Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Anna Holmes and Benjamin Moser debate whether pleasure in reading is trivial or vital.
By Anna Holmes
The problem with pleasure is that it can become the default mode, the baseline expectation.
I get it: Plenty of serious-minded individuals who value difficulty as a badge of honor consider pleasure a triviality or, at best, a distraction. Whereas folks such as myself might point out that pleasure is one of the most fleeting and ephemeral of sensations, and that we could probably all use a little more of it in our lives. “Pleasure comes, but not to stay: / ‘Even this shall pass away,’ ” wrote the American newspaperman, poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton.
Reading for pleasure — or reading and experiencing pleasure, perhaps — should therefore be above suspicion. But what is “reading for pleasure,” really? Does it mean burying oneself only in books or other forms of written material guaranteed to induce feelings of amusement or delight or serenity? Does it mean that pleasure is the point, rather than the pleasurable byproduct?
I don’t have answers, but I reject the false dichotomy that assumes pleasure and edification cannot be one and the same. In fact, I believe that in reading, as in life, confronting painful truths we’d just as rather avoid can elicit a certain satisfaction, even comfort.
In 1994, while I was auditing a graduate course in journalism, a professor assigned the class Norman Maclean’s award-winning “Young Men and Fire.” This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, 13 young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean, probably best known for his 1976 novella “A River Runs Through It” — which was turned into a pleasurable Robert Redford film starring the pleasurable-to-look-at Brad Pitt — is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I’ve read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I’ve had.
I have felt this way about many other disturbing or even devastating books, and not just because of the prose style or the deft pacing. Take Michael Light’s “100 Suns,” a 2003 photography volume made up of 208 pages of images from the hundreds of underwater and atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs conducted by the United States government from the mid-1940s to the early ’60s. “100 Suns” is a ghastly but beautiful piece of work: The first time I paged through it, I giggled; afterward, I felt almost giddy. A reviewer for Booklist even described the images inside as “nearly pornographic (one bomb is named Climax) in their troubling allure.” Was what I experienced pleasure? Discomfort? I’d say it was a little bit of both. Like riders of roller coasters or fans of horror flicks, I enjoy the adrenaline rush, the pleasure that comes from experiences of controlled terror.
If you’re judging me for thoroughly enjoying a book that offers a preview of what nuclear annihilation might look like, all I can say is: Fair enough. I’d be disappointed to discover that the enjoyment of a book like “100 Suns” might undermine an understanding of and appreciation for the very serious geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. I wouldn’t want the astonishing or the formidable to become the frivolous — which is probably why I share with some people a love/hate relationship with the Internet. Digital content, especially social media, has acclimated so many of us so swiftly to the promise of the quick fix, the digestible tidbit, that we are beginning to privilege listicle over long-form, ease over effort, sensibility over sense. The problem with pleasure, in reading as in anything else, is that it can become the default mode, the baseline expectation. At that point, as Neil Postman put it three decades ago, we may find that we are slowly but surely amusing ourselves to death.
Anna Holmes is an award-winning writer who has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Newsweek and The New Yorker online. She is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s website she created in 2007. She works as an editor at Fusion and lives in New York.
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is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,” a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the general editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector at New Directions. A former New Books columnist at Harper’s Magazine, he is currently writing the authorized biography of Susan Sontag. He lives in the Netherlands.
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