When I mentioned the theme of this piece, for instance, my daughter immediately and shamelessly confessed to having recently completed an English essay on a text that she hadn’t even opened, based purely on the class discussion that she had attended on the first day back after a week off with Covid. But I have noticed that such libertine manners are fast becoming normalised. I have a shell like a Galapagos Tortoise when challenged on this sort of thing.
I AM PRETENDING THAT I AM DEAD HOW TO
Now, as a life-long pseud, I learned years ago how to float in an implied familiarity with an author or their work, without telling an outright lie.
We - okay, I - have quietly developed a very much more relaxed attitude to what we mean by “to read” or as is the preferred and more inclusive term, “to know”, a book. I earnestly endorse quotation anthologies Others are more “browsed with benefits” or “it’s complicated”. A certain fuzziness now surrounds the question of our relationship with a given book. It is the unwelcome reminder that our literary to-do list grows ever longer as our mortal span contracts.Īnd so (sorry, Orwell, but my guilt is too great to avoid the passive voice) certain strategies have evolved. But in my case at least, it is perfectly conscious.
The diagnosis focuses on posited aromatic chemicals in ink or the ominous quiet that predominates and subconsciously reminds us of exam halls. The Mariko Aoki phenomenon describes the sudden need to evacuate one’s bowels on entering a book shop. That’s before you factor in the fractal nature of the coastline. “The larger the island of knowledge,” goes the old Reader’s Digest phrase, “the longer the shoreline of wonder.” I used to find that thought reassuring, even awe-inspiring. With genres such as “speculative fiction” that used to be for comics and cranks now taken seriously, and made-up genres like psycho-geography and ethnography sprouting all the time, not to mention the world’s back catalogue being available on one’s phone (and of course on-line titles like The Critic spewing essential verbiage like a broken main into the thoroughfare of discourse 24 hours a day), it is quite impossible to keep up or even to tread water.Īs the world divides ever more decisively into the long-form literate and the snapshot social-mediated, maintaining well-articulated and informed opinions becomes ever more demanding on our time. Now, over ten trillion new titles hit the shelves every month in Young Adult fiction alone. There were a few classics one needed to be acquainted with - Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, perhaps Mme Bovary to show willing - and only three or four new books a year of importance - Bonfire of the Vanities, Wild Swans, perhaps a reissue of Absolute Beginners.
It sat somewhere between the spivviness of gate-crashing a private function and the cringe of having a scale replica of Michelangelo’s David on the mantelpiece.īut it was also as easily remedied, should one wish. We have always been prone to exaggerate our capacity for books, but talking about specific books one has not read - let alone basing entire stand-up sets on them - used to be frowned upon. But would now work with “I am reading a book”, too. “I am writing a book,” says the man at the drinks party, in the old Peter Cook cartoon.
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