Why I Read Books I Hate

It took me 2 months of grueling effort to slog through Crime and Punishment. Since I normally read a book a week, this was very out of character. Of course, some of this could be the newborn daughter I often held in my arms when I read, but it wasn’t all her fault. It was also the fault of Dostoevsky and the literary market of the 1800’s which, true to form, had published the book in 12 installments in a literary journal, making it long and complicated. It was also because of the difficult nature of the themes and going into the throes of depression inflicted on Roskolnikov because of his high ideals and terrible choices. 

I may not have liked reading the book, but I love what I learned from the book: the dangers of elevating one way of being over another and the value of every life. I hated the effort, but I also loved it because that’s what made me learn. In fact, I’ve slogged through many books I really didn’t like and I think you should too.

Now before you scroll to another page or write me some angry hate mail, let’s talk about what I mean by books you hate. Or rather, let’s talk about what I do not mean. I do not mean bad literature in the sense that it is offensive to your belief system or personal ideals. Or bad literature in the sense that it has brought up some powerful emotions in you for reasons that can only be explained by difficult past experiences. Books can and should get put down, but they should be for the right reasons. The right reasons, for me, are because they don’t meet the basic standards I have adopted for myself. There are certain words I don’t want to see, certain scenes I don’t want played out and certain suggestions I’d rather not take. Authors have a perfectly good right to write these things, but I also have a perfectly good right to not read them and I have put down several books in this category just this year alone. I readily encourage you to have and uphold your own standards.

It may surprise you to know, though, that I don’t consider badly written books and automatic no. Authors are often a product of the literary market of their time and sometimes that made for sloppy texts or plots. Anyone who has read any of the short novellas after A Christmas Carol know that even famous authors like Charles Dickens sometimes had these issues. That can happen in our time, too. One book I read this year with one eye half-opened at the strangeness of the plot did not so much have a bad plot as a bizarre one. Still I trudged on and I don’t regret it. The idea in the sloppy texts, plot and character development were good, just poorly packaged.

And this brings me to why I read books I hate and that is the whole point of reading, which is to enlarge our perspective and further our education. I would prefer that knowledge to be perfectly wrapped in beautiful prose and tight character development, but if the wrapping is somewhat hastily slapped on and the box smashed in the progress, the knowledge is still there. Good reading leads to good knowing and a good way of being and showing up in the world. If that reading has opened me up to a new perspective and made for a more whole or complete education than I call it successful no matter the wrapping.