I was sitting on a bench by the beach, reading a book, when someone walked by and mentioned that he hated the author. I won't say what book I had, but the author is famous. I’m always surprised when people tell me that they hate certain authors, these authors usually the well-known variety who have their newest releases stacked in bookstore windows. Haruki Murakami, Malcolm Gladwell, J.K. Rowling, a lot of people hate them. Back when Bill Simmons wrote regularly for ESPN and Grantland, I remember people saying the same thing about him – Bill Simmons, can’t read him, I hate that guy.
Hate is always confusing to me, and especially about writers. Something evil deserves our hate, but I don't know of many evil writers. So why do people hate, say, Malcolm Gladwell? I’ve read most of his work and I can’t recall much evil, so he flunks my test. You haters, get in touch and let me know.
I gazed out toward the sea and thought about my problem. Little kids can barely read and they seem to hate nothing, except maybe the very act of reading. Was it possible that my reading skills were not good enough to understand why I should hate these authors? There were two fat men waddling down by the water, metal detectors out. I could go ask them, but why interrupt their walk? Plus, I would need to go into the sand, and I'd much rather stay on the bench.
I decided to blame my personality. I like to build on strengths and I'll work tirelessly to find potential. As a reader, this means I’ll endure five hundred pages of crap to find three good sentences. I don’t think I could do this if I felt hatred while reading. The treasure hunters were almost out of sight. I wondered – do those guys hate the sand? Of course not, they were looking for Captain Kidd’s booty, or maybe a couple of dimes.
This was the moment when I finally understood everything. See, I hate the sand, can’t stand the stuff. Dry sand is scratchy and uncomfortable, wet sand sticks to my toes and gets in my socks. God help me if sand gets in my food. It’s a big reason why I don’t often go to the beach. But if I told this to those guys, they wouldn’t understand me. The sand is what they deal with when treasure hunting; it’s just a fact of the environment. It's possible that they might love the sand, but my guess is that it never occurred to them to have an opinion about the sand.
When I talk to people about books, the roles are reversed. I read seventy-five books this year, my eyes scanning endless sentences and paragraphs for hints about the author’s buried gold. Do you know how hard it is to find seventy-five books worth reading a year? Most people don’t. The first thing I would teach them is that hating authors gets you nowhere. There are barely enough books to begin with that ruling out some of these based on the author is going to reduce the quality of your reading list. That’s all hatred is, the fastest way to reduce quality, and it applies to life just as it applies to my reading list.
