In defense of reading everything
People eventually ask what kind of reader you are. The question sounds casual, a conversation starter, not an interrogation. But it functions like a sorting hat. Literary fiction or thrillers? Horror or memoir? Only the classics, or only nonfiction? Is one tidy corner of the bookstore reliably yours?
I used to think I was a sci-fi-only reader, until I picked up a graphic novel once and put it back down. Too simple, I thought. Just a step up from the comics I read as a child. I was wrong, the way reading snobs always are; I mistook format for depth. Saves words, same point. That book taught me more about grief than several novels I had treated like homework.
A few years later, I found myself genuinely riveted by Army Motors, a military maintenance publication from the 1940s. Not ironically. Actually riveted. The writing was direct, visual, and often funny. It was technical writing doing exactly what it set out to do, without apology. I didn’t expect to find it alive. It was.
That’s when I stopped asking what kind of reader I was supposed to be at all.
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Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Karr’s Lit aren’t the same experience. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Michael Herr’s Dispatches don’t ask the same things of you. You’ll find all of these books on my shelf.
We move between grief and humor, devotion and absurdity, practical problems and large unanswerable questions. A reading life that holds all of that doesn’t feel scattered. It feels true. What I reach for on any given day is often just mood or curiosity. It’s Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem today, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary tomorrow, and David McCullough’s 1776 running alongside both.
That breadth pays back over time. A question about justice surfaces in a horror novel. Endurance shows up in a war memoir and then, unexpectedly, again in a nineteenth-century novel I was reading for pleasure. Frankenstein resurfaces in essays about artificial intelligence. Brave New World reappears whenever a new technology promises to reorganize society. The books keep finding each other across time in ways I couldn’t have predicted when I was reading any one of them. After a while, I stopped being surprised.
Reading preferences can harden into identity without much warning. I used to judge people by what they were reading, especially when traveling. On a plane, I’d clock the book covers and form a first impression before the person had said a word. I was usually wrong, and I knew it, which is probably why I switched to my Kindle whenever I thought someone might be doing the same to me. No cover, no exposure. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see the hypocrisy in that.
The plane was just a small theater for something larger. Certain books, such as Homer’s Iliad and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, are considered important. Others, like Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series, are shelved as entertainment or dismissed as genre. But what counts as important shifts constantly.
Reading everything is a quiet refusal of that sorting. Not because every book is equally good; discernment matters. But the sorting often reflects anxiety more than judgment about being seen in the wrong aisle or wasting time on the wrong kind of book.
Some people assume reading widely means reading loosely. I’ve found the opposite. I reread often.
At least once a year, I read Frankenstein. I’m not done with what it asks about creation and abandonment, or about what you owe the thing you made. Every couple of years, I return to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (Bookshop.org | Amazon) because I’m still not finished with what it does to the line between truth and memory. I come back to The Exorcist (Bookshop.org | Amazon) every so often because it forces me to face fear and stay with it longer than I want to. Rereading is how I know I was paying attention the first time.
The wider I read, the more each form asks of me. A novel earns a different kind of attention than a memoir. A cookbook works on a different logic than a political history. When I read carefully, I keep coming back to the same question: what is this trying to do, and did it do it honestly?
That question holds in any aisle of the bookstore.
For a long time, my shelf was narrow by design: dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic survival, supernatural horror. I built a reading life inside a particular kind of darkness and called it taste. It probably was, partly. But I had also stopped asking what I was missing.
Then I read The Road.
It fit the category on paper. Post-apocalyptic, relentlessly bleak. But McCarthy wasn’t doing what I expected. There was no world to map, no system to understand. Just a father and a son walking through ash, and prose so stripped down it had nowhere to hide. I didn’t know what to do with how it left me feeling. That wasn’t something the genre had asked of me before.
I didn’t start reading everything right away. It took time. But I started noticing that I was reaching for the familiar out of habit rather than hunger.
The reading life that feels most honest to me now is broad. It includes literary fiction and cookbooks, theology and thrillers, poetry and how-to guides. That breadth has carried me through more than one difficult year, not as escape, but as steadiness, a way of staying in conversation with myself when everything else is loud.
Where to go from here
If this essay is about refusing narrow categories, Why I keep reading, even when life is loud continues that thought through attention, presence, and difficult seasons. How to read without rating looks at criticism as interpretation rather than judgment. For a more practical version of the same idea, Modern books I think will become classics pushes back against the idea that literary value is already settled.
You can also browse the Reading Lists archive by theme, season, and lived experience, or continue through the Reading Life archive for more essays about attention, memory, rereading, and the habits that shape a reading life.
