In a brilliant essay in New Zealand's Metro, the writer Eleanor Catton, winner of last year's Man Booker prize for The Luminaries – a remarkable and groundbreaking novel I haven't read yet – defines the incompatibility of art and the shopping cart. And therefore the books that are most at risk from our attention and integrity deficits are those that require a bit of effort. They involve patience, solitude, contemplation. The traditional pleasures of reading are more complex than just enjoyment. Better to speak volumes than to read them. But the innate human desire to make ourselves look cleverer than we are, combined with an overabundance of consumer choice and the intense cultural bombardment of the digital age, means we increasingly lack both the time and willpower to engage with anything longer than 140 characters or more demanding than Granta or Grazia. Indeed, the sudden mass availability of free ebooks via sites such as Project Gutenberg ought to bring "the classics" closer to all of us. Just because a book is a bestseller does not automatically mean the book must be entirely without merit equally, a book's inclusion in the canon should not exclude it from your Kindle. A number of people have privately admitted to me they do the same.Īrguments over whether it's better to read, say, Dante's Inferno or Dan Brown's Inferno will always be with us. As Schopenhauer noted 150 years ago, "One usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents." And after drawing up a list of potential titles – which, incidentally, did not include To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men, because I was made to study them at school years ago – I realised I had inadvertently self-selected a series of books which, at various points in my life, I had lied about having read. Book lovers habitually accumulate more than they can actually read. Greenfield is clearly on to something, but this is not an entirely new phenomenon. "What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content first-hand but simply knowing that it exists." "What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate," he writes. In a New York Times blog, Karl Taro Greenfield talked about "faking cultural literacy". The experience led me to conclude that although we love to argue about books, acquire them, express strong opinions about The Goldfinch, etc, etc, more than ever we seem to be losing the knack of reading them. Some of the books are from the canon, and can be considered "classics" – Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Moby-Dick – and some are most certainly neither: The Da Vinci Code and, in the words of the Guardian's reviewer, "something called Krautrocksampler" by Julian Cope. I have just written one about 50 "great" books, the research for which involved staring at lines of words on pages until first the lines, and subsequently the pages, ran out, and then thinking about them until I knew what I wanted to commit to paper. The fact is that when reading a book there is no substitute for reading a book. It is a very good way not to get any reading done. However, taken alongside the general hum of social networks, book groups, the media-shopping complex and the literary festival season now upon us, I mistrust my own eagerness to engage with this sort of stuff. I find these debates about reading as enjoyably incensing as anyone – and, just to be clear, I deplore the restrictions placed on prisoners' access to books, which seems less of a storm in a teacup and more of a violation of basic human rights.
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