So why not plan a vacation devoted exclusively to reading? Twice annually, Bill Gates schedules a week-long “reading retreat” during which he does nothing but pore over the books and papers he’s set aside during the year. He’s not alone: The idea seems particularly popular in the UK, where you can sign up at London’s School of Life to receive a customized book list (they have “bibliotherapists” on staff to compile one based on a telephone consultation) and lodging in one of several modern country houses. The website promises “the perfect combination of great books and great architecture.”

Those who prefer a more social experience can enroll in book-club-style retreats in which an assortment of guests all read the same book during the day and discuss it over the evening meal. Deb Snow, an English teacher currently running a guest house in rural Bulgaria, hosts a reading week with a pre-set list of books and meals provided. Reading Retreats in Rural Italy has a grander setting — the 14th-century Castello di Galeazza in Emilia-Romagna — but the terms are more informal and spartan. Clark Lawrence, who has been running these retreats for 15 years, explains, “Staying here is very similar to staying at a friend’s house. People have to share the two bathrooms. We cook meals and eat together.”

The exceedingly independent — if not downright antisocial — might follow the example of Natalia, who writes a travel blog called No Beaten Path. A harried mom seeking a reading getaway that involved “as little interacting with other people as possible, no housework, no cooking,” she recently rented a “simple” room at Glasshampton Monastery in Worcester, England, run by the Society of Saint Francis. Even the meals there are held in silence.

All these retreats have the advantage of being inexpensive once you get there — why shell out for luxurious surroundings when you hope to spend most of your time transported to another world by a book? If money were no object, I suppose shacking up in a fancy hotel with excellent room service would also do, but I’ve always found hanging around a hotel room all day to be obscurely depressing, no matter how posh the establishment.

The ideal reading retreat to my mind would involve four or five friends renting a big country house for a long weekend (at least three full days). They ought to be people who know each other well enough that they won’t be tempted to spend all their time either getting acquainted or catching up. Everyone agrees that the rooms with the comfiest chairs are strict quiet zones. Everyone takes turns cooking meals. And everyone reads whatever they want, because trying to get four people to agree on a single book on top of all the above conditions is asking too much of the gods.

Lastly, I wouldn’t schedule my reading retreat for the summer. It’s too easy to be lured away by outdoor activities. (To be honest, if I were on a reading retreat at the Castello di Galeazzo, I doubt I’d be able to resist the siren song of nearby Bologna.) Not only are rentals cheaper in the off season, but the fall — with its drizzly afternoons, blowing leaves and crackly evening fires — is far more congenial to the readerly impulse.

As for what I’ll be reading on my summer vacation, first on the list is “The Magician King,” by Lev Grossman, the sequel to his 2009 novel “The Magicians;” I can’t review it because he’s a friend, but I’ve been looking forward to it for months. I plan to listen to an audiobook of “The Eustace Diamonds” by Anthony Trollope (narrated by the great Simon Vance) on the drive up. The rest of my stack is advance readers’ copies of fall titles — specifically, new fiction by Haruki Murakami, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen DeWitt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Helen Oyeyemi, Colson Whitehead and Neal Stephenson, plus several promising-looking debuts. So if I don’t succumb to the charms of sun and sea, I should have plenty of books to recommend to Salon’s readers when I return.

Further reading

The School of Life’s Reading Retreats with Living Architecture in England

Reading Week at the Retreat Svaboda in Gorna, Bulgaria

Reading Retreats in Rural Italy at the Castello di Galeazzo in Emilia-Romagna

Natalia’s account of her reading retreat at the Glasshampton Monastery in Worcester in the No Beaten Path blog

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own “branches,” although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn’t listed.

The pseudonymous Dr. Beachcomber would like to expand the Invisible Library to include fake books — that is, titles that don’t even exist in a fictional universe. They appear only on the spines of sham bookshelves used to disguise secret doors in exceptionally interesting houses. Charles Dickens had just such a door installed in his own study in London, with fake titles of his own devising, including “Socrates on Wedlock.”

Most such titles are jokes (“Cat’s Lives” in nine volumes, etc.), but then so are many of the celebrated holdings in the Invisible Library proper; if there’s one thing authors relish, it’s a chance to make fun of other authors. Hence, such immortal imaginary works as “Only a Factory Girl,” by Rosie M. Banks, a popular sentimental love story that often crops up in the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse; “The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contradiction in the Industrial Novel,” by Robin Penrose, in David Lodge’s academic satire, “Nice Work;” and “My Big Ol’ Feets Gon’ Stomp Dat Evil Down” by Isshee Ayam from Trey Ellis’ send-up of 1980 multiculturalism, “Platitudes.”

