It’s a conspiracy. Every piece of worthless advice I ever hear tells me I must, “Read, read, read”. I can’t even try to listen to music on YouTube without entrepreneurs, life coaches and other snake oil salesmen popping up on shouty adverts, posing alongside other people’s Lamborghinis and Learjets, asking me to guess how many books the world’s top fifty “Super Achievers” read each year. (It’s fifty-two, conveniently.) “The more you learn, the more you earn!” these morons confidently claim. As if reading books makes you a billionaire.
I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers — why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.
Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write — if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste, for which I rightly delve — in my lasting endeavours — my contention, if you will, against the ordained — in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?
Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It’s ridiculous, but if you read — or, better still, opine pretentiously about what you read — the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.
Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.
April 21, 2026
QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”
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The worst torment I had in college was a class with the innocuous title “Modern Novel.” The professor was a thoroughly unpleasant, supercillious, fat, ugly dyke who generally despised men, but worshipped James Joyce. We were dragged, kicking and screaming through Ulysses, The Rainbow,(DH Lawrence), The Ambassadors (Henry James) and a couple of other stinkers I can’t recall. Majoring in English destroyed any love of reading I ever had. It took me a good ten years before I picked up a book for entertainment again. The author who rescued me was Anne McCaffery with her Dragonriders of Pern series.
JWM
Comment by jwm — April 21, 2026 @ 10:00
As a voracious young reader, I found many of the books we had to study in school to be … not to my taste. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed studying Shakespeare, unlike most of my classmates, but my inability to memorize lines meant I had to avoid opportunities to perform. I’ve seen many factoids about English Lit students who avoid reading books after graduation, and I find them believable. Few things can destroy your enjoyment of a book more thoroughly than dissecting it for marks.
Comment by Nicholas — April 21, 2026 @ 15:43
Few things can destroy your enjoyment of a book more thoroughly than dissecting it for marks.
Funny, but that was my description of the experience. I called it “dissecting the hummingbird.” The little bird is a delightful creature, but once you’ve cut it up, you may get some understnding, but you don’t have much of a hummingbird left.
BTW, I saw your comment on the David Warren post. Lucky man. I would love to have been able to listen in.
JWM
Comment by jwm — April 21, 2026 @ 16:46