Unexpected effects of good reading

Some books don’t seem quite as good as we remember.

Our consultants, to no one’s surprise, were all avid Science Fiction fans in their youths.  Some teachers attempted to get them to read a balance of genres, with very limited success.  They finally gave up.  It seemed better to have us reading anything, rather than watching TV or doing less constructive things.  Of course each of us found favorite authors and favorite books.  Many were library books, and even those that they owned have mostly disappeared over the years as moving around took its toll, so we haven’t had much of our old collection at hand for a long time.

A few years ago, our astronomer found one of his long-ago favorite authors, an old paperback in a used book store.  He hadn’t read that particular story before and hurried home to get started.  To his surprise, it wasn’t very good.  Cardboard characters, lame plot, the writing itself was a bit stilted; he found he couldn’t finish it.  What happened?

Not a breakdown on the part of the author.  In between, our astronomer had been introduced to good literature.  Partly in school, partly on his own (based on what he’d been required to read in school), he’d read many of the masterworks of English writing.  His standards had been raised, and the old author just didn’t measure up.  That’s the danger of getting into the good stuff: your tolerance for anything else becomes limited.  The same thing happened to all of our consultants, particularly our writer.

So are we all condemned to reread only a very limited selection of masterworks for the rest of our lives?  Well, no.  The number of very good books is vast, so there is no danger of actually running out of them.  That’s even if one doesn’t really care for dense nineteenth-century novels, or the conventions and assumptions of the eighteenth century, or any other sub-genre.

Nor are we limited to Literature, High Art, the masterworks themselves.  There’s plenty to enjoy in just reading a good story well told.  There is value in many an unpretentious book.  What we don’t tolerate now is poor craftsmanship, or something attempting to be clever or Important that fails.

So now we’re mulling over a change in our reading program.  In addition to our present survey of accepted Literature (David Copperfield was passed around between us recently), we intend to go back to the Science Fiction of our youth.  There were certainly competent writers, and probably some very good ones; we should identify them with mature eyes.  We’re not sure, though, whether we look with hope or fear on the prospect of meeting our adolescent selves in the course of the project.