This is not about comedian Anthony Jeselnik. Anthony Jeselnik genuinely loves books and wants people to read more. Terrific, totally on board. Go forth and may your efforts succeed. This is about a phrase of his in this very good profile in The Los Angeles Times: “I’m trying to make reading cool again.”
This is an idea that crops up now and again, that the cure or safeguarding of reading culture can and must come from making reading “cool.” In the inexorable logic of popular culture, cool is the currency of attention and therefore survival, so if you want something to stick around, it needs to be cool (or sexually transmitted, which is trickier for books).
Let me offer this instead: poppycock. People who read have never really been cool. People who write certainly haven’t been. There are the odd cool writers, but they are cool people who happen to be writers (Joan Didion) or that got associated with coolness after they were famous already. But reading itself has always been the redoubt of the weird. The loner. The eccentric. The oddball. That readers find each other is powerful because of that intrinsic strangeness of being a reader at all.
What reading offers is in some ways the opposite of cool. It is the solace of knowing that there are other weirdos out there who care about things that are expressly uncool, who like complexity, ugliness, indeterminacy, and the range of human messiness that cool is always trying to distance itself from.
If people read more because they think it is cool, I am all for it. But I suspect that if people read more, it will be because they want a respite from trying to be cool, from playing the game of doing things primarily so that others will think you are cool for doing them. Which is where most of us started, whether we liked it or not.