Steve Donoghue is a prominent book reviewer and restless vlogger. He is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly, and has reviewed books in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The National, and the Daily Star — to name just a few. Donoghue’s videos have created a small but notable group on Booktube (the corner of YouTube focused on books), where he and his four legged sidekick, Frieda, discuss everything from Kafka to Kawabata.
In this interview we discuss reading tips, Steve’s YouTube community, and Steve’s hatred of philosophy.
His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.
So, Steve, you’ve managed to gain quite a cult following on YouTube. Do you ever get recognised?
Steve Donoghue: Cult following? Hah! I’ve always wanted a cult following! I never thought this would happen, but: I have indeed been recognized a few times when I’m out and about. It’s always surreal and wonderful.
Your community on YouTube is uncharacteristically friendly, why do you think that is?
SD: Well, it’s not just the community that’s grown up around my own channel — the entire section of BookTube where I fit is a very friendly place, full of real people and real connections rather than grifters and trolls.
However, there are the occasional critical videos. How do you respond to them?
SD: I try not to respond. There’s really no point.
Do you ever worry about being cancelled? You talk quite often about ‘cancel culture’ and some of the things that irritate you in the literary world, especially around the website formerly known as Twitter.
SD: Surely by this point we all worry, at least in the back of our mind, about being cancelled? It’s this mindless, roaming animal out there in the world, and the only way any of us can be 100% certain it won’t come for us is to self-censor and stick to the current hymnal. But I try not to think about it too much!
Would you ever take your videos to a shorter format, like TikTok?
SD: Hah! I can barely make a video that’s under 15 minutes long, even if all I want to do is say ‘hi’! I don’t see how I could be satisfied with TikTok, although I’m curious to give it a try.
Steve, you’re known for having an almost inhuman reading pace. How did you achieve that? I assume that as a young man you didn’t read hundreds of books a year?
SD: It’s not almost inhuman, I promise! It’s just the result of long practice. If you read for hours and hours every single day, I guarantee your own reading pace would resemble mine.
What tips would you recommend for people who want to read more?
SD: There’s really only a handful of such tips: a) intentionally make time for reading, b) concentrate on reading (i.e. no distractions), and c) eliminate the sub-vocalizing where you’re sounding out the words in your mind. Although I’d also stress that it’s not a race! There’s nothing wrong with reading at your own most comfortable pace.
How do you remember what you read? Often, people who read lots, suffer from a form of ‘reading amnesia’ where they struggle to remember what they read. I often forget the name of characters in novels, or specific facts in nonfiction books.
SD: I’ve never really understood ‘reading amnesia’ — I suspect it might have something to do with (b) above!
You are one of the few readers who is equally as passionate about fiction as nonfiction. Why do you think people silo themselves into one type of reader?
SD: I think this silo behaviour is a completely natural defence reaction to the sheer number of books out there to be read. People become aware of that vast ocean of books they’ll never read, and they intentionally mark off a much, much smaller patch that seems manageable. Sometimes the resulting patch is very, very small — I know people who only read cozy mysteries, or epic fantasy, and of course there was the whole adults-reading-only-YA fad we all watched some years ago.
How should people get out of that silo? I tend to read nonfiction as I haven’t found many novelists that appeal to me, other than Nabokov and Kafka.
SD: The only way out of the silo is to be adventurous, truly adventurous, in your reading! And since that involves the kind of profoundly personal risk that only reading represents, most people don’t want it as an option. Look at your own examples: Nabokov and Kafka! Not, say, Rosamund Pilcher and Dennis Cooper, no — Nabokov and Kafka! Already some risk-mitigation happening there, I think.
You are known for your hatred of philosophy. Why do you dislike philosophy so much? I notice that you’ve a framed photograph of Erasmus in your room.
SD: I hate the genre of philosophy mainly for two reasons, only one of which is fair to the genre: first, it’s a complete waste of time, just endless gassy word-games, and second, the one that’s not fair, it does something truly horrifying to the men who read it, turning them into the very worst, most pompous, most condescending people on the planet.
Are there any other types of books that you find worthless?
