For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that readers must take responsibility for their reading choices and should not blame authors if they dislike a book.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver highlights the personal responsibility of readers in their engagement with literature. She suggests that if a reader finds a novel unappealing, they should not dwell on it and instead explore other options available to them. The emphasis is on the active role of the reader in selecting and enjoying literature rather than criticizing the author for their preferences.
In practice
In a book club discussion when someone expresses dislike for a book.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.
The progress of the world depends almost entirely upon education.
One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.
What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?
We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.
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