Bethanne Patrick

Recommended Reading: "The Solitary Vice"

It's not often that a Book Maven gets to have a blog entry with a subject line that reads like a Jezebel post. Oh, prurient ones, it's not what you think. The full title, book jacket, and review can all be yours, after the jump...

                                            

Mikita Brottman's new book is called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint). She has a blurb, of course, from Laura Kipnis (Against Love: A Polemic) -- I suppose this is because, like Kipnis, Brottman isn't truly against her subject, but is trying to look at it from another perspective. However, I find the pairing a little too cute, making it seem as if Against is the new black (thank goodness, Kipnis did not play up the cuteness factor in her blurb). 

Brottman isn't truly "against" reading; she's against reading as prescribed by our dominant culture and educational systems. She knows whereof she speaks, having earned her D.Phil in Modern Languages and Literature from Oxford and being a practicing therapist who will soon have a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis. She even provides 21 pages of works cited in her own book -- clearly Brottman has not broken free of the academy, even as she sings in her chains.

This is an odd book (not, I hasten to warn you, that that means I didn't love it). It's rambling and fractured and it seems more like a very long self-conducted psychotherapy session at times than a cogently argued thesis. I wondered if that might be why Brottman is earning her Ph.D.: perhaps she has decided, as she does argue, that reading is less important as a method of collecting knowledge than it is as a means of earning self-knowledge.

Of course, once you know yourself and are able to love yourself, you're more able to care about other people, and Brottman believes that if reading is given its proper place -- not used merely to escape -- then it can be a wondrous thing. 

Go on, pick up this little polemic. It won't grow hair on your palms, but it might put (figurative) hair on your chest.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on March 27, 2008 | Comments (0)