Dan Piepenbring responds to a “really snotty” piece in The Guardian about avoiding reading anything by a recently deceased author. He says there’s at least one truth that emerges from this snobbery. “There are writers we instinctively, permanently dislike: not only will we never read them, we will quietly relish the not-reading, finding in it a pleasure that can occasionally rival reading itself.”

It’s the nature of the beast, he says. Not that we have to be nasty in our opinions of authors we haven’t read, but we will reject–and even enjoy rejecting–books and authors for scant reasons of our own. And sometimes we miss good writing, which Piepenbring illustrates with his about-face on Michel Houellebecq. Once he enjoyed hating Houellebecq, but now he enjoys his work greatly.

“It took impassioned pleas by not one but several friends to get me to read him—an almost literal conversion effort. People have become Catholic for less.”