Some books have a special moment when a reader places the book face down on the table and simply sits there. These are not the books that people usually recommend at parties, nor are they the ones with happy covers and affirming titles. Not because they’ve become disinterested. since they have been apprehended. When the reader opened the cover that morning, they didn’t intend to go there, but something on the page has crossed the comfortable boundary between fiction and self and arrived somewhere intimate.
The whole point is that moment. The best books are made for this purpose.
Drawing on his experiences at Auschwitz and three other Nazi concentration camps, Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days. The book is uncomfortable. It doesn’t provide comfort or a simple solution. It provides a documented account of what happens to a human being under conditions of complete dehumanization. Frankl discovered, while working as a psychiatrist inside the camps and observing the men around him, that those who had found something to live for were the ones who had survived both physically and mentally. Not precisely optimism. Not coziness. Something more severe than that: even internal suffering, even when it was severe, unfair, and completely out of the victim’s control. Since 1946, millions of copies of the book have been sold. It has never provided a single validation page.
Validation is the foundation of the self-improvement industry. Commercially speaking, it is excellent at figuring out what people want to hear, such as that they are headed in the right direction, that minor changes will yield significant outcomes, and that the challenges they face can be overcome with the correct framework. Those books are very popular. They also alter very little, to the best of anyone’s ability to gauge. They validate the reader’s current course, perhaps slightly refining it, and return them to their lives with a sense of recognition rather than challenge. That is perfectly acceptable. However, reading at its most serious level doesn’t really accomplish that.
The aftermath of slavery in America is the subject of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which centers on a woman who murders her own daughter rather than let her be taken back into slavery. It’s a book that makes the reader sit with the impossible weight of the decision and what it says about the institution that made it possible while holding that act in their mind and resisting the easy reflex of judgment. Most people report feeling exhausted after finishing it. Comfort did not appeal to Morrison. She was interested in the truth, and the truth she was sharing was one that the culture had spent generations trying to avoid confronting head-on. The book’s discomfort is inextricably linked to its goal. It would be a lie to soften it.
Readers’ descriptions of the books that truly changed them exhibit a pattern that is worth observing. Seldom do they characterize the experience as pleasurable in any traditional sense. They talk about frequently putting the book down. They talk about feeling involved in things they hadn’t anticipated, becoming defensive, and wanting to argue with the text. One reader who wrote about her experience with Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates described her own defensiveness as information that alerted her to the fact that something genuine was occurring and that she was pushing the boundaries of her comprehension. She continued reading because the discomfort felt right—like a correct diagnosis rather than a comfortable misreading—rather than because it was enjoyable. It’s really hard to be that honest with oneself while reading. Additionally, that’s the only way those kinds of books function.
This is made more difficult by the algorithmic issue. Recommendation algorithms are now used by all major reading platforms to provide users with more content that is similar to what they have already read in terms of genre, themes, and worldview. It is effective and results in a reading life that gradually narrows and feels fulfilling in the moment. A reader is not in a worse mood after receiving book recommendations that support their current viewpoint for three years. Simply put, they are less able to comprehend those who have different perspectives, less challenged by their preconceived notions, and less likely to experience the particular friction that leads to real growth. George Orwell was aware of this. The purpose of 1984 was not to reassure readers about political structures. The fear it evokes—that certain icy uneasiness that lingers after the last page—is not a side effect but rather the delivery mechanism because it was written to make them afraid of something real.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that nearly none of the books that people describe as truly life-changing are also described as enjoyable readings. A Little Life is harsh. The Handmaid’s Tale intentionally causes nausea. Lolita causes a persistent cognitive dissonance. These books are similar in that they refuse to control the reader’s comfort; they are willing to write something truly challenging and have faith that the reader will stick with it, to sit in the difficulty rather than be led around it. This mutual trust between the writer and the reader is a kind of respect in and of itself. It makes the assumption that the reader is capable of handling more than they are typically given, can put up with the discomfort of a broader viewpoint, and can emerge from the experience transformed rather than just amused. Generally speaking, the books that assume that are correct.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.