sometimes books are hard to read

and that is fun

While conducting my little check-ins on “what Taylor Swift stans are up to” on X¹ I ended up noticing a very stupid piece of book drama. The short of it is that somebody posted about how they were reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved and how it was hard. A lot of people weighed in to say if you think Beloved is a difficult book that’s a sign of declining literacy. As far as the conversation about Morrison’s work goes, I thought Namwali Serpell’s² posts on the subject said what needed to be said. I don’t have a lot to add; I read Beloved when I was a teenager so I can’t really comment on its difficulty or complexity except to say that a lot of it went over my head at the time.³

There is certainly a… comment dit-on… eau de racisme…? about people acting as if it’s completely and utterly ridiculous to say Toni Morrison wrote books that are challenging to read. But that’s not what I’m here to complain about. I am here to complain about different problem, which I would put like so: some books are challenging to read. That is not a flaw. It is often on purpose. Some books are both formally complicated and verbally dense in ways that require reading and rereading before you feel like you are competent to discuss what they contain. They are written that way. A person who openly struggles with Beloved gets this fact, because… why else would they even be trying to read it?

There’s a certain kind of readerly person who really hates admitting that some books are hard to read. If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. This defensiveness calcified over time into a feeling that reading modernist literature or watching art films can’t be difficult—rather than what I think is the more productive position of “I enjoy doing difficult things.”

This is ancient news in internet terms, but back when Pete Buttigieg was running for president he said his favorite book was Ulysses and this statement was, impossibly, an entire discourse cycle, to the point where declarations were being made that nobody would ever read Ulysses for fun. Of course, that’s a stupid claim. People do lots of things for fun, many of which I find harder to imagine than reading James Joyce. (There are people out there who run marathons.) You can be having a blast inching through Ulysses at ten pages a sitting, which might not be “fun” in the sense of “easy” but is “pleasurable” in the sense of “you enjoy doing this.” Saying your favorite book is Ulysses might come off as “try hard” but at BDM Industries we are fans of try hards.

What I would not say, though, is “Ulysses is not hard to read.” Some parts of Ulysses are not hard to read once you catch the rhythm and some parts remain hard to read even once you know what’s going on. And that’s fine. Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.

Now ideally, this is true of any book—that is, that you will continue to encounter something new whenever you read it again. Books that are not “difficult” in the sense that some parts of Ulysses are “difficult” will also change on rereading. There was a lot of hay made recently about students not being able to follow the opening of Bleak House, and Dickens is certainly the kind of writer where what is difficult (thanks to unfamiliarity) should eventually become natural for somebody who keeps reading.⁴

However, in my experience, there is a specific kind of first reading experience where you are in deep over your head and you know it and all you can do is move forward. And a contention I make here from time to time is that people enjoy that feeling, actually. People like stuff that is difficult. They like to be challenged. But there’s a kind of gap, between whatever you’re doing right now and something a little harder, and right now the route to satisfying and worthwhile challenges is unclear. And the response to somebody trying to find a way across the gap between where they are and where they want to be cannot be: haha, you’re so stupid.

I guess my point here is that somebody who logs on to say they’re struggling with Toni Morrison is billion times more valuable, to me, as a reader than somebody who is more sophisticated but cannot do the work of understanding the source of their own pleasure, instead pretending that reading Beloved is just another thing one can do that is no more demanding than any other thing. If you don’t want to be stuck having 101-level conversations about texts with newcomers, that’s your prerogative. (Neither do I.) What I see online, however, are conversations that are not even 101-level; they’re just talking shit in the hallway.

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The “Toni Morrison isn’t difficult” thing has been irking me, in addition to all the other reasons, because I reread Joanna Russ’s The Female Man over the weekend. The Female Man is an enormously fun book. It’s also bewildering to read at first, with the point of view represented by “I” shifting among multiple characters. The first time I read the book I was completely enthralled and also completely lost. I never knew what was going on.

This confusion is on purpose. Russ’s signature prose style “move” is to open her stories in a quick-moving and disorienting way, which means that reading any work of hers the first time is a process of getting your sea legs. We Who Are About To…., which is usually the book I recommend to people as a place to start with her, opens like this:

About to die. And so on.

We’re all going to die.

The Sahara is your back yard, so’s the Pacific trench; die there and you won’t be lonely. On Earth you are never more than 13,000 miles from anywhere, which as the man said is a tough commute, but the rays of light from the scene of your death take little more than a tenth of a second to go … anywhere!

We’re nowhere.

We’ll die alone.

You don’t know what’s going on here and you won’t know for a minute. Once you think you do know what’s going on, Russ will kick your legs out from under you. She will do this over and over. It is a deliberate technique. She is also, as I think that excerpt makes plain, extremely fun to read. She treats you like you’re smart. She thinks you can rise to the occasion. Many of Russ’s books involve a moment a protagonist character crosses a clear line. That provokes you ask whether or not what just happened is really necessary, an attitude she mocks in The Female Man but also takes seriously. You need to argue with her books. They’re not passive experiences.

People can be bowled over and moved by things they don’t even slightly understand. If you say that something needs to be worked at to be truly appreciated, you are not denying that. Russ is a fun author who I read for fun and she is also a difficult author. There’s no need to choose.

We Who Are About To… in Galaxy Magazine (January 1976)

Anyway I get, what. One of these posts where I complain like this a year? This is this year’s. Everybody had better behave for the rest of the year.

1. Not much except for playing a game about situations Taylor’s songs apply to.

2. For reasons I cannot explain this went out as “Namwali Serpeli”… well I can explain (I actually am stupid).

3. I do, however, remember this Oprah line:

You know, I didn’t really get to speak to Toni Morrison that day. I was just too bedazzled. But I had already previously called her up to ask about acquiring the film rights to Beloved. After I finished reading it, I found her number, called her, and when I asked her, “Is it true that sometimes people have to read over your work in order to understand it, to get the full meaning?” and she bluntly replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.” I was embarrassed. But that statement actually gave me the confidence, years later, when I formed the book club on the Oprah show, to choose her work. I chose more of her books than any other author over the years —Song of Solomon first, Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise. And if any one of our viewers ever complained that it was hard going or challenging reading Toni Morrison, I simply said, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

4. On the other hand, I remember when I read the opening of Bleak House for the first time. I wasn’t confused but I was certainly astounded.