What We Read
Let’s pretend you’re reading a book and you’re enjoying it. So you go on social media to look up the author’s page, and she is rabidly against treating infertility. She thinks women who use fertility treatments are destroying the world, doesn’t believe children born from fertility treatments should exist, and actively works to support policies that remove another person’s ability to access IVF.
There is nothing about family building in her book, and she has two children, so she understands why a person would want to build a family.
The question: Would you continue reading the book?
I ran up against a situation like this recently and sat with the decision for a long time. I liked the writer’s first book. I was enjoying the writer’s second book. But when I returned to the page, all I could think about was the writer’s words. I couldn’t get lost in the story because everything felt flat, framed by the writer’s comments outside the story. That had nothing to do with the story.
I returned that book and started someone else’s book because it was a low-stakes decision. I could always return to the first book in the future, but this wasn’t the time to read it.
Social media gives us access to everyone’s thoughts and feelings. Sometimes that’s a great thing. Sometimes it’s not.
7 comments
Oh, I would have absolutely shut the book up too.
And this happens to me frequently with music (when artists have abused women or children especially). As it turns out, I respond in the same way as you do–I don’t necessarily *decide* to boycott them, it’s just no longer pleasurable because I can’t stop thinking about the other stuff.
There are too many books for me to read in my lifetime. So if something causes me to no longer enjoy a person’s writing (whether it’s a book that feels rushed or some other external influence), I will stop reading them and read something else and not feel bad about it. I found this with Dean Koontz – I loved all of his books up until about the last 3-4 years. I didn’t even have to look up his views on anything because they were coming through loud and clear in the books.
It’s not often that I don’t finish a book, but that would certainly affect my enjoyment of it, and I would likely take a pass on any future books by the same author. (Now you have me curious about which author this is!)
My rule is generally: if the author is dead I don’t care, and I’m fine with treating the works as separate from their creator.
If the author is alive then I don’t do anything that would support them once I find out, which includes reading their books from the library (though not actually, say, getting rid of our Harry Potter books that we already owned). I do boycott.
I wouldn’t be able to continue reading. The enjoyment would be gone. I can’t support the work of someone who feels so strongly in opposition to my basic needs and rights.
I’m with you and all the other commenters. I read books to be entertained, informed, and exposed to different ideas. But, and that’s a big BUT, I don’t read to be manipulated, to be subject to the abuse or discrimination I might feel in regular life (eg misogyny, or pronatalism), or to support authors who put out ideas (either in their books or in their public utterances) that are detrimental to the world, or that I find abhorrent. All of which would take away from my entertainment and enjoyment of the book. Not to mention it would reduce my assessment of the quality and reliability of the information I would be receiving in the book, and the quality of the ideas I would be reading.
Depends.
If their words or actions hurt me or my loved ones – I would drop their book and (probably) never touch anything they write again.
If it’s their belief system that is very different and doesn’t make any sense to me – but they are not actually saying or doing anything that sends my blood pressure through the roof – I would keep on reading.
This goes for blogs, too. And sometimes I come back to the blogs I stopped reading to see if people have changed.