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If you're happy with the amount of reading that you do then this advice isn't for you. I'm addressing specifically the kind of person that feels like they should read more, but can never seem to get around to it-- because, in my opinion, their problem is that they need to wrap bitter pills in provolone. Before reading the great books, it is necessary to read the good ones-- to create a habit of reading so that your mental muscles don't end up sore three paragraphs into a difficult book.
The point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty of good books that aren't difficult (surely that should be clear from the examples I gave). It's not clear to me that reading slop helps read good books any more than watching tiktoks helps you enjoy movies.
"Not difficult" isn't sufficient. We need fun books to get boys and men to love reading-- and literary fiction is often written in direct subversion of what it takes for a story to be "fun." Reading about depressed writers getting cuckolded by their mistresses might be interesting if you've read a thousand stories about Buffguy McStrongJaw beating up the Unquestionable Evil Species of Alient Bug Invaders, but first you do have to read those thousand stories.
--Also, this went unaddressed in my earlier post, but twenty thousand years of human literary history doesn't matter one whit when someone feels the need for currency, or in particular a story told using the language and aesthetic of their lived experience. Yes, every theme is ultimately universal. Yes, we haven't come up with anything truly novel since Grug came up with the idea of telling his kids that if talked back to him the terrible LionSnakeFalcon would drop out of the sky and murderize them into little bits. But boy is it a lot less cognitive effort to read a story about a farmboy fighting a dragon instead of a caveman fighting a LionSnakeFalcon, and that leaves a lot of extra cognitive effort to spare for contemplating the deep truths common between both stories.
You have an incredible talent for talking to someone without responding to them.
The essence of my post is that we're not publishing enough books that are interesting to men. The essence of your first reply was that we already had published plenty of interesting books. The essence of my first reply was that those might have been interesting to you, but that you're atypical and that therefore your reply fails to contradict my thesis. I understood the essence of your second reply as being to claim that old books aren't necessarily unreadable, and replied that "not unreadable" != "interesting". If that was noncentral, and the essence of your reply was actually something along the lines of, "there's no point making books more interesting when that doesn't necessarily make them more useful", then I encourage you to go back and read my article without skimming because I use most of it to explain why the present state of the publishing industry disadvantages books that provide any sort of value to men, and therefore why, if you care about "good books", it is necessary to first convince publishers that men like to read by reading and paying for any books, so that they see the need to select and cultivate good books. If that was noncentral, and your central point was that you men probably won't start reading good books just because they're reading bad books, then I would claim that my central point is that they definitely won't start reading good books if they're not reading any books... and as per my earlier points, that in a tautological but also very true sense men won't start reading books if there are no books they're interested in reading.
(if the central point of your 2nd-to-last reply was something totally different than my three proposals, feel free to clarify that now.)
It clearly wasn't, which should have been obvious given the examples I gave of interesting books. It's quite simply wrong that there are no interesting books published before current year plus ten.
As written, your response implies that you disagree with the position that "old books aren't necessarily unreadable"-- meaning, you think old books are unreadable. Responding against what you actually mean to say-- that "old books are interesting"-- I would counter, "nuh uh." Well not actually, but c'mon-- are you totally incapable of seeing how a person might enjoy recency and currency in the media they consume, and thereby prefer to look for classes of media where they can find it?
No, my response implies that the essence of my second comment was not that old books merely readable.
Sure, in the same way that I am capable of seeing why a person enjoys reading books written in the first person rather than the third, or why a black woman enjoys reading books about black women. I simply consider this a blinkered perspective and if I never read, for example, Hemingway because I think bullfights are barbarous and reprehensible, it would be ridiculous.
I do not believe that you can learn to expand what you like by reading more of what you already like.
Why are you making a moral argument instead of addressing my mechanical one? I'm not saying that reading old books is bad or worthless, I'm saying it's going to be much harder to get kids and men to read good books without first instilling a love of reading, which is very likely to take bad-but-entertaining books. I absolutely loved Eragon as a kindergartener. Was it the absolute peak of literary achievement? Absolutely not. But it hadn't been for books like Eragon, I never would have been interested in reading books like the Dragonriders of Pern, or from there Foundation and I, Robot, or from there Anathem and Void*Star.
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