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IN DEFENSE OF NOT READING

Some days ago, I saw something rare: a white middle-aged man reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. For a great many folks, “Gatsby” is synonymous not with love, longing, class conflict and the postwar obliteration of old ways in Jazz Age America, so much as with the longueurs of freshman English class. Most nascent American teenagers are forced to read this book at an age when reading about the past couldn't be less desirable.

Sure, there was always that chick who wrote histrionic slam poetry, made her own clothes with questionable skill and carried around a potted flower and a Bic-scarred, dog-earred copy of “Wuthering Heights”, but most of us couldn’t be bothered. (I mean, after Catherine dies, the book just goes on and on, right? “Jane Eyre” suffers the same malaise, actually. Face it, the Brontës’ game in the back nine is atrocious. But I digress.)

I figured this “Gatsby” sighting may have been inspired by the buzz surrounding Fitzgerald’s short story-cum-epochal Oscar event, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. It turns out that I needn’t have been so surprised. Apparently the “quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed”, according to a new report from the National Endowments of the Arts: “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy”. The US census survey found that over half of American adults have read at least one poem, short story, play or novel in 2008. Bravo. This is clearly an age of mass intelligence.

Educators, artists, parents, politicians and the media all get in a huff about reports like these (even though the bar of progress seems to be set so low a baby could backflip over it). But I can't really see why. After reading non-stop for several decades, I’m firmly convinced that literature has little bearing on intelligence.

When people panic over dropping test scores, like they did over a year ago, they don’t take into account the fact that reading comprehension can be taught as easily as arithmetic. We tend to underestimate how much information the average person processes--how thoughtful people are--even if they fail to quote Fitzgerald’s florid, Keatsian prose in their e-mails. Such choices are less about intelligence than preference. 

My sister hates poetry (despite the fact that I told her it "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought"), my brother-in-law reads spy thrillers exclusively, and my niece would rather take her Miley Cyrus avatar shopping in Paris than read the latest Roald Dahl book I bought for her. Still, I’ve never met a smarter family.    
   
Regardless, meaningful bookish culture is all around us. Films are often novels committed to celluloid, and television viewers readily consume what are essentially one-act plays--poorly written, but plays nonetheless. Any fan of “The Wire” knows that the show stands up to pretty much anything from the scribbler from Stratford-on-Avon. And we’re corresponding and communicating far more than we ever have in the past. John and Abigail Adams can eat their hearts out.

Any educated American has already read enough books. Everything else you read is gravy, and hitching your wagon to the so-called dumbing down of society argument merely lends your voice to the shrill chorus of others throughout history who thought they were smarter than everybody else. This isn’t to say that there aren’t dumb people, but there aren’t as many as you think. The answer isn’t to throw well-aimed copies of “Don Quixote” at them.

~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: Aaron Escobar (via Flickr)