On Not Reading

By Amy Hungerford 

"Here is why refusal is so important. Sometimes scholars will need not just to silently make their choices without acknowledging the choices forgone, but to refuse, in a reasoned and deliberate way, to read what the literary press and the literary marketplace put forward as worthy of attention. This requires a distinctly nonscholarly form of reasoning: One must decide, without reading a work, whether it is worth the time to read it or not. And a decision not to read must be defended, and received, on the basis of this different standard of evidence.

Why admit to this unscholarly approach, which seems to run against all our intellectual values — the commitment to open-minded reading and exploration, the commitment to gathering a credible body of evidence before making an argument or a judgment? We need to tolerate this shortfall in method because a scarce resource is at stake: the reader’s time, and, by extension, the attention that could be paid to any number of other books among the throngs that will always remain unread."