Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
If I have to name one book, then it is Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts.
That surprises me slightly, because I have never believed that we should protect ourselves from difficult or objectionable books. Quite the opposite. I have always liked the idea that a serious reader should range widely: good books and bad books, respectable books and disreputable ones, books that confirm what we think and books that make us profoundly uncomfortable.
I have read Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. I have read Michel Houellebecq. None of them exactly keeps to the well-lit side of human experience. Part of the attraction of reading is discovering minds, desires and ways of living which are not your own.
But Macho Sluts crossed a line for me.
The difficulty is that I found it both disturbing and compelling. That combination matters. Had I simply disliked it, I could have put it down and forgotten about it. Instead, parts of it lodged themselves in my imagination. I would rather some of those images and ideas were not there, but once read they cannot conveniently be removed.
That, I think, is what makes this genuine reading regret rather than mere dislike.
There are plenty of books I have regretted starting because they were dull, badly written or simply not for me. I have read too much of particular authors—five Ken Follett novels and I begin to see the machinery; four Karl Ove Knausgård volumes and even My Struggle begins, ironically, to become a struggle. The same thing can happen when I decide to read everything by Henry Miller, H. G. Wells or Houellebecq. Admiration turns into completionism, and sooner or later I find the duffer.
I have also regretted books in French which required so much work with a dictionary that reading ceased to be pleasure and became translation. And I have ventured into genres simply to see what they were about—young-adult science fantasy, Mills & Boon, chick-lit—and occasionally wondered why I had bothered.
But those are regrets about time.
Macho Sluts is different. It is a regret about memory.
That is an uncomfortable admission because I still resist the idea that books should be avoided merely because their ideas are disturbing. Reading is not endorsement. As a student of history I have read opinions I found repellent, and I would not wish to have remained ignorant of them. Bad ideas can be historically important. Offensive writing can still reveal something about a culture, a writer or ourselves.
Yet books enter the imagination in a way that historical evidence sometimes does not. They create scenes. They give shape to possibilities. Occasionally they leave something behind which you would rather not carry.
So if the question is simply, “Which book do you regret reading, and why?”, my answer is Macho Sluts.
Not because I believe it should not have been written, and not because I think nobody else should read it.
I regret reading it because I stepped further into the dark than I wanted to go — and discovered that, unlike closing a book, closing that particular door in a fertile and restless imagination is not so easy.
Leave a Reply