(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Self is an English writer and political commentator.
He grew up reading whatever was to hand, promiscuously, freely mixing genres, fiction and non-fiction, and both children’s and adult’s books (Self 2022, 164). As an adult he continued this approach, reading about a hundred books simultaneously, practising (pp. 22, 166):
a promiscuity born of fidelity rather than its dereliction; a fidelity not to a given work or its author, but to the great palimpsest of texts, worked up, worked over, interleaved and woven with one another, that constitutes literature in its entirety
We should read “as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text”, comprehending “the caresses of one work in the arms of another” (p. 166). Indiscriminate reading taught Self to discriminate and comprehend. Only by reading voraciously do we develop appropriate schemas, “supple enough to interpret new material” (ibid.). However, we not only need to suspend disbelief, we have to also suspend comprehension: reading while experiencing doubt as a luxury (pp. 166–7). We should not expect to comprehend everything we read; if we encounter a difficulty we should just read on, “secure in the knowledge that either the context will supply the answer, or the writer will use the same words again in a different one” (ibid.). Self reflects that he found the deepest engagement with texts in his “more negative capability”: “I learned more by resisting the effort to get up and consult a dictionary or an encyclopaedia than I did by doing so” (p. 167).
This promiscuity must be combined with faith: “keeping faith with a single text, toughing it out until the very end, regardless of either longueurs or those purple passages whereby it seems to be being unfaithful to its reader” (p. 168). To understand how texts and authors are related, you have to read sufficient quantities for these comparisons to become intuitive, and to become fully absorbed in a book you need to persevere with it (p. 270). Self suggests (p. 169):
it’s in the oscillation between textual monogamy and polygamy (or polyandry) that we find our true love of—and engagement with—reading
In a matter of decades “people came—entirely paradoxically—to believe both in the undoubted existence of a literary canon, and its baleful effects on what we now call inclusiveness” (p. 266). This implies to Self that “many diverse people really were being told what to read by a group of people exhibiting considerably less diversity themselves” (p. 268). And, for him, to tell people what to read is analogous with telling them where they’re allowed to sit on the bus (p. 266).
Self takes neither side of the canonicity debate. The traditionalists make “the canon a synecdoche of the social and economic hierarchies as currently constituted” (p. 269). The revolutionists’ attempt to alter the canon is to “enact a sort of cultural counterfactual: rendering the readers of today somehow magically altered in terms of their own acculturation” (ibid.). Both parties are prescriptive about what we should read (ibid.). Not only should we read as widely and deeply as possible, but “such eclecticism and absorption is our principal prophylactic, protecting us from the blights and pestilences that surround our cultivated little enclaves” (p. 270). So, Self exhorts: “read what you want”, but with a caveat (pp. 273–4):
be conscious that, in this area of life as so many others, you are what you eat,and if your diet is solely pulp, you’ll very likely become rather … pulpy. And if you read books that almost certainly won’t last, you’ll power on through life with a view of cultural history as radically foreshortened as the bonnet of a bubble car
We should read because the turf wars over belief, the key philosophical debates, “have been waged on the territory afforded by language itself”, so to participate you need to be a skilled reader (p. 10). We should read in order to understand and connect with people we’re separated from by literacy, space, time, or technology (p. 9). We should read because, without communing with them, reading is the best way to enter into diverse modes of being and abiding there (pp. 9–10):
To enter the flow-state of reading is to swim into other psyches with great ease, whatever their age, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, class or ethnicity