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Confess Your Literary Sins
In David Lodge’s campus novel Changing Places, two college professors—one American, one British—swap teaching roles for a year. In one memorable scene, the British academics invite their American guest to play a party game called Humiliation. Players confess important literary works they haven’t yet read, and points are scored based on how many other players have already read them. The person with the most—and most egregious—gaps in their personal reading history wins. If everyone but you has read that book, you’re going to be great at Humiliation.
Those fictional professors aren’t the only ones who enjoy shocking and delighting their fellow readers by spilling the guilty secrets of their reading lives, sharing those works they suspect everyone but them has already read, or perhaps the books they love but feel they shouldn’t. Why can we not help but laugh when we discover an English prof has never read Hamlet (as in Changing Places), or that a serious friend has a thing for Sophie Kinsella novels, or that a soft-spoken friend is obsessed with celebrity memoirs, or our friend with the religion PhD has never read C. S. Lewis?
Why do these revelations delight us so? Screenwriters have a name for it. They call it the comedy gap, that gap between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. Or, in this case, what we expect a person’s reading life to be like and what it’s truly like.
In 2011, I named my new blog Modern Mrs Darcy, because it captured the timeless and timely nature of what I wanted to write about—and because I love Jane Austen.* Almost exactly five years later, in 2016, I started a podcast called What Should I Read Next? devoted to book talk, reading recommendations, and literary matchmaking. The funny thing about creating a blog using a name from a Jane Austen novel, or casting yourself as a literary matchmaker, is how many readers you meet feel as though a conversation with you is an invitation to play Humiliation.
Since I began these projects, I’ve been surprised to find myself a magnet for readers’ literary confessions: so many readers feel compelled to confess important literary works they haven’t yet read, or that they love the “wrong” books, or that they don’t read much at all lately.
These readers are acutely aware of their own gap: that divide between what they think their reading life should be like and what it’s really like.
Sometimes I think they’re sharing in fun. They’re content with their choices and opinions, but they appreciate the pleasure of divulging guilty secrets and see in me a kindred spirit, one who will appreciate their confession. But the truths of many readers’ reading lives make them uncomfortable; their gap isn’t a source of amusement, but frustration. They’re certain their taste is questionable, their opinions are wrong, their reading habits are poor, and it’s only a matter of time before the Book Police track them down. They’re carrying guilty reading secrets that make them feel as though they aren’t real readers. They’re partly terrified of being found out and partly feel they might burst if they can’t tell someone their bookish secrets.
Often that someone is me: these readers find me—in person or online—and say, “I don’t usually tell people this . . .” before spilling their secrets:
They’ve never read Shakespeare or Chaucer, Brontë or Austen, Hawthorne or Dickens, or any other author you might possibly have been assigned in high school.
They were assigned these books in school, but never read them.
They wrote their term papers on Important Novels without reading the important novels. (The better their grade, the worse they feel.)
They’ve never read Jane Austen. Specifically, they’ve never read Pride and Prejudice. They once read Jane Austen, but they don’t understand the fuss. They attempted Jane Austen but couldn’t get past the first chapter. They read Pride and Prejudice, but they liked the movie better—and not even the one with Colin Firth, which they think I could understand, but the other one. The crown of their home library is a beautiful Jane Austen box set—and they still haven’t read Jane Austen.
They’re an English Lit major who did all the required reading—and hated a healthy percentage of it. They think Moby-Dick is trash. Also, The Sound and the Fury. And everything by James Joyce.
They don’t understand the love for To Kill a Mockingbird, East of Eden, The Great Gatsby, and any number of beloved American classics. They just don’t care. (“Can you say boring?”)
They hate Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, The Giving Tree.
They hate the Twilight series so much they want to flip over bookstore displays.
They finally succumbed to the hype and read the Harry Potter series, and they think it’s drivel.
They teach ninth-grade English by day and currently binge on the Twilight series at night, for the sixth time in as many years. (“Please don’t tell my students.”)
They don’t understand how anyone could not love The Catcher in the Rye. They are obsessed with Holden Caulfield. They wonder what this says about them. They are not adolescent males, so they’re pretty sure it’s not good.
They’re obsessed with the Harry Potter books.
They’ve read the Outlander series eight times. They’re counting down to the next installment the way they once counted down to their wedding day or the birth of a child. They wrote Diana Gabaldon a fan letter, begging her to write faster.
They own forty-two cozy mysteries, whose covers all feature a skein of yarn, a pie, or both.
They are addicted to firehouse romances, the kind whose covers bear rippled torsos, and they don’t even bother to buy the more sedate-looking Kindle versions anymore, because the e-reader experience just isn’t the same.
They tried to read the latest thought-provoking National Book Award winner on the beach but couldn’t get into it. So they made an emergency vacation bookstore run for a stack of baby-blue books by Elin Hilderbrand, Mary Kay Andrews, and Dorothea Benton Frank, whose covers all bore sandy beach scenes, all of which were inhaled that week. (They still haven’t read the award winner.)
They haven’t read much of anything lately, unless their iPad counts. Or In Style magazine. Or the tabloid covers in the grocery checkout line.
They’ve had the same book sitting on their nightstand for three years and haven’t opened it once.
They’ve never, not ever, read a book over three hundred pages long.
They’ve tried and tried, but they haven’t enjoyed a book written by a woman in years. Or a man. Or a white person. Or someone who doesn’t live in England or the United States. Or Alaska. Or the American South.
They checked a book out of the library four years ago—and still haven’t returned it. They’re afraid to show their face at the library until they pay down their overdue balance, which now equals the cost of a nice dinner out. The library canceled their card because of lost books and overdue fines.
They ordered pizza so they could skip making dinner and finish their book. They ate cereal for dinner so they could finish their book. They forgot to eat dinner because they were finishing their book.
The last time they finished a great story, the book hangover lasted three days. They were so caught up in their book that they let the kids draw on the walls so they could get to the last page. They locked themselves in the bathroom so they could read undisturbed.
They think they might love books too much.
Whatever it may be, they’re sure they’re the only one with this issue.
Reader, whatever secret you’re keeping, it’s time to spill it. I’ll take your confession, but the absolution is unnecessary. These secrets aren’t sins; they’re just secrets. No need to repent. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
Reader, you’re not the only one. Keep confessing to your fellow readers; tell them what your reading life is really like. They’ll understand. They may even say, “You too?” And when they do, you’ve found a friend. And the beginnings of a great book club.
*Emma and Persuasion are my other very favorite Jane Austen novels, but Modern Mrs Knightley didn’t have the same ring, and Anne Elliot and I share a first name, which seemed confusing.