Class is now in session. Today’s lesson: a professor’s mind-numbingly tedious critique of books teaching readers how to read a book.

What the writers always insisted was that people are better off reading [Leo] Tolstoy than some yahoo from the University of Akron deconstructing Tolstoy, and who would disagree with that? Whoever it is, they seem to need a lot of convincing, because scads of authors have published books advising them to beware the snobs and schoolmarms in academia and look at “the text itself.” The “how-to-read” genre is venerable, already well under way when Noah Porter published Books and Reading, or What Books Shall I Read and How Should I Read Them? in 1871. There is something odd, though, about the latest slough of anti-academic books offering to teach us “how to read.” Perhaps it is the fact that they are written by academics like professor [Francine] Prose of Bard College. But perhaps it is because most of these books are only masquerading as guides to reading. What each really offers is a series of explications of famous passages, much like, well, academic criticism.

On to page two. Here’s where I keep my head from exploding.

… The fact is that more books are released each year, more novels are being published than ever before, and more copies are being sold. Not only that, but we are in the midst of an explosion of new small presses the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1920s. Poetry hasn’t enjoyed such a wide audience since then, either. Just as happened in the music industry, the calamitous blockbuster mentality that has literary authors up in arms has resulted in the blossoming of new outlets, new distribution networks, new excitement that has nothing to do with big publishing. Anti-modern screeds against the current state of reading like [Harold] Bloom’s cannot account for all this new activity any more than they can account for the Harry Potter phenomenon.

This isn’t to say everything is great. We’ve all heard how millions of filmgoing, TV-watching boobs are killing off whatever literature is left after the bad professors are done kicking it around. And we feel a little guilty. Isn’t it true, after all, that I might read more if I didn’t watch film or TV? Yes, probably. But then again, I drive seventy-five miles per hour, not [J. E.] Spingarn’s sixteen, I don’t play bridge, which takes an enormous amount of time, and what about the extra reading time I carve out by not having tea with the vicar? Iraq, global warming and the increasing gap between rich and poor aside, the state of things is not quite as dismal as these literary folk suggest.

Still awake? Shame. We haven’t even gotten to the point. Why this “how to read a book” book sucks, why that “how to read a book” book sucks—here we go.

So we have a collection of books that don’t do a very good job teaching people how to read, with a series of bogus antagonists and misleading titles. What might be the point? The better ones function as highfalutin Reader’s Digests, a way to get the pleasures and buzz of literary masterpieces in a fraction of the time required to actually read them. On the face of it, this is a kind of literary laziness, but I do the same thing with my iPod now, listening to thirty seconds of a tune, really loving it, before clicking on to the next. I had a half-hour commute for a while that would sometimes have me bumping through 150 tracks on my way in and another 150 on the way back.

But the point, God damn it! The point!

Virginia Woolf, in “How Should One Read a Book?” (1932), declared that the “only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” Every writer of how-to-read guides since has tipped his or her hat to some version of this obeisance to subjectivity, but none of them really believe it, do they, or why would they have written a guide? In the end, Dear Reader, these books themselves are part of that dread project: literary criticism written by professors. And they all beg the obvious question: Shouldn’t we be reading something better?

(Our sincerest apologies: Brandon’s head exploded. All posting at The After-Dinner Payback will now cease, at least until we can piece together his skull. Have a lovely day.)