Book Snobs

In skimming blog posts at my bloglines account, this line from a Blog of a Bookslut post jumped out at me: People feel anxious about the demise of reading, but those anxieties are groundless, and perhaps rooted in snobbery.

Oooh, snobbery! As you know from my posts here and here, oh, found another one, I love reading. And, as with anything a person loves, hopes other people love it; and wants other people to love it; and loves talking about books and discussing them and arguing about them.

But I've never been a fan of the concept that what one reads, or doesn't read, makes one a better person than someone else. So I had to follow that link, and found a delightful interview with Mikita Brottman at Nerve.com about her book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading.

Despite the "against reading" subtitle, here is what Brottman thinks: Despite her own book's title, she doesn't believe people should stop reading. In fact, she says we're reading more than ever — websites, email, text messages, blogs — and that this type of reading is more valuable than an unhappy slog through The Iliad.

Brottman on the concept that reading for pleasure is bad, while reading a book you don't like is good: And whether we're getting too much pleasure out of reading, as though if we really enjoy it then we're not learning from it, that it should be a struggle, it should be difficult, and we should just plow on with something even if we're not particularly engaged in it.

I'm very intrigued by the book, and hope my local library has it.