Read Your Vegetables

An ineffective approach to the problem of people who don't read

A little over a week ago David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV, took to the Paper of Record with an op-ed titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” Headlines are, of course, not necessarily chosen by the author, but in this case it gives you a decent idea of the contents: Morris notes that best-selling authors, customers who buy books, and students studying writing in college are now overwhelmingly female, and then goes on to argue that this is Bad for culture writ large.

I didn’t actually read this when it first dropped, despite a colleague’s attempt to get me to. I actually first read it because Erik Hoel on Substack caught my eye with a response headlined “Literature needs young men more than young men need it.” Hoel argues that the gender split in the audience for books runs a risk of relevancy collapse, where the medium risks losing even the possibility of breaking out more widely:

But a loss of Sad Young Literary Men has effects beyond the numerical loss of readers. No matter its underlying readers, any novel was still succeeding within a medium that contained the potential to reach everybody (even if it almost never did). To put it bluntly, a restricted sphere of demographic influence provokes the judgement of “it’s just for this type of person and they’re just doing their own thing” and it means outsiders will take the entire medium less seriously—even if they shouldn’t (if you want the case for why this is both likely and unfair, see The Guardian’s “Why do so few men read books by women?”).

This is an angle I hadn’t heard before, and I think he might be on to something with the video games analogy (which comes in the next paragraph after what I quoted; you’ll have to click through to read it). I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

What jumped out to me, though, was a bit he quoted from Morris’s essay, which I’ll quote here with a bit more context. It’s where Morris makes the case for why reading novels matters:

These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling. Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives. Like many other bookish Gen X-ers, I can’t conceive of my formative years without the Douglas Coupland novel that gave our generation its name. This is why we need a more inclusive literary culture, one that will bring young men in from the cold.

I am not saying that we should declare progress for women writers complete and now focus only on men. The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

This is… not a super inspiring pitch for reading as a way to spend one’s free time (and not just because I found Douglas Coupland super hard to take back in the day). It’s very much the standard line in these sorts of things, though: reading as character building. For an easy second example, here’s a similar bit from the Guardian piece Hoel linked in the quote above.

Why does this matter? For a start, it narrows men’s experiences of the world. “I’ve known this for a very long time, that men just aren’t interested in reading our literature,” the Booker prize-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo told me in an interview for The Authority Gap. “Our literature is one of the ways in which we explore narrative, we explore our ideas, we develop our intellect, our imagination. If we’re writing women’s stories, we’re talking about the experiences of women. We also talk about male experiences from a female perspective. And so if they’re not interested in that, I think that it’s very damning and it’s extremely worrying.”

If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners.

It’s not that I disagree with the idea that reading more widely broadens the mind and makes you a better person— I’ve said similar things myself. But, damn, this is some “eat your vegetables” marketing right here— it’s Important for men to read, and read women writers, because they’re at risk of becoming Bad People if they don’t.

A very generic image from the prompt “books as vegetables”

This is to some degree a function of the anticipated audience for these pieces— the men who don’t read books mostly aren’t reading the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Guardian, either. Most of them men who will read those pieces will nod sagely in agreement, secure in the knowledge that the authors aren’t talking about them. The audience that needs to be sold on reading as an alternative to video is elsewhere, and the techniques needed to reach them wouldn’t really be appropriate for the Grey Lady.

At the same time, though, this kind of “eat your vegetables” argument is all too common in defenses of the lost art of reading, and “the humanities” more generally. I’ve heard any number of earnest pitches that we need to push the study of art and literature and philosophy and the rest on people who aren’t already studying them because those disciplines are essential in making better people, or at least people who suck less. And that’s just not a pitch that makes me want to go running to any of those fields.

This also makes me think a bit about my own relationship to reading over the years. I was always a big reader as a kid, not out of any particular drive for self-improvement, but because it was fun. I enjoyed the experience of being immersed in other places, in other lives, many of them wildly improbable. I mostly read genre fiction, but also a wide range of other stuff— I read The Odyssey and A Tale of Two Cities randomly (that is, without being assigned them for class) in middle school, and in a pinch would read just about anything involving words in a row. When I was in Japan back in 1998, and didn’t speak Japanese well enough to watch TV, I powered through more than a novel a day— generally a mass-market paperback on my commute to and from the lab, and something longer in my apartment at night. Discovering an English-language used store in Tokyo (RIP Good Day Books…) was an absolute life-saver, because there’s no way I could’ve hauled enough reading material across the Pacific.

The one thing that has consistently dampened my enthusiasm for reading has been the “eat your vegetables” approach— being told that it was Important to read some work or another. It happened in high school— working through A Tale of Two Cities in English class was a slog, where reading it on my own had been fun— and especially in college classes. Nothing sucks the joy out of fun source material faster than having to explain jokes in the context of Marxist theory.

And it still happens now. My main constraint these days is time, but I make occasional attempts to check in on the state of genre fiction. More and more, though, I find myself bouncing off of critically praised books that are presented as Important in one respect or another. I can still power through novels pretty quickly when they click for me, but I find myself falling back on reliable authors and (sub)genres, because so much of what generates critical buzz these days just isn’t much fun, at least for me.

Those last two words— for me— are doing a lot of work, of course. This is all incredibly subjective, and a lot of stuff that I find a real slog will be exciting and enjoyable for others. And vice versa. Different kinds of people enjoy different kinds of things, be they books or vegetables.

At the same time, though, that’s also kind of the core of the problem here. Works that seem inherently fun and attractive to the kind of people who nod sagely along to op-eds in the New York Times are being sold to a different kind of people as Good For Them, like a plate of cauliflower that they “need” to eat. And there’s just not very much chance that that ends up moving the needle in the good direction.

Again, I recognize that this complaint is a little unfair in that the op-ed pages of major newspapers are not the right venue to be launching a pitch to non-readers about the fun and exciting world of reading. At the same time, though, a lot of these pieces leave me with a very strong sense that the people writing them wouldn’t be comfortable going to the places they would need to in order to get in front of their nominal target audience, and wouldn’t understand how to make the pitch once they were there. Which is probably a big piece of how we got to where we are now.

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This is another of those “nagging at me for a while” kinds of things, as you can see by the dates of the things it references. If you enjoy this kind of week-late cultural commentary, here’s a button:

And if you want to either offer a better case for reading or just call me a Bad Person, the comments will be open: