What’s really being argued here, of course, is that old cultural imperative beloved of bluenoses and busybodies: the desire to dictate what people should be reading. For Brottman, the pleasure of reading — the “value” — is real, but it can’t be prescribed or codified. And she’s conscious of how reading enthusiasts make the classics sound like the last thing anyone would turn to for pleasure. What can be done to make the classics seem pleasurable? “Maybe if people come back to them later in life when they have a context to put them in, when they feel a need for this kind of knowledge, when they start wondering what these books are about. I only recently started reading Tolstoy. I tried before, didn’t get it, wasn’t interested. Now, I can handle being immersed in this long novel. I may lose track from time to time, but something else is going on that’s important beneath all those things, something about the idea that I can’t access except by reading it.”
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