It pains me to see that as careful a reader as Alan Jacobs, who writes as elegantly and eloquently about reading as he does, apparently has such little faith in reading. Why do I say that? Because he, like many, seems to think that in order to see reading as an activity worth doing, it must be be pleasurable, all the way through, and those who say otherwise are somehow threatening the future of readers and reading. He writes, in response to this piece,

We need in our lives realms of pure play. Why can’t our recreational reading be just that? (In the same way, why not talk a walk because you enjoy looking at your surroundings, not because you’re trying to get to the 10,000-step goal your FitBit says you need to meet?) We should feel free to read what gives us delight — yes, even if it’s YA fiction — and to stop when we’re not delighted. After all, we can always come back to a book later if we want to.

First, I think we need to be clear — for many (most?) readers, recreational reading is the only place they will read books at all. So for those readers, Alan has just locked off vast wings of the library.

Contrast this attitude with many other ways we seek pleasure in the contemporary world . Take video games. Video games are seen, conventionally, as the epitome of cultural hedonism; they’re posed, by both supporters and detractors alike, as sources of direct and unambiguous pleasures. And yet try to apply Alan’s requirements to video games, and you’ll see that almost none of them qualify. In fact, video games are a lesson in the denial of short-term pleasure. Think of all the times you were horrifically frustrated and angered by a video game as a kid! Video games make you try the same things over and over again, getting a little bit better every time. They force you through difficult slogs. They are frequently designed to frustrate, and often they mock you, directly, in their frustrations. A common game element of RPGs is literally referred to as “grinding.” And yet people pay billions of dollars on video games a year. They are an unstoppable cultural force. People absolutely love them. They don’t love them despite the fact that they are challenging. They love them because they are challenging. Game designers know that a diet of sugar alone makes the taste of sugar unpalatable. Is that a deficient way to design a pleasurable experience? What on earth is the word “pure” doing in Alan’s paragraph, anyway?

Or how about that FitBit? Suppose you take up with the times and start training  for a road race, like seemingly all of my Facebook friends. They all seem to love it; the extol the many pleasures of running. But suppose you get on the road your first day and you find, as one does, that your lungs hurt and your ankles ache. By the thinking in Alan’s post, the rational, self-interested thing to do would be to give up then and there. Life is too short! Our pleasures need to be pure! And everyone who has ever experienced the runners high would tell you, you don’t deserve to feel this type of pleasure if you aren’t willing to work for it. Precisely because the pleasure only comes from the long hours of suffering. Pardon me if you find that a Catholic attitude for me to take. I just think it’s a fact of life.

I don’t think Alan would advocate that people drop video games every time Mario dies, and I don’t think he’d counsel a young runner to stop at the first cramp. I don’t think he’d raise children the way he is trying to raise readers. Why the difference? Because like a lot of people who love reading, I suspect, Alan actually finds reading a very weak thing, perhaps a pitiable thing. What else could motivate the attitude that a medium must do nothing but give pure pleasure at all times? It reminds me of nothing more than Jonathan Franzen’s ugly, destructive war on poor old William Gaddis. It’s a defense of reading that presumes reading’s near-irrelevance. I think of the old advice to the lonely and lovelorn: no one will ever love you if you don’t love yourself first. Well, it’s the same with reading: no one will ever value books if those who love them best act like they are only worth reading when they constantly put out their lips to be kissed. Alan fears a world where everything permissible is compulsory. I fear a world where everything challenging is offensive.