SD: Mainly business-motivation and bro-motivation books, the kind of life-by-epigram “The dreams you’re not dreaming are the to-do list of the life you’re not living” crap.
You have said many times that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is your favourite book. Why?
SD: I’m not sure there’s really a ‘why’ when it comes to a personal favourite, is there? I love the way Ovid braids and folds and counter-folds his narrative, and I love his endless storytelling techniques, but that feels almost disloyal to say, since Ovid is very much a persona favourite before he’s literary master in my mind.
If you were to recommend 5 books that would convert a non-reader into a reader, what would they be?
There are no magic books! I know there are ‘this book made me a reader’ anecdotes out there, but there are no ‘this book kept me a reader’ anecdotes, because reading is a sustained practice, not a blinding white light on the road to Damascus. I can recommend some books a person might like, it’s only reading that can make a reader.
Has reading ever politicised you?
SD: Well, reading the news certainly has! Until the advent of social media, I think reading the news politicized everybody, one way or another.
Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that society had left the typographic age and entered “the age of show business” where TV culture, with its obsession for entertainment (at the cost of high quality information) dumbed down our culture, and made us less literate. What do you make of arguments like these, has the rise of the television as a medium of discourse eclipsed the book and denigrated public debate?
SD: I’m sure all these different violently aphasic vectors — television, the Internet, social media — have eroded attention spans and coarsened the public discourse. Probably that’s unavoidable, although the way some social media sites encourage feces-throwing strikes me a new kind of acceleration.
I’ve found mixed results when trying to research whether reading has increased or decreased over the past few decades. Do you believe that young people read less?
SD: Young people regularly report to surveys that they’re reading more (and, hilariously, that they’re preferring old-timey print-and-paper books), and the important thing to remember is: they’re lying. When they say such preposterous, visibly false things, to survey-takers, they’re crafting and maintaining a BRAND they like for themselves, the second self that all young people have in the age of social media. That second self, that brand, is not real. Its seamless, unhesitating reporting will shape the end results of polls, but it’s important to understand and remember: that second self is not real. It’s a construct made out of delusions and click-farming. There are roughly 75 million people in the US under the age of 18. About 6 of them read.
If you were benevolent dictator of the world, what would you do to encourage more people to read? @
SD: In light of the era we’re all entering, I should stress the obvious here: dictators don’t encourage — they mandate, and I’m against any kind of mandate involving reading (and also against dictators). But that having been stipulated, there are plenty of things non-dictators can to do encourage reading, but they all depend on an element that’s increasingly rare. That element can be stated very simply: only readers can make readers. Strictures won’t do it. Morality lessons won’t do it. Mandatory reading assignments won’t do it. Non-readers (including kids) will only become readers when they see how eagerly, how passionately, somebody they like or admire enjoys reading. As trite as it sounds, the only way to make readers is through the power of example — whether it’s set by teachers, librarians, peers, or parents.
You tend to argue against the instrumentalisation of reading, arguing that someone should only read for pleasure. Do you think too many young people see reading as an instrumentalist task. I’m thinking here of Bill Hicks’ joke about a waffle waitress asking “what are you reading for?”
SD: Well honestly, how could young people NOT see reading as instrumentalist? When they’re at school, they’re handed reading assignments from the moment they hit the fifth grade. And when they’re not at school, they’re seeing s****** over-filtered lunatics on social media hawking books they haven’t read with fake tears in their eyes, to chase clicks and clout. It’s only in the slim interstices that they might see real people genuinely loving books, only a thin crack through which they can glimpse what honestly passionate reading could mean for themselves. It’s probably never been harder for young people to see that.
Do you think that e-readers are bad for reading? I’ve seen some experts warn that they may encourage an overreliance on screens as entertainment, and may impact the way that information is absorbed.
SD: Hah! No, I don’t think e-readers are bad for reading! The devices are light and incredibly convenient, they hold thousands of books (huge number of which can be free), they can be hugely and easily annotated, they remove any self-consciousness by anonymizing what you’re reading, and the connection of screens with entertainment is all to the good, since books should be entertaining. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that screens somehow impede the absorption and retention of information; concentration is concentration, after all.
