Books gone bad

Emily Bruzzo
Editor-in-Chief

I read more than I interact with other human beings. Even when I step out of my cave, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, pungent breath, villagers screaming at the sight of my wolfgirl ghastliness, I feel like I’m still reading. People can be such characters sometimes that life often seems more like a novel than what it really is, which is the farting about of homo sapiens whilst they breath air and wage wars.

Presently, sitting on my bedside table are more books than there are favorites in my cellphone’s contact list. One of those favorites is my mother, which doesn’t count because cellphones might as well come pre-programmed with out mother’s contacts. We are a helpless generation; I called my mother not too long ago to ask her if one should eat expired eggs.

Don’t pity me. The incessant reading and my deteriorating social skills will make me a champion writer — a Pulitzer winner, probably. See, I want to write for a living. To be a professional writer, one must also be a professional reader — and a professional eater of non-expired eggs.

You know, I’ll never forget the first time I read a John Irving book. It was The World According to Garp. I stumbled upon it in a used bookstore I had entered while grumbling under my breath about how my jacket was missing a button and the widening wage gap in America seems senseless. The book had lived life. It seemed wise, and it turned out it was wise. It cost one dollar and fifty cents. I paid with only quarters. Brittany, the cashier, didn’t appreciate that. I could care less, though. I had just discovered my religion. I read the book in a day, sitting on a bench outside the building that housed the class I was skipping in order to learn T.S. Garp’s fate.

Irving is a special writer to me. He’s the reason I decided to write in the first place. His books opened up a world that had more to offer than just Hemingway.

It was because of Irving (and also Kurt Vonnegut, by the way) that I learned what a novel can be. It can be a statement, an anthem, an explanation, an apology. It is because of books, in fact, that I’ve reconnected with lost friends and taken chances and adopted certain views.

The reader lives in another world for 400-some-odd pages, and you come out on the other end a bit changed. You leave fragments of yourself on each page, between each word.

If a book doesn’t change you, you’re not reading it correctly.

It is books, after all, that have formed societies and constructed economies and toppled governments and created the self-help industry. The written word is this unparalleled, daunting thing. No revolution has started without the pages of a book leading the charge.

But what happens when a book goes bad — when the reading leads you down a slippery slope, not a highway to enlightenment?

There are several people in my life who are reading Atlas Shrugged at present. Ayn Rand, the novel’s author, was a well-known hack of a writer and better-known hack of a philosopher. She wrote four novels, her last — her magnum opus — called Atlas Shrugged. It is the novel that most clearly lays out the tenets of her philosophy, which is blandly titled Objectivism. When first published, Atlas Shrugged was a flop, with one Time Magazine critic asking, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman — in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?”

Regardless, a cult following soon formed. And it wasn’t long before Rand’s ideas about the falsity of altruism and the merits of unadulterated laissez-faire capitalism and the exaltation of the individual and the purpose of life being to pursue only our own happiness and the advantages of adopting unsightly bob hairstyles began to take root.

If you ask me, Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and a sociopath. She sure was unhappy as she purused all that happiness of hers. However, I bring up Rand not to scrutinize her theories, but instead to mock her (only marginally) and to discuss the power of books and the ideas for which they are conduits.

I think my uncle, a man far wittier and smarter than I, put it best when he said not too long ago in a cheeky text: “Ayn Rand captured many of the problems with the world, just not how to fix them or their ultimate cause.” As usual, my Uncle John was able to put into words what I am not; in fact, the old kook offered up the exact formula for what I feel happens when books go bad.

Marx thought great thoughts, but he didn’t know his ideas could contribute to failed governments. Nietzsche thought great thoughts, but he didn’t know his ideas could contribute to God’s murder. Hobbes thought great thoughts, but he didn’t know his ideas could contribute to state militarism. The egotist Rand probably knew her ideas would lead to something.

The point is, each thinker painted thoughtful portraits of our world’s issues, but the paint they used leaked into our water supply and poisoned us with lead. Now, us homo sapiens fart about, breath air, wage wars — and feel pain, numbness or tingling of the extremities because we’re dying from lead.

It is a curious feature of human nature that we often need just an ounce of truth to make the whole body of water fact. We take this ounce and run, particularly when it validates our own ideas.

This is a phenomenon often encountered in book reading; there’s nothing more reaffirming than seeing a personal thought printed on the pages of another thinker’s book. This is something we should approach with care, however. Just because an idea is tenacious does not make it right, truth.

Books are the human condition unraveled. That’s why I want to write them. But the written word is a responsibility. You may be able to burn the pages of a book, but you cannot destroy its ideas. No, those ideas drift off into the ether, these fantastical abstractions given verisimilitude through the powers of the social conscience.

I will never claim to know whether or not the outcomes of a book are good or bad; I subscribe to a worldview that embraces gray areas over black and white lines, after all. However, I would caution that we have just as much responsibility as readers as we do when we are writers. Let us not take ideas at face value simply because they make us feel the tingling warmth of validation.

I like when a book comes along and opens my eyes; I don’t like when one closes them — it makes it very difficult to continue reading.

At the end of the day, though, we take everything much too seriously. As John Irving once wrote, “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases” — especially when we eat expired eggs.