addictive reading

Now as in July, I’m finding Wilson to be one of the most addictive authors I’ve encountered in the past few years. There could be many different things that make an author addictive, and while bad authors might only rarely be addictive, good authors often are not. I really like reading Husserl, for instance, but it would be bizarre to call him addictive, and the same for Hegel. The going is simply too slow.

In Wilson’s case, I think there are two main reasons why it’s hard not to reach for him whenever there a few minutes free:

1. He does much of his best writing in 5-7 page bursts. In fact, I don’t think any of his books are actually books. He’s a born reviewer, not the sort of writer who keeps a thread going through 300 pages. But he also concentrates a lot of information in those 5-7 pages, and sometimes for longer stretches. If you know nothing about Yeats, for instance, you can have a pretty good road map to understanding him after less than half an hour of reading Wilson. (And occasionally he does a fantastic job with longer pieces such as the one on Dickens, which I think is more like 70 pages.)

2. He always makes things more interesting— even the stuff he hates. The reason seems to be that he is so scrupulous in detailing just why he hates it that you feel an immediate urge to rush to the scene of the crime and see if you agree that it’s a crime.

But as concerns point #2, it’s ironic that one of his most famous essays (“Poe at Home and Abroad”) actually fails to make Poe more interesting, despite his obvious admiration for Poe. But maybe that’s just a byproduct of the fact that I’ve done a fair amount of reading on Poe, whom I didn’t appreciate at all until my early 20’s, although he really ranks among the greatest of all writers.