Who’d want to slog through those — let alone tackle another of Dickens’ japes, “History of a Short Chancery Suit” in 21 volumes? The vast majority of the Invisible Library is, let’s face it, better off not existing. The world does not need “Feeling GREAT,” by Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D. (from Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections”). And if a reader learns anything from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, it’s to stay well away from the “Necronomicon” of Abdul Alhazred, perhaps the most famous — and certainly the most infamous — imaginary book of all time.

Which raises an intriguing question: If allowed to choose only one, which volume in the Invisible Library would you most want to read?

Assuming that “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” counts as an imaginary book (seeing as it’s also a real book, by Douglas Adams), then it would surely have the longest list of patrons waiting to check it out at the Invisible Library’s front desk. Fans of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño might opt for a masterpiece by Benno von Archimboldi, whose works captivate the characters in “2666.” Others would surely select something from the extensive imaginary works invented by Jorge Luis Borges — “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Ts’ui Pên, perhaps?

For myself, the choice is easy. I’d take “The Higher Common Sense” by the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, the indispensable philosophical handbook of Flora Poste, heroine of Stella Gibbons’ great comic novel, “Cold Comfort Farm” (1932). Flora, an admirer of Jane Austen, goes to live with the Starkadders, relations in the Sussex countryside, and finds herself plunged into a doom-laden agricultural milieu familiar to readers of the rural gothics popular at the time, overwrought “earthy” novels written in imitation of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Armed with the insights of the Abbé (I like to think of him as a more avuncular version of Montaigne), Flora tidies up the seemingly intractable messes at Cold Comfort Farm, from dispatching the hellfire-and-brimstone paterfamilias on a missionary road trip to shipping her oversexed cousin Seth off to Hollywood and imparting romantic and contraceptive advice to the local girls. At every turn, “The Higher Common Sense” provides her with a sound footing to tackle any challenge, including the most formidable of all — Aunt Ada Doom, who refuses to leave her room on account of the shock she incurred as a girl upon witnessing “something nasty in the woodshed.”

In times of trial and confusion, one can’t help but long for a copy of this invaluable imaginary volume. Readers who’d make a different choice if offered a single checkout from the Invisible Library are invited to leave their thoughts in the comments thread.

Further reading

Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog’s extensive postings on imaginary books and invisible libraries

The Invisible Library blog by Ed Park and Levi Stahl

Poets & Writers magazine on the Invisible Library exhibition at Tenderpixel Gallery in London in 2009

The Malibu Lake Branch of the Invisible Library, with links to other branches

Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn’t offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: “I don’t know. I wised up …” he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he’s determined that reading other people’s novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it’s like to fall under the sway of a master’s voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn’t enjoy other authors’ fiction because “It uses the same muscles that I use to write with.” Still, it’s improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.

Perhaps, like McCarthy, Roth has simply lost interest. (McCarthy once said that he found reading fiction “a rather odd thing to do.”) Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they’ve exhausted their patience for flagrantly “untrue” narratives. One blogger explained it thus: “I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal.”

There’s a school of evolutionary anthropology that might agree with him. It speculates that fictional storytelling — a universal cultural practice — helps people imagine what others are thinking and feeling, and consequently how they might behave in the future. The value of such skills when it comes to navigating complex social groups is obvious, but perhaps people do reach a saturation point with age. No other artistic form can surpass the novel’s ability to immerse us in the inner life of another human being, yet there may come a stage when that prospect promises nothing new.

The literary journalist Sarah Weinman rose to Roth’s defense on Twitter, writing, “Actually, I am more surprised when 70-something writers read fiction. V. Rare.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand on this remark, and she told me, “To read fiction in particular is to engage with so many different creative senses, from being knocked out by a great writer’s examination of the human condition to marveling over linguistic style and voice to escapism and entertainment, or even all of the above. And as one gets older, and the ability to free up space in one’s head to properly engage with reading and not be distracted by physical and/or mental ailments, it seems to me that reading fiction would naturally become more difficult.”

Or maybe what some readers get sick of is introspection itself. The celebrated memoirist Diana Athill spent her working life reading as well as editing fiction, but wrote that in her 90s she had “gone off novels.” She blames this on the loss of a certain narcissistic taste that once dominated her reading. “Because a great many of today’s novels still focus on the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time, that means I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction,” she wrote in “Somewhere Towards the End.” I can sympathize. Once, the struggles of 25-year-olds to satisfactorily arrange their romantic lives was a fascinating topic to me. Now, not so much.

