, eventually finding this, in an essay in Notes from a Native Son: ‘I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.’ The laden fatigue that comes with experience of ‘I imagine …’, the double meaning of ‘sense’, the choice of verbs, from ‘cling’ to ‘sense’ to ‘forced to deal’ … it is a masterclass in explaining the inexplicable to a child. That cliché, hurt people hurt people, it feels like it started here.
I’m asked constantly whether writing can change the world. And I think that perhaps it cannot. To speak in such a macro way, to not acknowledge that the world is filled with people and it is people who dictate its ebbs and flows, then perhaps changing the world in itself feels like an impossible task. But to move one person, to change the way they see the world, to show them the possibilities and boundlessness of their imagination. To move another, to hold up a mirror and say, I see you, to make them feel less alone, to make them feel like what they experience can make sense. That is all we can do.
But then, as Baldwin said: ‘You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world … The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimetre, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.’ That’s why we always trust in James.
5) Find books that stimulate your curiosity in the world, in people, in things, in magic and wonder and brilliance, and find them on your own terms. Books can’t teach you how to care about other people. That bit’s up to you. You can do it. It’s the way you’re raised and where you’re raised and by whom and who you look up to and how you move through the world and it’s a series of choices and decisions, some made by you and some made by others, that make you think about others. Besides, do we want didactic books? Books to teach us moral lessons and tell us what to think? I hate the idea of that, to be honest. I want to see the world reflected through complicated and messy characters and maybe they can open up the way we see the world or the perspectives that guide how the world might be the way it is, but how we feel, that’s up to us.
That’s why I’m perpetually irritated by writers who aren’t curious. Surely, kindness and curiosity are the way to navigate the world. To treat people with a basic level of kindness that isn’t self-serving, and to want to know more. Writers who want to know something head out on a journey of discovery, talk to people to learn more, look up at the sky to learn more, put things under a microscope to learn more, those are the writers who will give me something. Maybe they can open the world up for me, and maybe they won’t come to an easy conclusion, and maybe they won’t come to any conclusion, maybe it really is the journey itself that matters and not the destination. Maybe the answer to the question is less important than the meandering we did to get to that answer. Either way, a curious writer can open things up for you.
There you have it … instead of a bunch of books to read, as gifts, I’ve given you some rules for reading. But here’s the thing: do what you want. These rules aren’t for following, nor are they didactic. More, just a general feeling of why I read in the first place. You know how I said I hate writers who tell you stuff they know rather than take you on a voyage of discovery through what they don’t, well I skirted close to the line of being guilty of that myself. But hey … I love being a bit mischievous. Good luck. The world is yours. It always was. I don’t know if it’s being handed to you in the best state. But hopefully you can make sense of what comes next by reading about what came before. I love you. Keep going. Above all else, keep going.
This is an extract from new book The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, edited by Jenny Orchard and published by Scribe UK, 978-1915590824, £16.99 hbk.
