More than two years ago I wrote an angry piece about how lame the bulletpointization of books is: the point of reading and engaging with books is not so the reader can consume little bullet points of knowledge.
But since then technofascism has gained so much traction that art and being challenged by art has been completely devalued. Last week the publisher of Axios, Nicholas Johnson, published a post about how AI became his “reading buddy,” helping him to elucidate themes and “make sense of wordy, old prose.” In other words Johnson is bragging about outsourcing the act of trying while reading.
In our convenience-obsessed world it’s more important than ever to celebrate the existence of literary friction, the kind of writing that doesn’t go down in one easy gulp, that makes you sit in your uncertainty or even discomfort. This kind of contemplation is a big part of how you grow as a reader and a thinker. And yeah, I think that certain reading experiences should allow people to grow.
There’s nothing wrong with quick and easy reads that are meant to be consumed for sheer pleasure. I would never knock a good page-turner. But that’s only one kind of reading.
I’m talking about the kind of reading that was once taught in high schools and higher ed, but apparently not so much anymore. The kind of reading that had me puzzling through all 880 pages of Middlemarch as a college student when I would much rather have been participating in an event called Thirsty Thursday at my local campus bar. All of those nights at the college dive blur together; reading Middlemarch remains a seminal experience.
The fear of discomfort is so widespread that it’s even a huge factor in why book bans and other forms of censorship are rampant today.
But I’m also not just talking about the great works of literature. In this age of AI and optimization and convenience at all costs, the ability to wrestle with just about any text and glean some understanding of it is what turns people into life-long readers. As Megan Greenwell reported in a chilling story for WIRED, children can still read words just fine, but they have trouble making meaning out of those words and that, of course, is a primary reason to read books. One educator told her, “They’re reading probably more than they ever have, but it’s snippets.”
Even book criticism isn’t safe. As publications divest from straight book reviews in favor of more “user-friendly” formats, there is less space on the page for ambiguity. I say this as someone who has written a lot of editorial lists in her day: the best book coverage grapples, it doesn’t merely catalogue. Good criticism is about placing a new piece of art in conversation with our larger culture. Much like good fiction, criticism helps us to understand complicated ideas and to see the world more clearly. It’s important. Related: most of the job listings I receive lately from LinkedIn want me to use my many years of editorial experience and expertise in order to train AI.
I was thinking about literary friction when I read Missouri Williams’s new novel The Vivisectors and found parts of it inscrutable, and parts of it completely frustrating. I felt lost and I hate to feel lost. But I also did a lot of underlining while reading—so much of the text made my brain light up. In the end I tried to let the book wash over me like poetry rather than trying to decode it and that truly made me enjoy it. I gave myself permission to sit with the ambiguity the book left me feeling, and isn’t that wonderful? It is, I promise you.
The fear of discomfort is so widespread that it’s even a huge factor in why book bans and other forms of censorship are rampant today. From the books recently removed from a Glendale, Arizona school district’s middle school curriculum (just the latest example I could find) to the English professor in Florida who was fired for assigning her adult-aged class an Ottessa Moshfegh story, educators and students are suffering the consequences of parents and administrators who are unable to tolerate a little cognitive dissonance or unease.
In other words, the fact that slavery happened in America or that gender-nonconforming people exist in the world, among other topics, upsets wannabe book banners so much that they feel entitled to legislate who can and can’t read books about such topics. Educators and librarians are already experts in which books are age-appropriate for their students; they don’t need help from a racist peanut gallery (I include the Senate and the House in this categorization) that is unable to tolerate any hint of literary friction.
The act of thinking and learning and growing is anathema to our increasingly fascistic world. Which is all the more reason to double down on them. Questioning everything is the one way every single one of us can fight the tide.
