Why we read

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Publish and Perish by Sally Wright, which I've been sort of keeping in mind for future reading (why is it somehow humiliating to admit I voluntarily read something published by my former employer?) for a long time. It was actually a fine read. It won an Edgar Award for mystery writing, a respectable achievement. The characters are interesting, and it has a fun academic setting.

There is a good moral lesson to the story, not as heavyhanded as I think its publisher would have liked it to be, but true enough to traditional mystery style. The stories of Sherlock Holmes had morals. Agatha Christie wrote about good and evil. Mysteries necessarily deal with good and evil, right and wrong, but we seem to want to draw moral lessons even from literary fiction. I remember doing that in high school English, not just at my Christian college. It made me think a lot about why we read. In fact, I've been thinking about that since then. It seems to me that there are countless reasons.

Vladimir Nabokov had strong opinions on the matter. He told his students at Wellesley and Cornell, "I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the joys and difficulties of creation."

I think I have read (and still do) for infantile and adolescent purposes. I am quicker to dislike generalizations, mainly because I fail to grasp them. John Updike's wife, Martha (whom Professor Nabokov apparently recognized during her college days as "a genius") remembered this quote from Nabokov's class: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." I like that quote a lot.

Why do we read? I have tons of thoughts on the subject. I'm not sure there's something wrong with caring about the characters. Must we be so detached?

On the other hand, surely we can't apply the same rules of love to fictional people that we do to real people...

My mind has been going in circles for weeks about why we read and what it means to read well. I've finally concluded it really isn't worth thinking about too much.

What do you all think?