Of course, that’s only one kind of novel, in a world that offers many, many choices. It’s hard to muster the energy to explore new genres, however, when you’ve lost your faith. As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn’t offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.

This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it. As Weinman suggests, you have to clear space in your head, like a party host pushing back the furniture, stocking up on drinks and hoping that everyone invited will come. If the gamble pays off, if the guests show up in a festive mood and hit it off with one another, you have a fabulous time. If the party never gels, all you have to show for your efforts are disappointment and embarrassment.

I don’t think fiction is harder to read than nonfiction — if anything, good fiction (make that the right fiction) is easier. But, as every reader can attest, opening a novel is a crap shoot. Depending on how new and untried the books you read are, the washouts are likely to outnumber the successes. For some older readers, summoning the optimistic energy required to give it yet another go despite these discouraging odds just doesn’t seem worth it. As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages, such efforts represent the triumph of hope over experience.

Yet others are still willing to try, like the late John Updike. “It frankly amazes me,” Weinman noted, “that he still reviewed younger writers for as long as he did.” I expect he threw some great parties, too.

Further reading

The original Financial Times interview with Philip Roth

Will Self tells the BBC that he doesn’t read fiction

The text of a 2007 Rolling Stone profile of Cormac McCarthy in which he describes reading fiction as “an odd thing to do.”

Readers of Mike Johnstone’s blog discuss their diminishing interest in fiction

As if hell-bent on providing further illustration of this dilemma, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul played the provocateur last week by announcing that he is a better writer than any woman who has ever lived. He offered a variety of reasons for this state of affairs, none of them worth repeating. While his remarks lacked intellectual content, his antics did inspire some thoughtful responses, many of which have pointed out that talented artists can be reprehensible people.

If Dickens sometimes behaved badly, Naipaul is unquestionably a bad man, notorious for his floridly abusive relationships and bigoted ideas. Does this diminish his work? Naipaul’s fiction is not to everyone’s taste, but the grace of his prose and the power of his early books, especially “A Bend in the River,” is hard to deny; I admired much of that novel even as I gritted my teeth over its blinkered depiction of Africans. “A House for Mr. Biswas” is a veritable touchstone for New Yorker critic James Wood, a tough crowd if there ever was one.

For myself, I ended up feeling that Naipaul’s prejudices (less glaring in his earlier books, but still evident and clearly fueled by cultural insecurity) bar him from the sort of insight that renders a novelist truly wise as opposed to merely smart. Other writers make for more ambiguous cases. T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I’m not ready to shrug off “The Waste Land,” “To the Lighthouse” or “The Cantos.”

Charles Dickens’ shortcomings, on the other hand, were more personal than political. (To make a long story short, he treated his wife cruelly.) This might seem less ideological and therefore less relevant to his work than, say, Eliot’s anti-Semitism, were it not for the fact that Dickens wrote constantly about women and love, while Eliot seldom mentioned Jews. Dickens’ ideas about women are an inescapable element of his fiction, and they surely affected his marriage as well.

Dickens’ characters tend to be all good or all bad, with the heroines in particular resembling saints or angels. It’s easy to see how a man with this mind-set might end up vilifying a woman for remaining in his life even after he stopped loving her. It must have been her fault, otherwise, he’d have to be cast as the bad guy.

While knowing about Eliot’s anti-Semitism adds little to my reading of his poetry, the sad story of Dickens’ marriage does enlarge my understanding of his fiction. However, I don’t have as much at stake as the reader who wrote in asking for my advice. I may love Dickens’ novels, but he’s her favorite writer, which is something else entirely.

She’s like the old college friend of mine who venerated George Orwell and was crushed to learn of his idol’s often shabby romantic life. The more we get from an author’s work, the more we tend to expect from the author; we want to believe that someone kind and sensitive enough to write “Little Dorrit” (or principled enough to produce “1984″) would always conduct himself in a manner commensurate with the ideals expressed in his books.

Still, there’s much to be said for getting past this form of hero worship. Bad eggs like Naipaul aside, most writers, like most people, are a mixture of the reprehensible and the admirable. Our own personal lives require that we learn to love people flaws and all. When you idealize someone, you can’t truly know him or her, and that makes real, adult love impossible.

