The Book Only You Can Read
(This essay was prompted by Richard Hanania’s “The Case Against Most Books,” his Substack essay about why you would be better off ignoring most books. I think Hanania is spot on, but misses an entire category of reading, the book only you can read.
Also, I have been publishing less often than I wish, and for a range of reasons. Beyond my children, and then my wife and I coming down with non-polio enteroviruses, I learned that you can farm Microsoft Reward points and use them to earn one-month of free access to its PC Game Pass. And that you can write automation scripts to farm those points every day, and earn free months at a rate of 1 month every 18-19 days. )
All images made by Midjourney - because seriously, who the hell is paying for stock photos anymore?
There is a book only you can read.
It will change your life, by changing how you think. Because you think with the book, rather than just absorbing it.
But you won’t be able to tell anyone about it.
Think about that a moment …
The Social Nature of Liking
Other people have said this better, but this is shorter than their book length treatises on the subject, so here you go:
The best guide to what you actually like is to abstract away from it (”bracket” in Husserl’s sense) all the relations your enjoyment has to other people liking the same thing. Huge amounts of what we rational animals like is social things we can share. Even private, internal acts like reading derive a lot of their enjoyment from being able to share that experience with other people.
Let she or he who has never read a book or watched a movie to be part of the current ‘conversation’ cast the first stone.
This is where literary studies on the high-end and fandoms on the low-end come from: sharing the enjoyment of an artistic creation with other people. And increasing your enjoyment by promoting the liking and discussion of a thing, which lets the scholar or fan claim a kind of social precedence and distinction.
If you need more proof: why does the New York Times, and other newspapers, publish a list of best selling books? It’s not just a suggestion of quality - other people liked this thing, you will probably like it too - but a crowd signal: other people bought this thing, you will be left out if you do not buy it too.
It’s not that people discussing literature, or fans arguing about their fandom on Discord, aren’t enjoying the thing itself - the imaginary universe which they access through various vehicles like books, comics, movies, streaming series, games, and so on. It’s just that the shared nature of the property takes precedence: imagine liking Harry Potter without the entire fandom that surrounds the books, or Star Wars. Especially publicly expressing your liking so intensely as Harry Potter and Star Wars fans do.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
People need people. Arguably, you can’t be human without other people around to be human with - being human is a ‘being with other humans’ thing. And its a wonderful thing that we are continuously inventing new ways to be together, new things to come together as people about.
But there is a real, private experience of enjoyment that is beyond that and that is, in many ways, compromised and limited by public consumption.
Just ponder what is actually going on in public ‘cancelling’ of creators and their works. It’s bullying and power tripping, certainly. But it’s also, to coin a phrase, community curation. The cancelers want to split online and real world communities into Us/Them groups: you’re either with Us, or you’re with the verboten. It’s also a claim to authority - to be the people who can make or break reputations and livelihoods.
The things themselves, the works of artistic creation and people’s real. unmediated enjoyment of them, are beside the point. The experience of belonging, of taking part in the Two Minute Hate, means more than the things you hate.1
The Unsocial Nature of Enjoyment
A few years back my mother pointed out to my wife that I have always had an instinctive aversion to going with the crowd. It’s not even contrarianism: a deliberate, chosen stance of making a reputation based on being opposed to common, accepted opinion. For me, it’s an instinctual aversion: I prefer things where my enjoyment of them is not mixed with or mediated by anyone else’s enjoyment or approval of them. I prefer to enjoy things that have stood, as the phrase goes, “the test of time,” and usually things that few other people publicly claim they enjoy.
This may seem odd given my prior essay on the value of confirmation bias, but I make a distinction between going along to get along - to be safe, comfortable, and not a social outcast - and actually valuing being and remaining one of the In Crowd as your primary good, whatever your In Crowd happens to be. I value the first and not the second. Aristotle observed that whoever would live without society must be either a beast or a God, and I don’t think I’m cut out to be either.
The Book Only You Can Read
But, if you bracket out the social pleasure of something, the being part of a group that likes and esteems a thing, what is left?
My favorite 20th century philosopher, Paul Weiss, coined the term “privacy” to refer to the innermost part of things, including people. That is, however much of our consciousness and personality and “being-in-the-world” is determined by relations with others, there is still a small part that is just us and our relation to ourselves: the part of us that watches what we think, what we feel, how we get along.
The book only you can read is the book you read with that part of yourself. As an analytic philosopher I hate to speak so vaguely, but here goes:
The book only you can read is the book, usually a physical book though it can be an online one, that you don’t just read but actually think with. As you read it, the act of reading sparks new ideas in your mind, new concepts, new possibilities. You are having a time shifted conversation with the author, who can only reply through the book. Mortimer J. Adler called this “syntopic” reading, reading a book by bringing to bear everything you know and everything you are. It’s a rare state, and hard to achieve even in worlds free of the present epochs dopamine-tweaking distractions.
But it’s still a real thing. Arguably more ‘real’ enjoyment than what you experience in enjoying things with others.
The reason you can’t speak about it with others is the reason that they can’t read it the way you did. There are public aspects of the work - the words on the page, its context, its ideas - that you can share, but your interaction with them, your experience of them, what changes to to the weights of your neurons the interaction produces, you can’t. This is why recommending books to other people is so futile: not just because other people don’t have the time, but other people can’t read the book in the same way you do.
An example, as much as one can give one: one of the main triggers for my dating my wife, who was at the time my best friend, and eventually marrying her, was my reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the book there is a section where Eliot reflects on the motivations of Casaubon, a dry as dust scholar whom the books heroine, Dorothea Brooke, becomes infatuated with. Eliot delves deep into Casaubon’s thinking about the prospect of marrying Dorothea, a woman nearly four decades younger than himself. Eliot notes the Casaubon only thinks about whether Dorothea can make him happy, not, vitally, whether he can make her happy. Reading that deeply affected me, and led me to realize I both loved my wife and confess my love to her.2
That’s an effect of reading a book, but not one that’s really shareable - I’m not sure Middlemarch has led to any other marriages.
As for how to find these books, I can recommend nothing more than library shelf browsing, especially university libraries which tend to have less common, rarer books. The books you can really interact with, really ‘read’ in the deepest sense, are those that, likely, most other people have never heard of. Public fame, while not preventing a person from deeply interacting with an art work, shapes the experience so much that public passions and evaluations can displace your own. I really enjoyed In Search of Lost Time, and enjoyed greatly discussing it with my wife - its a common cornerstone of our conversations - but I cannot fully separate my enjoyment of it from the distinction of being one of the few people in the world (of all people who regularly read books for enjoyment) who have completed the book. The same goes for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I did like it, but talking about the book was a significant part of that enjoyment.
But the books that have really shaped who I am, those are books I cannot really tell you about. At least, the things I derived from them are things I cannot share because you cannot be me, nor can I be you.
Treasure those experiences. Don’t let yourself be guided by what society likes or what it dislikes. Just like things.
Disliking things can also be a cause of social unity: witness the “hysterical hate read” or “hysterical hate watch” of a book, movie, or streaming series.
An aside: Dan Simmons’ novel Flashback, which I primarily remember as the one where Simmons’ political leanings came out most strongly, features a devastatingly addictive drug called, naturally enough, ‘flashback.’ By focusing on a memory while the drugs effect comes on, the user can vividly relive the memory. It’s an intensely unsocial drug, plunging the user into private reveries of past experience, but it still has social groups built up around its use. The one I remember most are the book clubs, people united by their use of the drug to experience reading their favorite books for the first time.