The Stakes of the Read
Dear Reader,
Sometimes the reading stakes matter in how we engage with a read. This is, of course, a matter of anticipation, and it can certainly lead to the letdown. But I think it’s important to be clear about this: we all approach a reading with some measure of expectation.
And the stakes matter.
I was recently reading through some of journals that I subscribe to, and I realized that one of them never quite grips me as I’d like. This very slight letdown exists because I expect more of the journal—it presents itself as possessing high stakes and thus I expect the read to measure up. The read rarely does.
A different journal has much lower stakes. It really has no stakes at all. It functions like one of those chill pets that’s delighted to interact with you if you’d so desire, but also happy to leave you alone if that’s what you’d prefer. And for this reason, I find the journal agreeable enough without any pricking about how well I’ve attended to the read or how much it’s offered me whenever I choose to pick it up.
I should perhaps mention that most of my journal reads fluctuate in terms of quality and fineness, but that judgment is so subjective that I’d never publicly declare a hierarchy, aside from naming a favorite issue or two. That is, my assessment of the quality and fineness is completely idiosyncratic and best kept to myself.
I mention this, though, to make certain that I’m clear that not every read has stakes that we’re entirely invested in, or that we need to be constantly fussing about the stakes of our reads. My disappointment in the first journal above is that the journal itself makes some claim to importance, to high stakes, and I find it isn’t quite up to those stakes with the frequency its self-assessment would require.
Stakes, then, can be set by the publication or the reader. Often it’s a little of both. And it’s good to acknowledge this.
I think an easy analogy can be made with movie watching. One of the world’s perfect movies is The Man Who Knew Too Little, but my attachment to it is one of my youth—I watched and loved it then. I am, however, quite chuffed that it’s still a most excellent movie.
I recently watched that movie with a friend of mine, she in her state and I in mine. Her appreciation, though present, was not as enthusiastic as mine. Fortunately, I knew this would probably be the case (a favorite of my youth is unlikely to grip another adult who is lacking that nostalgia), and I’d intentionally lowered the stakes. I was thus not hurt when she did not love it so dearly as I did, and she knew I’d be mature enough to accept her entertainment without needing her to think it’s as grand as I do. She enjoyed herself and I was thrilled by the accuracy of my youthful judgment.
But if you’ve ever had a friend introduce you to a movie gushing “this is the greatest movie ever” and then you watch and find it otherwise, you get the disconnect. The stakes have been raised to “greatest movie ever” and even a fine film can’t often measure up to that.
If you tell a child “this was my favorite book when I was your age,” they’ll have one of two responses. If they think you’re a bore (or insensitive to youth), they’ll find your suggestion laughable and be surprised if it’s anything other than terrible. (This isn’t all bad, as you’ll have undersold, but you might struggle to get them to even crack the pages.) If they think you’re rad, they’ll excitedly grab the book and launch into it right away (or as soon as they’ve finished the one they’re presently reading). But oh the disappointment if the rad-you has recommend a not-rad read.
Stakes.
The read that comes most immediately to mind for me as one that didn’t measure up to its stakes is NPR education journalist Anya Kamenetz’s The Test. The packaging sells the idea of a dispassionate, tenacious NPR journalist hot on the trail of a pressing American issue—the book is supposed to be an exposé of the failures and terrible history of standardized testing. It’s blurbed by Boston Globe:
"[Kamenetz's] journalistic talents coupled with her role as a mother of a student on the brink of testing humanizes this book, making it a perfect entry for parents who are too deep in the muck of testing to have the clarity of distance."
Instead, there is no clarity of distance; there are few basic follow-up questions; there is much moralizing without a clean connection to the book’s narrow theme; there is mostly a rose-tinted, access-journalism sales spiel for Knewton and friends. Knewton, of course, has had a long history of being profiled by Kamenetz. Knewton also, by the by, was founded by former test-prep executives, a history that our intrepid reporter somehow never manages to explore in her wide-ranging examination of standardized testing…
The stakes: first-rate NPR journalism.
The reality of the read: initial analysis that ranges from outstanding to sanctimonious, and a second half that is largely a puff piece with more than a waft of access journalism.
The problem with The Test isn’t that it isn’t the book I’d have written or that I wanted to read. The problem with The Test is that it doesn’t meet its own self-declared stakes.
It’s one thing to offer low or no stakes and meet them. It’s quite another to advertise professional journalism and provide an advertorial instead.
I’ve greatly enjoyed so many books (and a few articles) where the stakes involved were a recommendation on the level of “this book is interesting in area X,” and then the read proved a quantum leap better than that. It’s the inverse side of stakes. When you come in with zero or moderate expectations, anything in excess of those is a true gift. And while I’ve found few reads that were advertised as lifechanging to be actually lifechanging, I’ve been blessed to encounter several lifechanging works that were introduced to me under fairly lowkey stakes.
Still, I must say that there were a few reads that lived up to their high stakes. Their authors (or the ones recommending the read) made a large boast about what they were about to do, and then they actually do it. And that, too, is rewarding to encounter as a reader.
To the reads that make their boast,
Kreigh
P.S. Yet another entry, this one from Literary Hib, on the subject matter of this newsletter, this one titled “How Should We Read?”. If one or two more of these appear, I’ll get to retire from this newsletter sooner than I’ve hoped. Fingers crossed!