Bethany BrookshireUncategorizedComments are off for this post

I used to think I wasn’t “well-read.”

I love to read. I always have. The instant I could read to myself I was off with any book that was left lying around. My parents gave me loads of books and were always taking me to the local library. My most potent memories of my adolescence are of weekends spent on my bed with the old patchwork quilt, cat on one side and bag of candy on the other, devouring novel after novel ’til my eyes were sore.

But for all that, I thought I wasn’t well-read. Because I didn’t read the “right” things. My first love was fantasy and science fiction, followed by history and science. I gulped National Geographic and chugged Douglas Adams and Mary Stewart. But somehow, I always felt like my reading was wrong. That I was reading the beginner section. I would read Lord of the Rings and gush about how great it was. Then someone would say well, I wasn’t well-read until I had read The Silmarillion, and I would deflate. I would tell someone how I loved Muir, and be told I wasn’t REALLY well-read until I read Gould, or better yet, Darwin.

Every time I said I’d read something to my peers, someone would say “well that’s all well and good, but you’re not REALLY into X until you’ve read Y.” I came away from each of these conversations feeling like a fraud.

I stopped telling people what I was reading. I felt ashamed of the light fantasy novels, the “popular” histories. I was sure people would mock me. Sometimes they did.

I decided I’d had enough. So help me, I was going to be well-read. I would be the one looking down my nose and telling people that really, they didn’t know jack until they’d read Ovid.

I started making lists. I looked up the “greatest” novel lists online, ticked off the ones I had under my belt, and tackled the rest. The Silmarillion. The Bible, the Koran. The Kama Sutra. The complete works of Shakespeare. Livy. Darwin. Kierkegaard, Boccaccio, Dostoyevsky. Sartre. The I Ching.

I tried this for years. Forcing my way through the “greats” of literature and history and science, science fiction and fantasy and even romance (Twilight has nothing on Pamela for sheer nauseating Stockholm syndrome ick).

And then, about two years ago, I stopped. I was midway through Great Expectations. I remember suddenly being overwhelmed with rage.

What was I doing all this FOR?

I wasn’t any wiser. While I did discover some wonders (Tolstoy!), the majority of my reading was an exercise in willpower. Gritting my teeth through one more page of Dostoyevsky or Chronicles II.

I began to wonder, who made these book lists? Who were the people telling me that I needed to read X, Y or Z?

And I realized the people telling me to read specific lists of books were people interested in upholding the status quo. People who were invested in the current lists of “What Makes you look Smart,” because they had already ticked off those lists. Most of these people were not smarter than I was. Most were not better educated. Most were not even interesting people.

They were merely people interested in telling me how to be more like them. People who wanted to tell me unless I did what they did, read what they read, I was deficient somehow. That in some way, my gaps in this huge list of books made me lacking, less able to be successful, less understanding of human nature or of culture.

I had spent most of my life trying to fit in with those people, trying to be knowledgeable about human nature and able to see deep perspectives of how this or that battle or agreement echoed through the ages. But as I read the books and fired quotations back at them, I began to realize something.

I didn’t like those people very much. And I didn’t want to be like them.

I wanted to read things that made me happy. That I would look up from, turn to the nearest person with sparks in my eyes, and say “did you know that…”

I wanted to read things because I wanted to know about them. Not because they were on some arbitrary list that a bunch of people deemed necessary.

Since then, I still force my way through some things. Books for review, sometimes. Novels I want to read so that I can rant about them on a professional level. But I no longer want to be well-read.

So you might be able to understand my frustration when I read Steven Weinberg’s list of books he recommends for non-scientists to read. First, it’s mostly physics and astronomy and written mostly by white men who are dead (as others have noted with eloquence). But secondly, glancing at that list filled me with that familiar feeling of shame. I’ve only read three of the books on it. I enjoyed none of them.

I will say he’s not yelling at you to read them. But an authority like Weinberg offering up the Greate Liste of books…I felt that same flush of failure. I must be a bad science-lover if I don’t enjoy these books. How DARE I say I love science and admit I yawned and forced my way through Darwin with drooping eyes.

And I got mad.

 

Note the mistake there! It’s by Dava Sobel!

Let’s be ourselves. Let’s be curious and find books to satisfy our curiosity. Let’s read for our classes so we can discuss, and learn more about each other and the world. Let’s read novels that give us joy, whether they are or aren’t Martin, Rothfuss or Simmons. Let’s take each others’ recommendations because we think we’ll like them or be interested. Let’s read because it’s fun, because it gives us new worlds and because sometimes, yes, it does give us new understanding and perspective.

But let’s leave the lists of “shoulds” behind.

Bethany Brookshire

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