Over at the World Book Night blog, Julia (first name only, please) asks what it means to be “well-read.” The question is a good one, especially at a time when university English departments have dropped any requirement to study Shakespeare. (Chaucer and Milton? Don’t make me laugh.)

Julia’s answer is not a good one, however:

To me being well read is about exploration and an open mindedness that will take you beyond your comfort zone to discover new things. We all have our own reading journeys — and that’s what W[orld] B[ook] N[ight] is really about, helping people along their own particular path, encouraging people back to reading who for whatever reason have given it up and giving those who’ve never given it a go the chance to discover it. We all start at roughly the same place (Very Hungry Caterpillar for many) but then diversify enormously. . . . Sure there are some “must-see sights” along the way but if you’ve given Dickens a go and found you didn’t get on then it’s far better to shrug and try something else instead than give up reading completely, but equally it doesn’t matter how much you read if you never give anything out of the ordinary for you a go.

There is a lot to criticize in this short paragraph, but two ideas are especially popular fallacies of the moment. In reverse order: first, that reading is intransitive (“back to reading”), an activity that can be pursued without an object, like running or dinner table conversation; and second, that being well-read is somehow “about exploration and open-mindedness.”

To read nothing in particular is an impossibility. Reading in general — what I have taken to abusing as “book enthusiasm” — is no better than cooking in general. I have friends who “love to cook,” but when it comes to preparing lasagna or ratatouille, they make a hash of it. The fallacy of intransitive reading is first cousin to the conception of reading as a set of skills and techniques that can be developed through drill and instruction. E. D. Hirsch Jr. explains the fallacy:

The skill idea becomes an oversimplification as soon as students start reading for meaning. . . . The trouble is that reading for meaning is a different sort of game entirely. It is different every time, depending on what the piece of writing is about. Every text, even the most elementary, implies information that it takes for granted and doesn’t explain. Knowing such information is the decisive skill of reading.

And that’s the trouble with reading as “exploration.” To read well is to read for meaning. To become well-read is to acquire the knowledge that makes it possible to read things “out of the ordinary for you.” Enthusiastic readers who plunge into the jungle of literature without map or compass, without a knowledge of the books that have served for decades as maps and compasses, will get hopelessly lost. Nor will being “open-minded” help them much. Here’s J. V. Cunningham:

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

But he could always shrug, I suppose, and try something else than Dickens. A Handful of Dust, perhaps?