Most people begin figuring out how to do this in their teens. It’s not an easy transition. Suddenly, every bad quality in our parents — people who were like gods to us as children — becomes a glaring, intolerable betrayal. They must be repudiated! We don’t realize until years later that this is the first step on the long road to seeing our parents as they really are and forgiving them for being human.

Similarly, needing to believe that your favorite author lived in an exemplary way, embodying all the virtues of his best work, is an adolescent desire, passionate but ultimately unfair. Learning the truth is disillusioning at first, but enlightening in the end. Part of the sadly underrated process of growing up is realizing that people, the world and life are no less beautiful and amazing for being imperfect.

Further reading

Does reading great books make you a better person? A critic says Jane Austen taught him to be a more decent man, but the world is full of well-read jerks

V. S. Naipaul says women can’t write Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams on the Nobel laureate’s latest provocation

Naipaul’s long history of behaving badly, from the Telegraph newspaper

Robert Gottlieb on the life of Charles Dickens in the New York Review of Books

But I am going to quarrel, just a little, and not because “A Jane Austen Education” isn’t a delightful and enlightening book. It is both of those things. Furthermore, Austen’s reputation is sinking, quicksand-style, into that of a purveyor of romantic wish-fulfillment and empire-waist nostalgia; Deresiewicz offers it a gallant hand up. His book is a reminder of why she has long been regarded as among the greatest novelists of the English language, even by those who do not swoon for Colin Firth. The legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (a man of the world if there ever was one), when asked if he found the time to read novels, replied that indeed he did: “All six of them, every year.”

Deresiewicz would surely agree with Disraeli’s prescription. In “A Jane Austen Education” he explains how his long engagement with “all six of them” helped convert him from a surly, preening grad student — “about as dumb, in all human things, as any 26-year-old has a right to be” and grandiosely convinced that anything other than “complex, difficult, sophisticated” modernist fiction was beneath him — into a decent, civilized man.

It began when a professor forced him to read “Emma.” Balky at first, Deresiewicz was soon thunderstruck by the revelation that Austen had “not been writing about everyday things because she couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are.”

Each chapter in this fusion of memoir and literary criticism reflects on how one Austen novel helped Deresiewicz reach a fuller understanding of some important aspect of life: common courtesy, learning, the importance of character over charm, social status, friendship and love. He makes a good case; Austen is a profoundly moral novelist and surely meant her readers to glean some insights on how best to live from reading her books. I do not doubt that Deresiewicz improved a lot while reading them. It’s the causal relationship between the two phenomena that I doubt.

Does reading great literature make you a better person? I’ve not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate — which is admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to this topic, what isn’t?

There’s a theory, vaguely associated with evolutionary psychology, maintaining that fiction builds empathy, and therefore morality, by inviting us into the minds, hearts and experiences of others. This is what the British children’s book author Michael Morpurgo implied recently in the Observer newspaper, when he claimed that “developing in young children a love of poems and stories” might someday render the human-rights organization Amnesty International obsolete.

While I’m all for cultivating such tastes in children, I also don’t think the love of stories has to be taught. Most children are keenly interested in stories in all their forms. (Reading is a different matter.) They always have been. Yet there has always been a need for groups like Amnesty and it seems probable there always will be, no matter how many stories we pump into our youth.

Isn’t it just as likely that many people who are already empathetic and moral will be drawn to literature because they’re curious about and interested in how others think and feel? Of course, not everyone with a literary appetite is so motivated. Quite a few, like the youthful Deresiewicz, are driven by intellectual vanity. Perhaps Deresiewicz seized on Austen precisely because he was ready to become less self-involved and her novels spoke to this shift in his taste. If they had been forced on his (presumably even dumber) 22-year-old self, would they have had the same salutary effect, or would he just have dug in his heels and sneered?

So while I thoroughly enjoyed “A Jane Austen Education,” I didn’t entirely buy it. Its narrative seemed constrained by the very American (and fairly puritanical) notion that culture proves its worth by demonstrating that it leads to self-improvement. This approach, at its worst, can make literature seem like some dull but nutritious foodstuff that must be dutifully chewed and swallowed, however little pleasure it may give. That’s not why I read Jane Austen — it’s not even why I read “A Jane Austen Education” — and I suspect it’s not why Deresiewicz reads her, either. Something tells me that he has gotten a lot more out of those six novels than life lessons, and I’d like to read about that, too.

Further reading

William Deresiewicz’ website, where you can find links to his reviews and essays

Michael Morpurgo on children, literature and human rights in the Observer