The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (review)

Mikita Brottman is a contrarian in the best sense of the word. Pierre Bayard's recent book Comment Parler des Livres que l'on n'a pas Lus (How to Talk about Books That You Haven't Read), which became a scandalous success both in France, its country of origin, and abroad, promoted the rather remarkable idea that actually reading a book was unnecessary; just skimming the text should give one a good idea of the whole. In The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Brottman, a psychotherapist and chair of humanities at Pacifica Graduate Institute, is up to something much more in tune with that which actually constitutes a book; that one should read, in the main, as an act of self-discovery. A book, Brottman argues, offers the reader a chance to view the world though a different set of eyes, and allows one to inhabit the consciousness of another in an almost symbiotic fashion. Why then is she "against reading"?

The answer, of course, is that she isn't; it's a device to draw the reader's attention to her own text, in much the same way that Bayard's book was also written facetiously (a fact that seems to have escaped many of its reviewers). She admits as much early on in the book, when she cheerfully concedes that her "case against reading" was simply to "lure you in." Brottman is really against reading out of a sense of compulsion, or societal approval, or status envy. For both Brottman and Bayard, books matter intensely; they strip away the surface sheen of contemporary culture and offer us deeper insights into the often superficially presented world around us. They offer us, in short, a new way of looking at the world.

Brottman, the author of numerous other books, including High Theory, Low Culture, wants you to read with "thought, care, and discrimination." This doesn't mean she wants you to embrace the classics alone. Although Brottman is especially suspicious of celebrity, and the glitter of pop culture in general, she embraces pop fiction, comic books, and other aspects of our supposed "throwaway" culture, but not in the way that television programs such as Entertainment Tonight or American Idol contrive to do. Brottman wants you to look behind the surface narratives that you're being fed and discover what truly motivates the author of any given work.

"Despite what your English teacher may have told you," Brottman writes, "if a book doesn't really absorb you, you shouldn't be reading it—at least, not right now." Brottman herself has set a general rule of thumb that she'll give any book sixty pages to see whether or not it's something that grabs her; if not, she'll put it aside, maybe to read later, or perhaps not ever. If you're really not in the mood to read Galsworthy at the moment, she argues, "you can always go back to a book a few years later. After all, it will always be there on your shelf, waiting for you to try again." Brottman herself has done this numerous times: abandoning a text only to return to it later, often discovering an entirely different subtext (or meta-text) waiting for her arrival.

The deciding factor here is really one's own level of interest, or involvement; what Brottman wants to get across here is that the books one "ought" to read are a very personal matter. For example, my own tastes tend toward biography (not autobiography), history, and cultural theory. If I'm not rushing out to buy the latest Ian McEwen novel, is this a moral dereliction on my part? Brottman thinks not. The demand that one read specific books, the embrace of canon (the "great books" argument), the thought that a specific group of books comprise the bulk of thought within any given discipline—these are some of the ideas that Brottman militates against.

She also argues against the "one city, one book" phenomenon of forced consensus sweeping the country of late...