'Whose Books Are Honoured Friends'

“Various as are the kinds of books, so various are the uses to which we put them. There are those who read to kill time, as a refuge—oh, shame! shame!—from themselves.”

The explanation points are a bit much, but we get the idea. On a cross-country bus trip, there’s nothing wrong with using even a lousy book to at least severely wound time. That’s not so much a refuge from self as from tedium. Reading can be strictly utilitarian. There may be nobler uses for books, but at least our bus rider isn’t playing a video game.   

“There are those who read because some work is in fashion, and it were bad taste not to be able to talk of it.”

This is a species of reader with whom I have little personal experience. A new book has to be outstanding, something special, for me to read it – Joseph Epstein, say, or one of the books I’m reading now, Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. Fashion has nothing to do with it. I assume any recent book is worthless until tested. Hazlitt and Lamb are with me on this.

“There are those who read in order to give the public the benefit of their judgement—those mysterious men, the critics.”

Good critics are rare. Few can write well, so why should we trust them to evaluate writing? We’re in a brackish literary backwater at the moment. T.S. Eliot’s notion that the function of criticism is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” is truer than ever.

“There are those who read indiscriminately with morbid wideness of taste, as the savage devours earth.”

I read that way as a kid. I don’t regret having been an omnivore. How else do you develop good taste and critical standards except by reading good books and bad ones, and learning to distinguish them?

“Lastly, there are those who read little, but with discernment; whose books are honoured friends—‘the souls who have made their souls wiser.’”

Can’t we read many books “but with discernment”? Of course we can. Since I was young I’ve treated books anthropomorphically. The best remain loyal friends. They don’t let you down. The quote beginning 'the souls,' sorry to say, is from Emerson.

The quoted passages above are from a paragraph in Alfred Ainger’s essay “Books and Their Uses,” collected in Lectures and Essays, Vol. 2 (Macmillan and Co., 1905).