Reading Problems: "I hate books"

the 6th installment in an ongoing series

In Andre Agassi’s 2009 bestselling memoir Open, Agassi insists repeatedly on his hatred of tennis. People think he’s kidding, or being coy. In many ways, the book is about how prodigious talent and hard work don’t necessarily equate to love. If you’re lucky, Agassi counters, they lead to opportunities, and within those opportunities may lurk a purpose, and it’s from this sense of purpose, fully realized, that one finds love. Sorry, that’s kind of a spoiler. I loved the abridged audio version of the book.

In her forthcoming Light and Thread, Han Kang ponders the interconnectedness of pain and love. She describes her novel-writing process as an intense exploration of questions that lead to other questions and therefore, other novels. She longs for love to open doors in her writing the way that pain and violence do. It’s love she seeks, and pain she finds, but the act of writing—connecting to others through books—ultimately emerges as an affirmation of love, the process through which love, for her, is reified.

Of course reading and writing are the great loves of my life, but there are times when I wish I could do something—anything—else. For example when I see “serpent” or “wife” in a forthcoming title and want to run screaming off a cliff. Or a sexualized piece of fruit on a book cover. Or sprayed edges. Or advice about timehacking or biohacking or nap activism. Or an(other) account of the first/worst/least-known shipwreck. Or how something your grandmother would not have considered labor is actually labor. Or how a podcast I’ve taken great pains to know nothing about is now inexplicably something I’m expected to read. Or a novel in which a middle-aged woman is refusing to be invisible (what’s wrong with being invisible, I ask, invisibility is a superpower). In those moments, and I wish I could say they were rare, it’s like, yeah: I hate books.

But of course, it’s not books I hate—it’s those books. And it’s not even those books I hate—it’s the savagery of mediocrity and homogeneity when you’ve been lucky enough to experience the ecstasy of original, unmanufactured thought in book form. And then I wonder why I let it bother me at all—why, when there are so many bigger and more worthy things to be offended by, do I harp on what amounts to matters of taste? Everyone can love what they love! Isn’t that my entire ethics?

It’s uncomfortable to champion books and reading all day long, while toting around a secret hatred. This is the problem of pleasers, and everyone is a pleaser on some level. This is also why it’s easy to “love your neighbor” but very difficult to love your actual neighbor, the person who’s being annoying right next to you. The struggle is always in the specifics. “I love books,” but I also hate a lot of books. And if reading is an art form, which I believe it is, then we have to be serious and clear-eyed about what it demands of us, what our responsibility to it is, what we’re bringing to it and what we expect it to do for us.

Of course it’s difficult to talk about contemporary books, especially, without a consideration of current-day publishing. There are plenty of folks on this platform who do this far more diligently than I ever could or frankly, would want to. When my book came out nine years ago, I knew nothing about how anything worked. I was armed with my words and my ideas and sallied forth, filled with trust and gratitude. Nothing teaches you about how traditional publishing really works like traditionally publishing a book. Do I wish I’d known more, back then? I used to say yes. I used to say, I wish I’d known that editors leave houses all the time, sometimes in the middle of a book’s gestation. I used to say, I wish I’d known that publicists don’t read or likely care about the books they’re promoting. I used to say, I wish I’d known that a book’s best chance of survival happens well before the book comes out.

But now I’m sort of grateful that I didn’t know those things, because I was able to have an experience that was way less neurotic than it might have been. I just learned as I went. The highs and lows were entirely unanticipated and for lack of a better word, unrehearsed. And then a couple of years later I opened a bookstore and learned more than I ever wanted to know, really, about how books work as commodified objects.

So is what I’m hating the system? Sure. But it’s also a response to the burden of, for lack of a better word, care. I want every book to be the book that changes my life, which is to say, gets under my skin, arrests my thinking, even if the effects are temporary. Many books do this! Many more don’t. And those are the same expectations I have of myself as a writer—impossible expectations. Hard to set a word down under that kind of pressure. Hard to not picture the dozens of new releases that go unsold per month.

I’m tempted to say, oh, this isn’t, in the scheme of problems, a real problem. This isn’t, in the scheme of actual labor, real work. Oh no, the characters I made up in my head aren’t being excellent or exciting enough! Oh no, this book I really wanted to like actually kind of sucks! Oh no, late-stage capitalism is alive and well everywhere, including publishing! Writing is writing, and publishing is publishing. It’s necessary, for me, to try to reclaim some naïveté about the relationship. An exercise in forced forgetting can be spiritual, Lenten, even. Like knowing someone’s faults and loving them anyway. This may not be true for everyone, but for me, if writing and reading are going to be central to my life, they have to mean something beyond what they are. They have to make me better. It’s not a book’s responsibility to have a moral code or purpose, but it’s my responsibility to use my time on this earth well.

Where there is care, where there is commitment, there are problems. The idea of books that we carry around with us can be perfect, an ideology of time to read and reflect and be transported, to grow and to learn, to feel delight and connection and awe. The physical books that we have bought or checked out from the library can be massive disappointments. The book we’re writing in our head may or may not find its twin on the page. Not to be all, nothing means everything but also everything means something, but: hate is a problem of love.

Common law decrees that once you’re a Jeopardy clue, you have no problems.

Currently reading:

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (reading this one very slowly)

Nocturama by William Brewer

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

Previous entries in the series: