Reading: You're Doing It Wrong

I've been meaning for several days to post about this Times Online article by Rod Liddle, linked to by Bookslut, about highly acclaimed books that don't survive their era, and whose popularity comes to seem, only a few decades after their publication, inexplicable:

The columnist Catherine Bennett chose “the entire Virago imprint”, bemoaning the fact that, for political reasons, she had felt duty-bound to plough through Rosamund Lehmann and the like when there was Philip Roth waiting there, unread. ... Meanwhile, the historian Michael Burleigh suggested all “angry” black novelists (along with Herbert Marcuse and EP Thompson). Here’s a bunch of stuff we were all told we had to read by the political and cultural climate of the day; because it would be good for us and because, way beyond this, it was our responsibility to start patronising writers from minorities because it was only the oppressive white male cultural hegemony that kept them in an ethnic- or gender-defined ghetto.

...

What draws these nominees together? They perhaps captured a certain spirit of the age in which they were written, replete with its fashionable literary conceits, its political leanings (or lack of them), its mannerisms. And this is what characterises almost all of the books that were nominated. They were not so much deemed to be shocking at the time, or too difficult, or experimental – there is no Henry Miller on the list, or Robbe-Grillet, or Sartre. Instead, they seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published.

There's a valid point hidden somewhere deep within this article, in that there are books whose popularity is very much a matter of capturing the zeitgeist, of being at the right place at the right time, and therefore ephemeral and puzzling to anyone looking back at it. Fashion also plays a major role in this process, and like shoulder pads there are some book fashions that people will look back on and cringe. But for the most part the problem here seems to lie less with the books in question and more with the people reading them. Leaving aside the point made by that Alison Bechdel comic strip that everyone has been linking to, that telling someone that a certain book will be good for them is a great way to ensure they won't enjoy or even read it, anyone who chooses books in order to make a statement about themselves, in order to be seen as progressive or even in order to support a political agenda, in short, anyone who makes reading choices based on anything other than their tastes and interests, is being very silly, and deserves exactly what they get.

It's a foolishness that goes entirely unacknowledged by the article--even as the people interviewed within it lament their misguided choices of decades past and the vanity that led to them, Liddle assumes that present-day readers are motivated by the same vanity. I wasn't terrifically impressed with it myself, but I'm fairly certain that most of the people who liked Zadie Smith's White Teeth did so for reasons that went beyond the fact that it was written by "an articulate, photogenic half-black writer." We're often told that the books we read reflect on our personality, but sometimes our reasons for reading, or not reading, them, are just as telling.