Why do we read?

      I have a confession to make. When I first began reading Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, I was enchanted. There is nothing so wonderful as seeing that someone else takes delight in the same things that you do. (A bit narcissistic,I'll grant you, but true.) I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'" Not to cross that fine line between sentimentality and pure sap, but the first few chapters did indeed make me feel like I'd found a friend.

      But what do you make of a friend that recommends a book to you with all of her heart, and then proceeds to spoil the ending? Not just once, but time and again? It reminds me of the time that, having just seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at the theater, my older (nerdier) brother called me and, without mincing words, informed my cheery voicemail that "Snape kills Dumbledore."

      No harm was done, of course. Since I'd already read the books, I deemed his wry wit hilariously funny. But let's face it--I haven't read all of the books on Ms. Prose's "Books To Be Read Immediately" list. Nor had I read all of the books that she cited throughout her discourse on Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, etc. Let's take, for instance, Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina. Sometime last year, I got an itch for Russian literature and managed to read 397 pages of this monster of a masterpiece. But, as fate would have it, I am easily distracted and found that I needed a break from Tolstoy's style. While 95% of the world may have known poor Anna's fate, I did not. Thanks to Francine Prose, I am no longer a part of that ignorant 5%. Thanks a lot.

      The plot of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O-- suffered a similar fate. While I understand that she revealed the startling nature and (let's be honest) pure genius of the plot for strictly pedagogical reasons, I object nonetheless. That would be like a teacher telling her class, prior to studying the novel, that Richard Parker of Life of Pi is actually a...oh, I just can't bring myself to be that cruel.

     All that being said, I think that Prose's dubious pedagogical style raises an important question. Why do we read? It is probably safe to say that as children, we read books that interested us. Books that possessed a certain mystery and excited the senses. As we grow older, we are encouraged to read the Classics. Ah, the Classics. I don't mean to suggest that they are not valuable, or even that they aren't entertaining. But as a whole, we know what to expect from them in terms of plot. By the time you are old enough to read and appreciate the great works of literature, someone somewhere along the line has probably spoiled the ending. Sitting in Modernism during the spring semester of my senior year, I was seized by the irrepressible desire to find the nearest Barnes & Noble and purchase a cheap, probably hastily written genre novel solely on the basis that its plot had not been revealed to me. No, Jim Butcher's Storm Front isn't exactly a front-runner for the future literary canon. But it is fresh, life-affirming and without pretensions.

     So. Do we read because, as Bill Watterson might suggest, it builds character? For a lesson in writing good fiction? For pleasure? In all likelihood, the motivation behind burying one's nose in books on a regular basis is a mixture of all three. Still, that doesn't mean that Francine Prose is off the hook.