The Great Books Workout

By LAURA MILLER

An Englishman once told me that although he was shocked at how poorly educated the average American is, he considered the self-educated among us to be the best-read people he'd ever met. His statement might have been engineered to satisfy two contradictory stateside penchants: our persistent, self-flagellating faith in the superior sophistication of Europeans and our conviction that if we set our minds and most of our spare time to it, we can remake ourselves into savants. A surprising number of people harbor the belief that they will become thoroughly well read -- whatever that means -- once they get a proper chance to apply themselves. Carry around a new book like ''The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had,'' by Susan Wise Bauer, and friends will leaf through it earnestly, dreaming of a day when they'll finally be conversant with Sophocles and Rene Descartes. Surely that's why Mortimer Adler's ''How to Read a Book'' remains in print more than 60 years after it first came out and Harold Bloom's ''How to Read and Why'' became a best seller in 2000.

Although do-it-yourself Great Books reading programs like these have a loftier air than other self-improvement schemes, I suspect they're abandoned even more quickly than the latest diet plan or resolution to hit the gym four times a week. The benefits of slimming down and getting fit are obvious and uncontestable, after all, while the advantages of a familiarity with Plato's ''Republic'' remain somewhat obscure; unless you brag about it, no one's even going to know. Reading, like regular exercise, is one of those things people feel they really ought to do more of and yet never get around to, and as a result it's the subject of both guilt and a tut-tutting concern with regard to our fellow citizens. ''At least they're reading books,'' goes the response when some stuffed shirt deplores the popularity of the Harry Potter series and Oprah's Book Club. The act of reading has become a virtue in itself, regardless of the book read. The forlorn, unspoken hope is that like marijuana, a middlebrow novel might lead to stronger stuff.

Even if it does, so what? Quitting smoking will keep you from making yourself and those around you sick, and losing weight may help you get a date or become less of a trial to those seated next to you on an airplane, but how does one person's extensive reading benefit her fellow man? Or even herself? We want children to read because we're responsible for educating them enough to give them a start in the world, but is an adult's time better spent with a book than with her family and friends or, to be old-fashioned about it, in good works? How do reading gurus justify expending the hours and effort their regimens demand?

Adler, in the schoolmasterly tone of another era, explains that his book is for those readers who want to ''gain increased understanding,'' not just information, through a process ''something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.'' Because ''we can learn only from our 'betters,' '' reading any old thing has no particular value. However entertaining that middlebrow novel may be, ''improvement in reading skill does not accompany it.'' You must ''stretch'' your mind by attempting those works that ''make severe demands on the reader'' or ''the mind can atrophy, like the muscles.''

Adler's notion of great books as intellectual NordicTrack machines is a far cry from the swooning passions of ''A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life,'' by Arnold Weinstein, published last month. Weinstein, who teaches comparative literature at Brown University, is the sort of professor who at the beginning of a course asks his students, ''How many of you are hurting now?'' (This would annoy Susan Wise Bauer, who complains of contemporary teachers ''asking 6-year-olds how they feel about what they're learning long before they've properly had a chance to learn it.'') Weinstein's thesis, which he seems to consider bold and innovative, holds that great literature is deeply moving and makes us feel connected to other human beings. Or, as he would put it, art unveils ''a pulsating world of emotions and experiences that is overflowing all the time, spilling into and onto the scene we inhabit, ultimately and deviously composing the scene we inhabit, transposing the people we see into figures from our inner worlds.''

''A Scream Goes Through the House'' is an overheated swamp of abstractions, mixed metaphors and the occasional startling confidence (''I'll spare the reader a list of the substances I routinely ingest to remain me''), partly intended to ''show that the bookshelf is as basic a resource for body and mind, especially the body and the mind in pain, as the medicine shelf.'' But along with touting the quasi-pharmaceutical powers of books, Weinstein echoes an age-old argument on behalf of reading: like travel, it's broadening. Adler believes that reading increases sense, while Weinstein thinks it enhances sensibility. Clifton Fadiman, in his introduction to ''The Lifetime Reading Plan,'' maintains that the titles he lists can be ''a source of continuous internal growth,'' and presumably, as participants in a democracy, we all benefit when our fellow Americans are not just well informed but also open-minded.

Would that it were so, but I can't say I've seen much evidence to support the notion that reading is good for us. Some of the most voracious readers I know are also some of the most rigid thinkers. An individual can be remarkably insensitive to the feelings of others despite having studied stacks of great novels. As in the case of Emma Bovary, reading can even spoil your appetite for real life. There's not much indication, either, that reading substantially improves anyone's character -- in fact, it often seems to have the opposite influence. Nor does it sweeten the disposition. The imperious Harold Bloom could well serve as Exhibit A to that effect, which may be why I like his take on reading best. ''The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social,'' he writes in ''How to Read and Why.'' If great books enlarge us, we also find such ''augmentations'' enjoyable. Solitary pleasure is finally the only real reason for reading, which makes it sound more like a vice than a virtue. Now, if we can only convince everyone else of that, it might really catch on.