Adam Roberts on reading as social behavior:

I once went on a BBC Radio 2 round table talk-y thing with a bunch of other people. Whilst we were waiting to go into the studio I got chatting with a ‘literature’ talking head feller: ‘so you write science fiction do you? Hmm hoom hoom.’ He worked on the TLS, I remember, and was saying ‘we sometimes get sent those sorts of books to review’ in a distant, vague sort of way. But his nice knockdown argument (there’s glory for you) was: ‘you see, the sorts of dinner parties I go to, if I upped and said I’ve been reading a science fiction novel called … I would be greeted by blank faces all round the table.’

I don’t mean to sound dismissive. My point is that we often act as if the assumption is that people read ‘for pleasure’; and sometimes they do. But just as often, and possibly more often, people read instrumentally. Or maybe it would be better to say: they read for pleasure, but when it comes to choosing which, amongst tens of thousands of titles, they should read next they think instrumentally. As it might be: everyone I know is reading this; I’ll read it, so I can talk with them about it. SF is no different. At the moment, for example, everybody in the narrow world of SF is reading, or has read, Stephenson’s Anathem. Some people love it, some don’t, but that’s what’s being discussed, and if you want to join in the discussion you need to read it too. University Literature departments’ syllabi are merely the codification of this process. The popularity of book groups is another manifestation of it.

Which reminds me, I’m overdue to post on Distant Star and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Not to try to wriggle out of which: As much as I read now (and this taking notes business is making it clear to me that whatever I might think I actually read ridiculous crazy much), and with however much more sophistication I read now, I think I enjoy it less than I did once upon a time when I did just read ‘for pleasure’… or maybe just when ‘everyone I know’ meant, like, four people, and we all read the same books because there just weren’t that many books to read, and we had to share, and we talked about them all the time.

The books have gotten better — okay, David Eddings is a low base to start from, I admit, still — but the conversation’s gotten worse. Hello long tail.

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