Balancing the Bitter: Making the Most of Something I Hate
file under: PROCESS NOTES
this one is from: AMBIKA
I just finished reading a book that I expected to like. Instead, I really, really, do not like it, for no immediately obvious reason. I agree with many of its arguments, I believe that the book’s message is important, and I’m even somewhat glad that it was commercially successful…AND YET!
I couldn’t imagine recommending the book to anyone without some sort of caveat…but what caveat? When I hate a book I think I should like and can’t easily figure out why (which doesn’t happen often, thankfully), trying to pin down the reasons I hate the book becomes something of an obsession. I feel like I need to make sense of my conundrum, and learn something—about myself, about books, about writing, and about the world—by digging into the depths of my discontent. It isn’t entirely driven by wanting to be right (though that’s probably part of it)...it’s also about wanting to do what feels like my due diligence, not letting my dislike go entirely unexamined. And so I begin a little sensemaking project.
I start by trying to get out of my own way, looking beyond my own particular perspective of this particular work. I’ll talk to my friends about the book—especially if they’ve read it as well, and, better yet, have a different take than I do. While reading this book, I had been texting about my growing dislike with a good friend, who’d quite liked the book when he’d read it some time ago. Our conversations were illuminating, but I realized I couldn’t keep venting at just this one poor friend—he hadn’t signed up to defend the book! So I texted five other people about it, but none of them had read the book, though four of them said it was “on my list.” They were generous enough to let me text them my thoughts nonetheless! Which I did, and that definitely helped me think things through.
I also try to read other (shorter) works by the same author, to see if a different format or context helps me see their vision more fully, and to reckon with how their standpoint might differ from mine. I then might try to read reviews of the book and listen to interviews with the author, to learn whether others share my discontent, or whether some sharp interlocution can illuminate what I’m missing. In this case, I found a later, related essay by this author but was too annoyed to get past the first few sentences. I then spent the rest of my morning listening to three conversations with the author, conducted by interviewers I really like and respect, after which I decided that nothing was going to make me change my mind about this book. And I’d already sunk too much time into this impromptu quest to continue to the last step of the process—reading other writers who approach the same subject from different angles, in search of a broader sense of the discourse and how I relate to it.
What I’m describing is the process of research, but what makes it different from most other research endeavors is that it originates in an almost-comically acute negative feeling, and is thus underlain by a current of unsettled urgency. As I move through this discontent-fueled information gathering, I will try on almost any critique of the book I can think of, and see if it sticks. I’ve had to get a LOT better at self-examination for this process to work—many of my initial critiques aren’t solid, or might be solid enough but don’t explain my strong feelings. At this stage, I cannot get too enamored of my own thoughts, else I fall into rabbit holes of misguided resentment from which I’ll eventually have to dig myself out, which is never much fun.
Eventually, after this frenzied burst of research and not-particularly-pleasant brainstorming, I start to get annoyed with myself, and tired of my own mind and attitude. I’ve learned the hard way that this is the time to stop, and let my subconscious marinate on everything that my conscious mind has thrown up in the last few hours or days (and no longer, if I’m lucky) of rumination. Easier said than done, but if my well of dislike has truly run dry, then it’ll feel like a blessed relief to be thinking about literally anything else at all. And usually, in time, some kind of answer will emerge, something that does actually change what I think or believe. And if it doesn’t, that’s okay too. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to not like things—but don’t be a dick about it (a catchy, essential reminder—I haven’t always gotten this right).
I don’t yet know why I didn’t like the book I just finished reading. But the pieces of an answer are beginning to emerge. One piece is that I might simply have read the book too late. It was published about five years ago, and maybe its arguments seem sort of obvious to me precisely because of the book’s success. Perhaps it shifted the discourse—and with it, my thinking—long before I got around to reading the book itself.
Another piece has to do with how the book came to be. Like so many books these days, it began as a well-argued essay that was very well-received, which then turned into a book deal. Many books that originate in this way, I believe, never needed to be anything more than an essay at all; as books, they fall flat, becoming repetitive and unconvincing after the first chapter.
Yet another piece of the puzzle is about the author’s choices about what to include in the book, and what to exclude, and what those choices seem to say about how the author positions themselves in their own intellectual ecosystem. And the final piece has something to do with my sense of how the author regards their audience—I’m not sure if they had a positive vision or hope for how readers would engage with their material, which left me feeling…uncared for? Or at least uninvested in my relationship with the book.
No one asked me for my opinion on this book, and I don’t need to deliver a fully coherent critique of it to anyone. But, having been through this sensemaking process nonetheless, I can turn these pieces of critique into something positive, inverting them into aspirations and goals for how I write myself, and into a deeper understanding of what I admire in others’ work. For a process that began in intense dislike, that might be as good an outcome as I can hope for.