I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka
I share this preference for books that ‘wound and stab’, books that are ‘axes for the frozen sea’. What follows then, is obviously a personal predilection, not an objective analysis. Nor is it to say that other kinds of books are worthless. Many books – say, Zero to One – or authors – like Paul Graham are interesting without necessarily ‘wounding’ you.
And in direct contrast to grieving you deeply, you might instead have an author who cheers you, who offers you a temporary and illusory haven from reality. The epitome of this I think is P.G Wodehouse, who aptly described his writing as ‘making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether’. The word that describes Wodehouse’s writing is sublime, the most beautiful use of the English language I know of. Having grown up on Wodehouse, I can attest to the fact that he remains hilarious after nearly a century, and a Wodehouse book is a great way to uplift your mood. Yet, notwithstanding all this, I don’t count even Wodehouse among the most interesting writers, not because he doesn’t deserve to be there, but because the kind of books he writes don’t belong there.
But why should I care for a book that ‘grieves me deeply’? Why should a book that ‘affects you like a disaster’ be worth reading? One reason is that you like it, that it’s interesting. The other is that you don’t like it, but it’s good for you, something you do grudgingly as a necessity, like a junk loving kid consuming broccoli. There might be other motives – like vanity and social proof – these often being the books someone with such tendencies would want to drop in conversation to appear wise. But assuming, I think reasonably, that no one cares about the books I’ve read (or claimed to have read), I can ignore this.
Are these really the books that you bring yourself to read because they’re supposedly good for you? I think not. That category is dominated by so-called motivational or self-help ones. The sort of books Kafka talks about aren’t the ones that are good for you, at least not in a conventional sense. They don’t, usually, especially not directly, make you richer, more productive, more attractive, more grateful, more mindful, or even happier – if anything, they might make you unhappier.
Perhaps, the way a book that ‘grieves you deeply’ might improve you, if it does at all, is by what Jensen Huang calls building character. This is what I imagine Kafka describes as the axe for the frozen sea in a person. That takes you to an even more interesting question, of whether you need to suffer to build character – a question interesting enough that I had to pause this essay to write one on it. And then you have the subsequent question of whether suffering one degree removed, that is reading and suffering vicariously, builds character. Nevertheless, regardless of the answers to these questions, I don’t think these are the books whose value lies in ‘usefulness’, of being a tedious means to plod through to a sought after goal. Were that so, you could expect a vastly larger market for them, and a very different one, full of the usual gimmicks and hacks to reach the end by bypassing the means.
If it’s not necessarily good for you, at least good in the conventional sense, then is it interesting? Why should a book that wounds and stabs, that affects you like a disaster, be interesting? This is a question that I’ve tried, although not very successfully, to think about. Simple responses abound. The first being that such a book isn’t actually interesting; it’s merely personal bias at work. The next, that words like interesting are entirely relative; one man’s interesting is another’s boring. Sidestepping such superficial explanations, I think there’s another reason.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That is the Anna Karenina principle, that there are a number of ways for something to go wrong, but only one way – that is, avoiding all these potential pitfalls – to go right. A happy family, or happy person, is usually, simply happy – not happy about something in particular, but about nothing in particular, that is to say, everything in general. An unhappy person – and here I exclude perpetual whiners, who are boringly unhappy about everything in general – is typically unhappy about some specific thing, or things. A happy book is often happy in a typical, standardized way, usually a variant of a generalizable outline such as The Hero’s Journey. In P.G Wodehouse, for instance, the same themes recur almost formulaically. An unhappy book, on the other hand, is unhappy in its own way, and for that reason, often an interesting one.
What makes the unhappy book interesting is often (but presumably, not necessarily) the author’s unhappiness, that seeps into and brings forth his work.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Franz Kafka
This is not Kafka saying, as I once imagined, that he loves being unhappy because he has the true feeling of himself then, but simply that it is only when he is unhappy that he is able to contemplate, to know himself. A statement of fact, not an expression of preference. Happiness is perhaps not conducive for introspection, for any deep analysis, for the happy one has other things to divert him. The happy creature rarely pauses to ponder his happiness. The unhappy one, or the one with a melancholic disposition, though, ponders, amongst other things, his unhappiness.
The writers I would call ‘interesting’ – the names that come to my mind being Kafka, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace – do not exactly exude happiness in their writing. Even when not explicit, there is lurking a sense of melancholy, or in Orwell’s case, a strong feeling about something. Which is not to say, of course, that they need have been unhappy, only that their writing gives indications of unhappiness. I would imagine, in fact, that to all external appearances at least, they were often the opposite of unhappy, because blatant unhappiness is usually uninteresting, and that they are not.
So all people are boring. The word itself indicates the possibility of a subdivision. ‘Boring’ can describe a person who bores others as well as one who bores himself. Those who bore others are the plebeians, the mass, the endless train of humanity in general. Those who bore themselves are the elect, the nobility; and how strange it is that those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all… The other class of men, the select, are those who bore themselves. As remarked above, generally they amuse others, outwardly occasionally the mob, in a deeper sense their fellow initiates. The more profoundly they bore themselves, the more powerful a means of diversion they offer others…
Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
As an aside – if true, I wonder if unhappiness is a price worth paying paying for ‘interestingness’ – interesting to oneself, I should specify, for as Kierkegaard amusingly points out, bores are subdivided into two categories. If you could think or write well, but only at the cost of being unhappy, would you take it?
The unhappy bore achieves unhappiness without coming close to being interesting, and the happily interesting one attains the interesting without paying the price in unhappiness; the tradeoff therefore, is not for these two. The question is whether the unhappily interesting one and the happy bore would exchange places, the former renounce the interesting for the latter’s happiness and vice versa. I doubt you’d get an objective answer to what is clearly a subjective preference; nevertheless, it’s what I’d consider a Sophie’s choice.
Even if a book is interesting, though, would you want to read it if it ‘affects you like a disaster’? It goes without saying that not everyone would – there’s nothing that every person would want to read, nothing like motherhood and apple pie that I can say every single person will like. Obviously, too, the books that ‘wound and stab’ don’t make life easy, so it’s not for ‘help’, nor is it for frolic and cheer, which rules out both productivity and light amusement as motives. Yet, there is a pleasure, not necessarily masochistic, in a work that affects you like a disaster. And an impact, not necessarily ‘helpful’ or productive – even, perhaps, the opposite – in a work that wounds. It’s an impact akin to an axe breaking through ice in a frozen sea – the water freezes again, but it’s not the same, for better or worse. Something that wounds and grieves and makes life difficult can, I think, be pleasurable.
I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought … “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. . . . Wherever you look about you . . . you see the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” . . . Suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must . . . undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely. . . . I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Soren Kierkegaard
An ending disclaimer, though – what you read, if anything, depends on why you read. In that sense, any suggestion of ‘one ought’ to read X books faces the inevitable is-ought fallacy; what one ‘ought’ to do depends too much on what one wants for anyone to prescribe something for everyone. Failing that, you end up with literary elitism, looking down on those who read Y instead of X. Notwithstanding that, there are reasons to pick the books that affect you like a disaster.