How Reading Changed My Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the educated was in full flower: there was a right way to read, and a wrong way, and thewrong way was worse than wrong—it was middlebrow, that code word for those who valued the enjoyable, the riveting, the moving, and the involving as well as the eternal.
    Any reader with common sense was easily lost in this debate, which, among other things, produced critical prose so turgid that anyone who loved the act of reading was easily thrown into confusion, and a blue funk, by it. Besides, most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the
Iliad
set a standard that could not be matched by
What Makes Sammy Run?
or
Exodus
. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated, and that some of them are not addressed by Homer. Promoters and protectors of The Canon, who were really reeling from the democratization of literature and sudden inclusion of all those women and African-Americans, nevertheless liked to couch this argument in terms of an abandonment of taste of any sort, in both reading and publishing.
    As a confirmed Dickensian who had reread
Bleak House
more than I’d read either Dostoyevsky or Stendhal, I was a little puzzled when I arrived at college to discover that there was a kind of covert cloud hanging over the serious discussion of Dickens’s work. It took until my senior year to fully apprehend thatthe great man’s great popular success had made him a little suspect, even a century later, in the minds of some literary critics, who clung to the notion that selling well meant pandering, and talent was in inverse proportion to readership.
    A look at the best-seller lists of the twentieth century reinforces some of this prejudice: there is plenty of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins and those historical novels—
The Silver Chalice, The Robe, The Black Rose
—that were a staple of middle-class home bookshelves. But there is also
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Gatsby
, both
Animal Farm
and
1984, Lolita
, and
The Gulag Archipelago
, none of them what anyone would characterize as beach books.
    So what does it mean, that
Peyton Place
by Grace Metalious sold more copies than
Sanctuary
by William Faulkner? It means that reading has as many functions as the human body, and that not all of them are cerebral. One is mere entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time; another is more important, not intellectual but serious just the same. “She had learned something comforting,” Roald Dahl wrote in
Matilda
of his ever-reading protagonist, “that we are not alone.” And if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lessen human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?
    Discussions about the kind of reading that constitutes a core college curriculum too often ignore those alternate uses of reading, uses that are quite apart from educating. Too much of that discussion concerns itself only with the cerebral and not with the emotional. Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychosocial one. When the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress commissioned two reporters to travel the country and ask a cross section of Americans which books had made the greatest difference in their lives, learning was only a part of what they got back from their respondents. One man spoke of the book that helped him overcome alcoholism, another of a book that helped comfort him after his mother’s death. And more than a few were like one woman, who said of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
, “I read it when I was fourteen, when I didn’t feel like anybody understood how I felt. And here is this book about a fourteen-year-old girl who had the same feelings I did.”
    This