Just before New Year’s Eve, I wandered down from the attic bedroom in my in-laws’ holiday rental in a daze: I had finished Romola and there would be no more new George Eliot for me to read in the world. Around that time, a friend mentioned that he was saving one of the late great John M. Ford’s novels so that there will always be one to look forward to. I managed to stifle a “NOOOOO,” but honestly it was a near thing. I feel pretty strongly about reading the books you want to read when you want to read them. If you’re saving them for a rainy day, friends, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been in a deluge for a couple of years now. Books are not a marshmallow test, and there’s no benevolent researcher coming around to double your reward if you hang onto them.
What do I mean by that? Well, the marshmallow test is a pretty flawed psychological experiment, outlined here (https://www.simplypsychology.org/marshmallow-test.html). For years people wanted to believe that it showed that little kids who could delay a treat such as a marshmallow until an authority figure got back and doubled their reward were showing laudable virtues of self-restraint and would do better in life. This relied on some flawed assumptions about how you would learn that behavior and why, many of which mapped to class, and it turned out to be a very weak predictor of future successes. It said things people wanted to hear about virtue, so its signal got amplified. Holding back from things we enjoy seems virtuous. But is it? People are constantly writing new books, some of which you’ll love. Why keep away from them?
Here’s another problem: there is no trustworthy authority in the universe that has promised to double your reward if you save your nice book for later. The opposite, in fact: the universe is capricious and might easily snatch your reward away. So I’m going to give you some of my reasons to dive right in and not apologize for it.
Side note: the best reason not to read something is that you don’t want to. Books you don’t want to read are not marshmallows in this metaphor, they’re more like taking medicine, or eating something nasty. I am not here to tell you to do either one of those things. Save the books you don’t want to read for as far later as you like. Save them for never, as far as I’m concerned. But this is the last place you’ll hear exhortations about reading unpleasant things that are good for you. Here we’re talking about the thing where you put off something you want and think will be good.
Nothing is guaranteed to any of us. We’ve all spent the last four years with the Auriga whispering, “Remember thou art mortal,” you don’t need me to spend this essay doing it more. You already remember. But there are other reasons to gather ye rosebuds while ye may!
The books we don’t read can’t inspire us. Whether we’re writers, other kinds of artists, or “only” passionate readers, the books we love change us in large ways and small. When we save something we expect to love, we keep it sequestered from changing us. We can’t write another story that uses a novel we haven’t read as a springboard; we can’t draw fan art for it. Even our jokes can be shaped by our reading. Without the Presger Translator, we don’t look at fish sauce the same way—so if we save Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series for a rainy day, that’s a range of silliness we’ve deprived ourselves of for no particular reason.
Make more mental space for art to want. Books we’ve read have dimension—character, setting, depth—because they have detail that has had a chance to resonate with us. Books we haven’t read just have a vague yearning space. And I love that vague yearning space! But it keeps getting filled with more books as people tell me about their forthcoming projects. Art expands to fill the available space in your heart. If you keep making space for it, there will be more space to fill in.
Signal to the author—and the publisher—that you’re interested. Sure, you can buy books and save them, or request that your public library should do so. You can even check out books and deliberately return them unread to signal to the library. But how many times are you going to go through that ritual for books you’re saving for later? It’s a lot of work compared to just reading your library book or trying to make a dent in Mount Tsundoku. You don’t write fan mail for books you haven’t read. You don’t gush to your friends that they just have to read this great book you just read…if you didn’t just read it. All of the million pieces of financial and emotional support that keep writers writing the works you want to look forward to work best if you’re actually enjoying those works rather than saving them for a nebulous later.
While you’re waiting, the suck fairy may strike. For those of you who don’t know about it, the suck fairy (described here by Jo Walton https://www.tor.com/2010/09/28/the-suck-fairy/) comes in and rearranges books you used to love into books you don’t like so much anymore. We’re always trying to get better at how we see other people and how we write about them. The suck fairy doesn’t apply to books that never had anything good to offer, but we can’t always predict how our perspective will grow. Obviously books that are overtly, for example, sexist are books you’ll want to skip in the first place. But topics like gender and sexuality are complex enough that we all need to iterate several times on our ideas of them—and sometimes the thinking that can help us through an idea at the time can make us wince later. Better to enjoy it while you’re still in the middle of the same process yourself.
Other kinds of social change, including artistic change, can happen. Literary fashions change. Dialog that seemed perfectly readable in one decade feels stilted and weird in another. Obviously this doesn’t happen to every book—I’m the person who started out by talking about how I love George Eliot, so clearly I’m willing to roll with some kinds of older dialog. Others…age like fine fish. Why not enjoy a book when it strikes you that you’re likely to enjoy it? Then if it ages well, hurrah, you can enjoy rereading it too. If it doesn’t, you can wince and smile at your past self and think, “I’m glad we got better at pacing,” or descriptive writing, or whatever it is that changed.
You will—we hope—grow as a person. The insights that will rock your world at sixteen will be obvious when you’re forty, not because sixteen-year-olds are stupid, but because they’ve seen less of the world—including the world’s books. If you’re thinking, “that looks like so much fun!”, remember that a relentless number of games of Uno in an afternoon used to be fun too. And then it wasn’t…and then you were old enough to have the perspective to enjoy watching someone who had never played Uno before enjoy it, and it was again. The seasons of our reading life shift and change. Play in the snow in winter, stick your toes in the summer lake, and read the book you want to read rather than hoarding it. The rewards are immediate, and they go beyond just you.
Life will bring you obstacles enough, dear readers. You don’t need to place more in your own path—and you will not get bonus points for doing so. Meanwhile the reward of reaching for your own joy is more joy. You deserve more book joy today, not just some nebulous later. We all deserve more book joy. Please reach for as many treats as you can find.
© 2023 Marissa Lingen
