“The Solitary Vice,” for anyone who's unfamiliar with the phrase, is the best-known Victorian euphemism for masturbation, a habit which, at the time, was widely believed to cause not only physical damage and moral decline in this life, but eternal damnation in the next.

This book is about a different solitary vice – the act of reading.

Though it may not be apparent at first, these two habits, masturbation and reading, have much in common. Both are most commonly carried out alone and in private, often in bed at night, just before sleep. Both are best enjoyed at leisure, since they tend to absorb your entire attention. Neither can be rushed, and both involve acts of fantasy and the imagination. Both can be so exciting that you can get addicted to them, and, like all addictions, they can be difficult to kick. Both may be lifelong practices; both are picked up in early childhood and continue well into old age. Both are habits that some people discover on their own, and others are introduced to, usually at school. Both customs are encouraged by solitude, and both usually take hold at a young age, especially if you're sent to bed too early, or left alone for too long.

Prior to the twentieth century, masturbation was widely considered to have dire effects. It was seen as a terribly dangerous habit, which, if not broken, could lead to all kinds of suffering in later life. Now, however, “self-love” is commonly regarded as the best way of learning about your own body and your sexual responses, and is strongly encouraged for its capacity to reduce physical and emotional tension. It's often suggested, in fact, that people aren't masturbating enough - that, due to vestigial guilt and fear, we're denying ourselves the knowledge essential to sexual health. In many ways, the same is true of reading. What was once considered a dangerous vice, to be forbidden and denounced at all costs, is now, according to one slogan, “what makes America great.”

Other recent campaign slogans have tried to persuade us that reading is sexy (“Get Caught Reading!”), radical (“Reading Changes Lives”), cool (“Get Real @ Your Library”), powerful (“Champions Read”) and productive (“Read and Grow”). But if these things were all true, would we really need so many catchy slogans to persuade us of the fact? It's easy to forget that our unthinking faith in the power of reading has emerged only in the last fifty years, since the development of all the other kinds of entertainment that now compete for our time and make reading look quaint and harmless in comparison – cable TV, the Internet, hand-held electronic devices, cellphones and video games. As historians of mass literacy have shown, our indiscriminate faith in the act of reading would, not so long ago, have seemed gloriously insane. In this book, Brottman wants to remind us that, while illiteracy is just as dangerous as sexual ignorance, in both cases, there's a case to be made for moderation.

There's no shortage of people who still argue against masturbation, but who, these days, has anything to say against reading? On the contrary, there seems be a new reading program every month, from Pizza Hut's “Book It!” Campaign and the “America Reads Challenge”, to the “Building of a Nation of Readers” crusade from the Library of Congress, the READ*WRITE*NOW program from the American Initiative on Reading and Writing, to the USA Football “Tackle Reading” drive.

Of course, basic literacy is imperative for anyone who hopes to live a fully functional life, but what I find most wrong-headed about these campaigns is the blanket assumption that reading is, by necessity, a priori “good for you”. While the ability to read may be valuable, is reading in itself really always a good thing? And who says that prolific readers are necessarily civic-minded people? Hitler was a great reader, after all, and so was the Unabomber.

There seems to be a widespread superstition today that, since “serious reading” was the most common way of learning in the past, it's the only reliable way to provide continuity over the generations, and the best way for us to understand complex questions about human nature and the ways of the world. Brottman suspects it's the fear that modes of communication are shifting from reading text to other kinds of visual processes that has inspired this assumption that reading is “good for you” – a superstition even less rationally founded than the old fear that all books are dangerous, since, if we're to take the results of a much-trumpeted 2002 NEA survey seriously, over fifty per cent of Americans are reading literature regularly, which suggests the printed book is in no grave danger of obsolescence.

In a 2004 New York Times editorial column responding to this survey, Andrew Solomon, the author of a book on depression, made the case that depression is one the rise partly because of “the loneliness that comes of spending the day with a TV or a computer or video screen”. According to Solomon, reading is an entry into dialogue; books can be friends who talk to you, and yet people today are indifferent to them, since we tend to devalue literature as a means to illumination. “That rates of depression are going up as the rates of reading are going down is no happenstance,” argues Solomon; he also suggests there might be a connection between those who don't read and those who develop Alzheimer’s, claiming that “if you read nothing, your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.”

What she finds spurious about such arguments is the assumption that the opposite of book reading is mental atrophy, that it’s only readers of books who are constantly in the process of accruing fresh experience and new knowledge. Solomon is ignoring the obvious fact that electronic media also require reading – a kind of reading that is no less “active” than any other form, and perhaps more so. In making the case that “visuals” have triumphed over “text”, Solomon overlooks the fact that text is also a visual medium.

Indeed, some have also made the case that watching television or playing video games, while not necessarily encouraging literacy, can help the brain to develop in ways more fitting to today's society. The fact is, reading plays a very small role in the capitalist model; in fact, you could almost say that reading, in fact, is antithetical to capitalism, in that it doesn't produce anything, it doesn't make any money, and it doesn't make you look younger, feel better or go faster. Those promoting the campaigns that reading is “good for you”, and that's it's reading that “Makes Our Country Great” need, if they're going to have any success, need to substantiate the idea of a “good” and a “great” that isn’t bound up with what most people consider the most important achievements in life — earning money, being healthy, and having a happy and loving family, since none of these achievements require you to read.

In fact, Brottman says, the opposite is true: basic literacy aside, the more time you spend reading, the less likely it is that you'll achieve any of these things. In her own case, reading seldom made her feel better, and often induced, rather than relieved depression. Reading was not good for her; it did not make her happy, in fact, she explains, if you read too much, like she did, reading may well change your life – by turning it into a lonely and miserable ordeal.

But this polemic is not as one-sided as it sounds—there are plenty of books that give the author a lot of pleasure. In retrospect, however, she discovers that the books that have meant the most to her throughout her life have been those that, on first reading, she found either very disturbing or very difficult to read. Mortimer J. Adler, founder of the Great Books program, believed that all genuine learning involves some degree of suffering. Brottman argues that there are plenty of books that are disturbing and disillusioning but can still give deep pleasure and satisfaction, though in the most powerful books of this kind, the idea of “fun” is surely out of place, if only because the most sobering aspects of the human condition aren’t easy to come to terms with.

Here, she argues, lies the real power of reading. It can help you anatomize and explore the inner lives of people very different from you, people who are immoral, venal, vicious, evil. Reading can shape the mind in significant ways that other kinds of thinking can’t. It can help you to be less self-centered, more able to see the world through other people’s eyes. Only literature, and only the most meaningful, can lead you on that slow, gradual journey downriver, deep into the darkness of the human condition. This is a place most people don’t want to visit even once, let alone stay to explore.

Mikita Brottman was born and raised in Sheffield, England. She has a PhD in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, and has taught in various universities in Europe and the U.S. Her main field of research interest is the pathological impulse in contemporary culture; she has authored and edited a number of books on this subject, including, most recently, High Theory, Low Culture. She writes regularly for a number of publications, both mainstream and alternative, and is also a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is currently Professor of Language, Literature and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Mikita Brottman lives in Baltimore, MD.

Seven-city author tour: Boston MA, New York NY, Baltimore MD, Washington DC, Philadelphia PA, Minneapolis MN, San Francisco CA.