Voracious Reader

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m calling from South Bend, Indiana, where I’m a graduate student at Notre Dame.

Excellent.

Thanks so much for taking my call.

Sure.

Yeah, glad to have you.

Well, I’m hoping you can actually help me with something that I’m working on for my dissertation. So the stakes are high for me.

Wow.

But I’ve been curious about the origin and early uses of the phrase voracious reading. I’m hoping you can help me find out more about this phrase. And why voracious?

Well, you know, it’s a term that you hear used a lot, voracious reader.

Sure.

And I think most people mean it as a compliment these days, but it’s always struck me as kind of a puzzling phrase because, you know, it’s not usually considered good to be voracious about anything else. So it’s sort of puzzling.

And the way it comes into my work is that for part of my dissertation, I’m looking at what some scholars call the gestatory trope, which just is kind of a fancy way of saying the way we talk about reading and eating.

The way we talk about reading and eating?

Mm—

Interesting.

Voracious reader.

Well, I guess you’re suggesting that voracious, which comes from the Latin word meaning to eat, right? It’s related to words like devour and carnivore. It has to do with eating.

And I guess you’re saying that when you hear voracious, you think more of a teenager in the kitchen.

Right.

And sort of, you know, it has this idea of not discriminating, not having. So maybe you could oppose voracious consumption with tasteful consumption.

Oh, I see.

I’ve never made that distinction, but I could see that.

Yeah, sort of fast food versus slow food.

Right.

And I think we use it that way when we talk about food. But when we talk about literature, maybe not. I don’t know. We say it with a bit of wonder when somebody is a voracious reader. Maybe respect or we think that they’re kind of a spectacle, right?

If somebody is a voracious reader, they do it beyond all bounds of reason.

Yeah, I think people today describe themselves as a voracious reader and they mean it with pride, don’t you think?

Yeah.

I mean, you must be a voracious reader, Lauren.

I am. I think so.

But are you in the closet about it?

People have told me that.

Well, you know, I don’t know. I’ve often been called a voracious reader, but I haven’t quite decided how I feel about that.

Well, it’s a badge of honor, frankly, really. To be a voracious reader, to be called one, is a good thing.

I hope so.

Well, if we said a gluttonous reader, that carries more of a negative connotation. But I think voracious, to me, means zesty.

Yeah, I don’t think of it as meaning that you’re greedy or that you consume more than you ought to.

Okay, well, that’s good.

I don’t.

I don’t.

And I think that when we look in the text over the years where it’s been used, even up to the modern day where I don’t think there’s, I think half of the Match.com profiles say, I’m a voracious reader.

Do they spell it correctly?

Well.

Well, I’m wondering, you mentioned early mentions of the term voracious reader, and I’m not aware of anything that suggests that it’s a negative thing. I mean, as you probably know, there was criticism as the 18th century English novel began to develop that reading novels was a pastime of the middle class and really a time waster, right? A frivolous thing that ladies of leisure would do.

Right, right. Yeah, so I’m kind of wondering about that, because it seems like even today when we do talk about someone as a voracious reader, mostly we mean that they read novels. I mean, I don’t think people are often accused of being a voracious reader for reading biographies or something like that.

Yeah, they’re not voraciously reading the Congressional Quarterly, are they?

Yeah, yeah. Maybe there are those people out there. But it does seem to be kind of specific to novels, at least.

Yeah, and I just, I think what we’re plugging into, and Martha introduced it very well, we’re plugging to the idea that some people believe that reading fiction, in particular, is less meritus than reading nonfiction, right? And if you read a lot of fiction, it must somehow be bad for you because to do anything with that kind of extreme behavior, right? It’s not moderated.

It’s unmoderated behavior taken to an extreme, and that’s automatically seen as bad regardless of what it is.

Yeah, and that was one of the criticisms of the early novels, that they weren’t real.

Right.

Well, I’ll be interested to see your dissertation when it’s finished. Can you sum it up for us in one sentence?

Yeah, sure.

So my dissertation looks at food and consumption in early 20th century British and Irish literature, in novels, really, and short stories. And then there’s just one chapter where I’m focusing really on what I’m calling the gustatory trope, and the idea of literary taste, and how some of these terms, like voracious reader, might have been used at the time.

Well, I would be very interested to hear what our listeners have to think about this, about voracious reader.

Great, well, yeah, that would be fun.

Thanks for introducing an interesting topic, Lauren.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, good luck with the dissertation.

Thank you.

Okay, bye-bye.

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