READING FOR PLEASURE

READING FOR PLEASURE

L.A.G.Strong

To my mind the only sensible reason for reading anything is because we enjoy it or hope to enjoy it. Of course, pleasure covers a whole variety of feelings and shades of feeling. But it is my strangest belief about reading that one should read only what one likes, and because one likes it. I am taking, of course, of our private reading. When we are studying special subjects. Or working for examinations, we obviously have to read in other circumstances.
It may seem odd to insist that one should only read because one like it; but people read for such a queer variety of reasons. There are people who read a book not because they enjoy the book, but because they want to be able to say that they have read it. They want to be in the swim. Ten to one when they read a book for those reasons, they only skim through it, because all they really want do is to be able to talk as if they had read it. There are people who set themselves down to read a book because they think it will do them good. They make a duty of it a kind of penance; sometimes they go so far as to set themselves too many pages at a time. If it is some kind if technical book which they are reading in order to improve their knowledge well and good. But if it is a novel or a poem, or any part of what we call “English Literature” then the person who is reading it in this way is wasting his or her time.
You can not take a good book as if it were medicine. It is rude to the book and very silly from our own point of view, by approaching it in that way, you make sure of losing anything it might have to give you. You only begin to get good from a book when your sprit and the book’s sprit come together. A book is like a living person. You must meet it, is as a friend and actively like it, if any good is to pass between you.
A reason why people at school read books is to please their teacher. The teacher has said that this, that, or the other is a good book and that it is a sign of good taste to enjoy it. So a number of boys and girls, anxious to please their teacher get the book and read it. Two or three of them may genuinely like it, for its own sake, and be grateful to the teacher for putting it in their way. But many will not honestly like it, or will persuade themselves that they like it. And that does a great deal of harm. The people who cannot like the book run the risk of two things happening to them: either they are put off the idea of the book–let us suppose the book was David Copperfield–either they are put off the idea of classical novels, or they take a dislike to Dickens and decide firmly never to waste their time on anything of the sort again: or they get guilty conscience about the whole thing. They feel that they do not like what they ought to like and that therefore there is something wrong with them.
They are quite mistaken of course. There is nothing wrong with them. The mistake has all been in the teacher’s side. What has happened is that they have been shoved up against a book before they were ready for it. It is like giving a young child food only suitable for an adult. Result–indigestion violent stomach-ache and a rooted dislike of that article of food for evermore.
Still, I am not sure that even that is not better than the fate of the people who manage to persuade themselves that they enjoy the book. What happens to them is truly terrible. Once they get into the way of this kind of thing, they do not know what they think. Their real feelings, their real tastes are all Stoppard down under this sense of duty, which tells them that whatever Mr. Thingamabob or Miss Whatshername recommends to them is good, and that therefore, of course, they like it.
That has happened to a very great umber of men and women of my acquaintance. They do not know what is good; they know only what is supposed to be good. They do not know what they like: they know only what they ought to like. If you show them a book or a picture, if you play them a piece of music or put a record on the gramophone, you see them desperately trying to recognize it if it is music and looking quickly to see the author’s name if it is a book, because, until they have seen the label, they do not know whether they ought to like it or not. Give them something without a label and they are lost. They have long been without any power they ever had to judge a thing on its merits.
Now for a question on which people quarrel violently. Does it do any good to advice people to read certain books? What is the effect produced when a teacher or anybody else says. You ought to read Vanity Fair or the Old Curiosity shop”. Or whatever the name of the book may be? Does it make the average person want to read the book of does it put him or her right off?
The answer will depend in the first place, upon the person who give the advice and in the second place upon the person to whom the advice is given. It is not a subject upon which one can lay down the law. One way or another; and I cannot pretend to do more than give my own beliefs.
I do however; remember very clearly my own experiences and my own reading from a very early age. You may, or may not, be like me –but I confess that in the matter of reading at any rate, I have always been a bit contrary, I have always preferred to go my own way.
When I was a very small boy my ankles were weak and, I was slow in learning to walk. As a result, I learned to read sooner than most children. My grandmother used to read a great deal to me- school stories, all very virtuous were the hero and bad lad was terribly bad, and come to an edifying end in the last chapter but one. From these stories we came to Eric or Little by Little and St. Winfred’s which were similar in moral tone but much better written.

