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Originally Posted by rhadin
But you wouldn't have picked up the book to read if the subject choice didn't interest you. I don't pick up books on the biology of a dormouse in Winchester Cathedral because I am not interested in the subject matter.
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Not so. I pick up a book regardless of the subject because I have it on authority or have noticed that the writer is good.
I have no interest in the western as a genre. Yet I've read John Hawkes's western simply because I like his style.
More examples: Michelet's book on insects and Francis Ponge's book of descriptions of extremely prosaic objects. On a given day, I don't open textbooks on entomology and simple biology, or visual dictionaries, unless I'm doing research. However, I do read Michelet and Ponge for pleasure.
Yet another: William and Dorothy Wordsworth. On the surface, I ought to prefer William's poems to Dorothy's diary entries, since the poetry is more high-minded, dramatic and so on. But because I prefer Dorothy's prose style, with its surgical precision about plant life and so on, I'd rather read her entries than her brother's finished poems.
Here's the most telling example of all: I am not now nor will I ever be a Christian. Yet as interesting as I might find Bertrand Russell, I prefer reading Sir Thomas Browne's
Religio Medici and Jeremy Taylor's
Holy Dying because I enjoy their styles more than Russell's (and also the elaborate ways they think). (Of course, I prefer
Minima Moralia to all three, but that's for another topic.)
I'm a fan of the metaphysical poets for many of the same reasons: I enjoy "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together" (as Samuel Johnson famously said of their metaphors).
How many non-Christians, atheists and agnostics do you know who would rather read a strange and precisely-written book in praise of Christianity than a well-written but conventional book in praise of skepticism, or even a fairly well-written novel about war, romance and/or a series of violent or lascivious acts?
If you can't think of any, then you haven't met certain of my friends.
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If you were subject choice blind, you would, for example, simply go into a bookstore, close your eyes, let someone guide you to the nearest shelves regardless of subject matter, reach out and pick up the nearest book, buy it and read it. Is that what you do?
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You make the mistake of presuming that not caring about the subject is the equivalent of being blind. Some readers don't think as you do, but that doesn't imply their choices are uninformed. Some of us follow patterns of style and prosody as you do similarities in subject matter (if I understand you correctly).
Please do me a favor and don't jump to the next likely conclusion (though I'm not presuming it's in your nature to do so -- I simply mean it would be the next logical step given the trajectory of your reasoning).
Don't presume that, because I read for style and execution, I'm some bizarre and convoluted anomaly never seen before in Texas.
The truth is more mundane than that: You happen to choose books differently than I.