Reading for pleasure, reading to learn

 Michael Dirda wondered aloud whether people still read Joseph Addison. Does anyone read him for pleasure?

Dirda reminds us that in former days people read Addison to learn something about style. Ben Franklin said he taught himself to write by studying Addison. John Steinbeck set out on his travels with Charley with a four-volume set of The Spectator. And then there’s Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement that the writer who wants to attain an English style must study Addison. (But it was possible to talk of having a Latin style in Johnson’s day.)

I read The Spectator for pleasure, rather than for instruction.

It never dawned on me to study Addison as a model. And I know people who’d say that I suffered horribly as a result.

Worse, in their view, when it did dawn on me that I should I spend some time studying writing, I looked to Rudolf Flesch’s The Art of Readable Writing.

I’ve heard Flesch’s school of thought ridiculed in creative ways. It’s not a “school” at all, just a recipe for brutal, colorless prose. I was told this by somebody: The kind of “writing” that Flesch taught is to real writing what Stalinist architecture is to architecture.

I’d protest, but this online journal is incriminating. I learned from Flesch. I read Addison for pleasure.

• Sources: Michael Dirda poses the question about Addison in his essay “Style Is the Man,” collected in Browsings; New York: Pegasus Books, 2015, pp. 5-7. Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Readable Writing; New York, Collier Books, 1962.