Readers and Reading

Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).

As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.

If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.

In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare) is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum). If you’ve ever turned on the option that lets you see other readers’ highlights in a Kindle book, you’ll find that they almost always underline similar mottos, such as this line from Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.”

The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?

Others (including, recently, the novelist Philip Roth) reject fiction entirely and turn to history or narrative nonfiction, explaining that, at the very least, they can be sure they’re “learning something” from what they read. Learning can certainly be fun, but the implication is that acquiring facts about, say, the life of Cleopatra, has more value than following the story of an imaginary person like Elizabeth Bennet. The Precious Time thus passed away has something to show for itself, and the American mania for self-improvement has been appeased. Never mind that most of us will find little practical use for information on quantum mechanics, the military stratagems of World War II or the private lives of British aristocrats.

Ultimately, all of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success (two classic Puritan preoccupations). For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit. Like any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Further reading

Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols on their twins’ third-grade reading test for the New York Times SchoolBook blog

Philip Roth says he’s stopped reading fiction

Can a task this ineffable be automated? Many seem to think so. For years, Amazon and other e-booksellers have offered their customers suggestions based on the purchases of other customers who bought the same books. But you don’t necessarily read every book you buy from an online retailer (some are gifts) and you probably don’t like every book you read, either. For that matter, the books you like best you may have bought elsewhere, or borrowed from a friend.

The latest and most ambitious attempt to automate book recommendations is the website BookLamp.org, launched last week. It’s the public point of interaction with something called the Book Genome Project, an effort to “identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book using computational tools.” BookLamp’s oft-cited model is Pandora.com, a music-discovery service that allows users to create and listen to playlists based on a single song, artist or genre. Founder Aaron Stanton also cites OKTrends, a blog that crunches and analyzes data extracted from the OKCupid dating website, as an inspiration.

Stanton and company (students at the University of Idaho when the project began in 2003 and  academics from several institutions still figure among their researchers and programmers) have fed the text of some 10,000 books into a custom-built software program. The program then identified certain recurring elements and clusters of elements. The designers in turn trained it to recognize those elements and determine how much of each one can be found in a given book.

If this sounds confusing, it is, a bit. On the phone, Stanton explained to me that he and his confederates feel that more traditional labels applied to books — the genre classifications imposed by publishers and the categories of the Library of Congress’ cataloging system — are inadequate. BookLamp can not only provide a precise accounting of such literary qualities as “dialog,” “density,” “description” and “motion,” it can also measure how much of the book involves “Sea Voyages” or “Pregnancy/ Motherhood/ Infant Care” or, for that matter, “Rocky & Dry Terrain/ Canyons.” These metrics are included with 132 other “thematic ingredients” under a broad category the project’s designers call “StoryDNA.”

Such elements “aren’t necessarily what the book’s about, but they’re present,” Stanton told me. He added that although he would never say that Stephen King’s “The Stand” is about “Vehicles/ Rural Travel/ Country Roads,” nevertheless “you couldn’t tell the story of ‘The Stand’ without referring to those things.”

How prevalent such elements are influences a reader’s experience. “A book with 10 percent vampires is a very different book than a book with 80 percent vampires,” Stanton observed. BookLamp searches its database for titles with similar levels. (The idea that a book could be 10 percent or 80 percent vampires was difficult to wrap my mind around until I recalled the way a friend would complain whenever an episode of “Buffy the Vampire” suffered from “not enough vampires.”)

To use a familiar book as an example, Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes up in the BookLamp database with high quantities of “Newspaper Reporting/ Journalism” and “Criminal Investigation/ Detective Work.” Very true. But why does it also show significant levels of “Extended Family/ Cousins & Relatives” and the rather cryptic metric “Scheduling/ Elements of Time”?

“We make no claims to rightness,” Stanton said, explaining that BookLamp is very much a work in progress and that one of the project’s first priorities is to build a much larger database of analyzed books. (This will require the assistance of publishers.) “There are times when the system comes back with something I’d never thought it was capable of” — such as identifying the works of Stephen King as being very similar to the works of Richard Bachman, a King pseudonym — “and then there are times when I’m looking at it and thinking this suggestion doesn’t make much sense.”

Why not rely on the far more sophisticated if also unfathomable judgment of actual human beings, the same intuitive power that enabled John Warner to change a stranger’s life by suggesting “Gravity’s Rainbow”? Even the mechanized, crowd-sourced versions of such recommendations — whether provided by Amazon or such social networking sites as GoodReads and LibraryThing — have aided readers.

But, as Stanton points out, social networks can only tell you about books that other readers themselves already know about and have taken the trouble to read and review. They’re heavily weighted toward books that are well-known and successful, as well as toward more recent titles. “Right now,” Stanton says, “the world is not good at finding midlist or old books or books by first-time authors — a huge portion of the pyramid of books out there.” The Book Genome Project doesn’t care about a book’s critical reputation or sales history; all it wants to do is tally up exactly how much “Docks & Warehouses” or “Explicit Descriptions of Physical Intimacy” can be found between its covers. (Or both — paging Edmund White!)

While some of the recommendations I elicited from BookLamp made sense (people who like Dickens do tend to like Wilkie Collins, too), others left me perplexed. Plugging in one of my favorite titles from last year, Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” — a satire set in New York City in the near future about the doomed affair between a middle-aged Russian immigrant and a much-younger Korean-American woman and ranking high in “Partying/ Deviance” (Shteyngart would be so proud!) — I got back Robert Silverberg’s “The Book of Skulls” — apparently a thriller about four college buddies seeking an immortality-conferring tome guarded by a “mystical brotherhood” in the Arizona desert. Huh? (To be fair, Lara Vapnyar’s “Memoirs of a Muse,” just a little further down the list, is a perfect fit.)

Mostly, though, I appreciate how BookLamp persuades me to look at the books I like in a different light. Ask me why I love Haruki Murakami’s fiction, and I probably wouldn’t begin by praising his depictions of “Suburban Living/ Neighborhoods,” but come to think of it, that’s one of the aspects of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” I remember most vividly and with particular pleasure. I don’t recall an abundance of “Fashion/ Clothing/ Accessories” in the same book, but the next time I reread it, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled.

Further reading:

The fine art of recommending books by Laura Miller

Salon’s review of Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”

Salon’s review of Haruki Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”