'A Gluttonous Omnivore Like a Dog'

I seldom think of reading as work unless the book is lousy. Researching a project for my day job often involves reading equation- and jargon-heavy technical papers, and that is definitely work, though occasionally rewarding. Otherwise, reading is so pleasurable I feel guilty not feeling guilty about it. One exception to the reading-is-not-work principal is reading a bad book for review. You’re obliged to see it through to the last page, though there’s consolation in the demolition work ahead. In Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds (trans. Julie Rose, La Trobe University Press, 2017), Philippe Paquet quotes an article by Leys (Pierre Ryckmans):

“I like a library where you can waste your time . . . You can only know after the event whether the time was wasted or gained. Without wasted time, what would there be? Newton’s apple is the fruit of wasted time. It is wasted time which invents, creates. And there are two kinds of literature: the literature of wasted time, which gives us Don Quixote, and that of time put to use, which gives us Ponson du Terrail. The literature produced by wasted time is the good kind.”

Pierre Alexis, Viscount of Ponson du Terrail (1829-1871) was the Joyce Carol Oates of nineteenth-century France. In twenty years he wrote some seventy-three books. He was a factory. His readerly counterpart consumes Harlequin romances by the board foot. Leys was fond of quoting Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” Paquet paraphrases Leys: “So, if we can’t know whether a book is good or not before we’ve read it, we may as well also realise that we read for ourselves first.”

An obvious point but one seldom acknowledged. Guilt- or duress-driven reading (as in schools and book clubs) turns the consumption of books into onerous labor. Leys described himself as “more of a gluttonous omnivore like a dog,” whereas his wife was “more of a reflective gourmet like a cat.” Paquet quotes him again:

“The study of literature is of no practical use whatsoever – unless one would wish to become, of all things, a professor of literature.”

Asked at the turn of the century to name a twentieth-century book deserving of salvage, Leys selected three vastly different gems: Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro and Frank Worsely’s Shackleton’s Boat Journey.