Books I Read for Company
There is a reason to read a book that has nothing to do with learning anything, and I have stopped pretending that it does not.
Some books I read for company. Middlemarch is one. The Remains of the Day is another. Persuasion, Austerlitz and The Master and Margarita are on the list, and the list has a rule: these are books I go back to when the house is quiet and I do not want a book that will ask anything of me.
A book read for company behaves differently from a book read for instruction. You are not following an argument; you are sitting in a room with people. Some of them are difficult and some of them are foolish and one of them may remind you of yourself in a way that is uncomfortable, and the point of the exercise is that you do not have to say anything.
What company books have in common is that their characters hold their shape when you do not. That is the service they offer. The person across the table at a dinner party is interesting for an hour and then they go home; a character in a novel can be exactly as tiresome as they were in chapter three, for eight hundred pages, and remain worth sitting with. There is a kind of steadiness in that which I have never found in a person.
I am not saying the other books do not matter. A book that teaches you something is worth the evening it takes. But there is a cost to reading only for the improvement, which is that you end up in a permanent mood of dissatisfaction with yourself, and the afternoons I spend with the company books are the only hours in the week when I am not quietly grading myself.
The choice, in the end, is made by the weather and by the state of my head. Some evenings call for a plot. Others call for a room, a fire that is not there, and somebody sensible saying something careful. I have got quite good at telling the difference.