Read What You Enjoy

The other day, someone I follow on Twitter shared a New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago by Ceridwen Dovey exploring the connection between reading books and being happy. A lot of the article has to do with the author’s experience in what she calls “bibliotherapy,” but what I resonated with was her belief in reading what we want – not what someone else says we must, or, for that matter, what we feel for whatever reason we should.

“I’ve long been wary,” Dovey writes, “of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people – or different things to the same person – at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.”

Those of you who have ever asked me for book recommendations will find that sentiment awfully familiar. I’m mindful of the fact that it recently took me a few solid weeks to follow through on recommending a novel to a nonfiction-reading friend (and in the end, I couldn’t pick just one; I gave him four very different recommendations to choose from).

If you’re in school, you need to read what’s assigned. That’s how school works. But if you’re picking up a book to read on the weekend (i.e., “for pleasure”), it had better be something you enjoy.

There are many different kinds of enjoyment, of course. Reading a fast-paced murder mystery novel set in present-day Norway is a very different experience from reading Augustine’s massive and daunting City of God. But both can be enjoyable experiences in their own ways.

I tell you about a lot of books here. But let me say this clearly: I would never suggest you read all of them. I read what I find interesting, and so should you.

Which leads me to ask: which books have dazzled or dismayed you recently? Which books have made you laugh or cry? Which books have you found it impossible to put down? Which books have crept into your dreams?