As I grew older, and chose my own reading. I rushed to comic papers and penny bloods. The youth of today can have no idea what a wonderful period that was for penny –bloods …….. It was the golden age of thrillers, and I read them all, I have got some still in my bookcase. Only a few, but I treasure them.
Some good people, when they saw me reading these in the train on my way to school, would shake their heads, and say they wondered my presents allow it. But my father a man of great sympathy and good sense took a wise and tolerant view. He argued that, if I had any sense, I would grow out of this type of reading; if I had not, it did not matter what I read, as I should be a fool anyway.
Beside he argued if he forbade me to read these things I should want to read them all the more, because they would have the charm of being illegal. He was proved right on that point. Once my mother and grandmother, horrified by a particularly lurid picture on the cover of one of my Claude Duval books, told me to tear it up. I could not board in my grandmother’s summer house, where it stayed for two or three years, and received many secret and guilty reading it would never have had otherwise; for my father was right in the other point too, I had grown out of my taste for highwaymen and gone o to other books. But this forbidden book lasted linger than all the rest, because it was forbidden.
I have never regretted my penny- dreadful period. Indeed, I owed my jock Sheppard library the discovery of one good writer at least. That was Harrison Ainsworth, whose novel about Jack Sheppard I found in my boarding school library during my first few days there and jumped to it with a homesick thrill. I liked it, and proceeded to read all the other Harrison Ainsworth I could fond.
Beside penny –bloods, I read other stories of adventure; and as I grew a little older, I begin to realize that they were better written than the penny –bloods. They were not less exciting; they were more exiting. Which was read to us at school, was better value than Claude Duval? Sherlock homes were batter value than Sexton Black, more exiting; satisfying. I could believe than in him better; the people he met were more like real people. Then my favorite magazine, The Captain, begin to print school stories by a new writer called P.G Warehouse; and they were better than the adventure of Tom Merry of Harry Wharton and Co. they were funnier and they were more like real school, then when I was getting better from measles, my father read me some of W.W Jacobs’s stories. I laughed till I nearly fell out of bed and from that day always read everything by Jacobs that I could fond.
One day, at school, an older boy said to me, if you like Jacobs, you’d like dickens. I was very suspicious but I tried one at last; and then I read ten of Dickens all in a row.
At my first school, we read Shakespeare plays with a teacher who made them very interesting indeed. The first time I came to London on a visit with my father in 1907, I gave him on peace till he took me to see Sir Herbert. Tree in the Merchant of Venice, the play we were reading at the time, later, when the Benson company came to Plymouth, I went every night for a whole week, reading the play by day and seeing it in the evening. After that I got hold of all the plays I could lay my hands on by the other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. I read all sorts and conditions of things as I do today for one reason and one reason only: because I like them.
There were poems that I liked too and when I say liked I mean liked. That same English teacher I mentioned just now used to read poetry to us and tactful about it she did not ram things down our throats or insist that we must like what she liked. She encouraged us to discuss the poems and say if we liked them or disliked them.
I was young enough not to have any prejudice against poetry. Very few people have, if on one puts them off it either by forcing it on them, or making them learn it by heart before they want to, or if they do not hear older boys and girls laughing and suggesting that it is sissy or highbrow to enjoy poetry. I do not see why anyone should read poetry who does not like it. Thank Heaven; we are none of us under any obligation to read anything. But a good many people will not give poetry a fair try, or let themselves enjoy it. I took it as it came, when I was a boy and I have had pleasure and good from it ever since…..
The books and plays and poem to which I was introduce by this schoolmistress I like in exactly the same way as I used ton like the penny bloods; that is to say. I enjoy reading them or heading them read, because they interested me. I read them for pleasure. At that school owing to the sense and understanding of this schoolmistress there was no nonsense about its being priggish or sissy to like good books. We only knew a book was good because we liked it. We did not know, for instance, that David Copperfield was an English classic. We only knew that one day the schoolmistress brought a copy into class, and made us start reading aloud about David going to church on Sunday morning, and about his visit to the upturned boat at Yarmouth, in which the peggottys lived. These things delighted us and made us laugh and so we thought that David Copperfield was a good book and enjoyed it, in just the same way as we were enjoying P. G. Wodehouse’s school stories in the Captain.
And that beyond all possible doubt in the way to go at your reading; to enjoy it, and to read because you enjoy it, and not to read anything that bores you, because that makes it even less likely that you will enjoy it later on, it is first of all, a question of age, of the stage in one’s growing up which one has reached. My friends and I used to read the Dick Turpins and Jack Sheppard because we were in a stage when violent and bloodthirsty adventures were all we wanted. Later on, when we had grown out of that stage, these stories on longer satisfied us. We had growing out of them, just as we had earlier grown out of stories about teddy bears and fairies and Jemima Puddliduck. Nearly everyone has a touch of blood thirstiness in his make up witness the thrillers and detective stories that are written for grown up readers. But they will not do for our only article of diet unless for one reason or another, our development has stopped and we remain at the mental age when such things are all we want. Normally, no one wants to feed all the time off one dish only. It gets monotonous and we want a change.
But – and this is where the opposite school of thought comes in. the formidable number of teachers and others who hold a different opinion but. Say these teacher the hard fact is that as you have admitted a moment ago, quite a number of people never grow out of the penny dreadful, gangster thriller stage of reading and cannot read anything else
You are assuming one of these people said to me, you are assuming that everyone has naturally good taste and will pass on from on this shot of reading to other sorts as long as he’s not interferes with. It isn’t true because a great many won’t ever find out that there are other short of reading. They know that they like, and they stick to it, unless at some stage in their growth preferable early, someone takes them by the scruff of the neck and compels them to read good books, there they stop.
Well it all depends on the view you take of teaching and what it should be. Personally, I dislike from my soul this assumption in Cultural matters that we have a right to take anyone by the scruff of the neck and compel him to read anything he doesn’t want to, I believe and maintain that no sane person reads except for pleasure. If people wish to stay at an elementary stage in reading, let them. I do not see why anybody should not read what he likes, nor why anybody should read what he does not like. I believe that all a teacher may legitimately do is to try to show him how much more pleasure he might get from a wider range of reading.
The real point about reading good books, well written books, and true books is that, once you are able to enjoy them, they give you more pleasure than the books that are less good, less well written and less true. The only reason I ever read a book in my spare time that is to say is because I expect pleasure from it. If I like it, I go on, if it bores me, I stop. No one can bully me into liking what I do not like and I should never try to bully anyone else into liking what he did not like.