I am worried how the sub will react so I will share my thoughts but please understand where I'm coming from. So here it is:
I wonder if it’s just me, or maybe the people I’ve met, but some people treat books and reading way more seriously than seems reasonable.
For example, I once visited a friend’s house and his father had this rigid “reading time”. It was a set schedule, every single day, for the same duration (can't remember, I think it was 90 minutes). At first, I assumed it was for the kids, like a family study routine. But no, he followed it even when the kids weren’t around. And these weren’t work books or things he "had to" read; they were contemporary fiction, classics, nonfiction, whatever.
I’ve met a lot of people like this, though not always in the exact same way. Some obsess over owning the “right edition” of a book. Some get pisse if you suggest audiobooks count as reading. Others seem offended if you criticize any book in their library.
I once made the mistake of calling a classic “boring” (I won’t say which, to avoid potentially offending anyone here), and I got a lecture on its value. The lecture has never ended because still when I meet that person, they pick up where they left off. Feels like criticizing the Bible in front of a devout Christian. Unfortunately now I have formed a strong hatred of that particular book and I dislike it much more than I did originally, all as a reaction to this person. I know, it's irrational, but I'm just saying this can happen.
Here’s the thing: no author is perfect. Not Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Woolf, Austen, Hemingway, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling… no book is perfect. Every idea can be questioned. Books are just ideas written by people. Yes, they can be beautiful works of art and you can keep them and value them, and you can take reading as seriously as you like, but don’t force others to share your perspective.
If you’re passionate about a book, great. But obsessing, policing, or idolizing it doesn’t encourage more people to read. I think it alienates them. Let people read how they want, listen to audiobooks, spill coffee on their book pages, or even throw them on the floor. Life’s too short to lose your mind over books. If it's their books and their time, let them do what they want.
If the ideas in these books you value are beautiful, they’ll speak for themselves. YOu can certainly recommend a book and set the scene but otherwise Let the ideas sing themselves. And if the song is beautiful, people will stop and listen. If the song is not beautiful to them, they will move on. You shouting at people around who don't like the song will not make the song suddenly beautiful.
Rant over.
by maxwell-cady