Recently, BBC TV broadcast the first series of My Life in Books, in which well-known personalities are interviewed about five special books which have shaped their lives. The day after the first episode, I was poking around a secondhand bookshop – nothing remarkable about that, as you’ll see – when I chanced on a volume with the mirror-image title, The Books in My Life. This was no more than a coincidence. The Books in My Life was published fifty years ago; I had never heard of it and I doubt the producers of My Life in Books had either. However, on closer inspection, The Books in My Life was similar to The Year of Reading Dangerously in a number of significant ways. Just as in this book, the author of The Books in My Life discourses at length on the stories he read as a child, the influence of fiction on his imagination, the conundrum of personal taste, the problem of ‘great books’. He incorporates letters and diary excerpts into the text. There are appendices which catalogue the author’s favourite titles; there is even a satirical, though not unserious, chapter entitled ‘Reading in the Toilet’. And, with a certain inevitability, the writer’s name is Miller. Somewhat spooked, I bought the book. On the up side, at least he wasn’t called Andy.
Fig. 3: ‘Indubitably the vast majority of books overlap one another.’
The Books in My Life is the work of Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer and other racy romans à clef. In the opening chapter, he offers a simple phrase to sum up the authors or books that had remained with him over the years: ‘They were alive and they spoke to me!’ I cannot think of a more eloquent definition of greatness than that and I borrow it from my predecessor and semi-namesake with gratitude. It encapsulates the type of book I was hunting for during my year of dangerous reading, books that were alive and that spoke to me while I tried to deal with the trials of everyday existence: commuting, working in an office, being a new dad, getting older. The Year of Reading Dangerously, then, is a book about great books – reading them, writing them – and how life can get in the way. Whether it is great in itself will depend on whether, as you turn the pages, the machine begins to hum; on whether it comes alive and speaks to you.
The first decade of the twenty-first century was, superficially, a good time to be a book lover. You heard about a new book from a friend or on a television book club. Maybe a customer review caught your eye. You purchased the book from a superstore or supermarket, or you bought the audio edition to listen to in the car or at the gym. Over a glass of wine, you talked about it with your friends or reading group. How did it make you feel? Were you broadly in agreement? Later, perhaps you saw the author discuss the same book at a sold-out event or literary festival. You raised your hand and asked a question; you got involved. And if you had the technical know-how, it became possible to achieve all of the above virtually. You read off the screen of an ereader or a tablet computer and shared your thoughts on the Internet. You tweeted and blogged, on the train or up the top of a mountain. The humble book was transformed from a clumpy bundle of paper and glue into a pass-key that unlocked a variety of interactive book-based experiences, most of which involved the chatty participation of other users. In comparison, the more traditional method of reading – i.e. sitting alone, looking at lines of words until the pages ran out – seemed distinctly starchy and pre-millennial.
In short, this was a period in which the phrase ‘you’re never alone with a good book’ started to sound less like a promise and more like a threat.
However, it wasn’t all stimulating debate, dry white wine and a healthy queue in the signing tent. At the same time these innovations were captivating a certain class of reader, libraries and bookshops were struggling to survive. Ever since the advent of the big chain bookstores in the 1980s, with their armchairs and coffee shops, local independent booksellers have found it hard to compete. Now the chains’ market dominance was threatened in turn by the twin forces of the supermarkets – who offered deep discounts on the most popular titles, depriving booksellers of a vital source of income – and the Internet which, either in the guise of an online bookseller or as a provider of downloadable ebooks, can pulverise a bricks and mortar store in terms of stock. An average bookshop might hold a few thousand titles; the Internet provides instant access to these, plus millions more no bookshop could possibly contain, however super the store, comfy the chair or aromatic the coffee. Independent or otherwise, the dedicated bookseller started to vanish from the high street.
Meanwhile, public libraries continued to lose funding and the support of the local authorities who ran them. Budgets for books dwindled away. For a while, it seemed as though these institutions might survive as ‘community hubs’ – Internet terminals were installed and government ministers made speeches where they referred to the library of the future as ‘Facebook-3D’. fn2 However, in the wake of the credit crunch and the austerity cuts that followed, many libraries were deemed a luxury the community could no longer afford. Librarians were told their expertise was dispensable and that their roles could be performed by unpaid volunteers. Library closures gathered pace. Accusations of ‘cultural vandalism’ abounded; legal actions were launched. Some were successful and some were not. School libraries suffered a similar fate. In bankrupt California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to scrap new school textbooks in favour of ebook and Internet access as the state’s main portal to knowledge: ‘It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form.’fn3
fn2. Andy Burnham, former Culture Secretary, from a speech to the Public Libraries Association, 9 October 2008.
fn3. San Jose Mercury News, 7 June 2009.
Not very long ago, my family and I were staying at a cottage in the country. In the mornings, I worked on the second draft of this book – which was overdue – but in the afternoons we would explore the surrounding countryside or drive to the nearest town to pick up supplies from the local shop. The cottage was an authentic retreat and had no telephone or Internet access. One morning, I needed to double-check something I had written about Moby-Dick in Chapter VI. However, my copy of Moby-Dick was at home on the Shelf of Betterment. Never mind, I thought, if we go into town this afternoon, I’ll find a copy and look up what I need.
But Moby-Dick was nowhere to be found. The town’s bookshop had closed down the previous year and the library did not hold it in stock. I asked the volunteer behind the desk if I could use one of their Internet terminals but she told me their server was down and they weren’t expecting it to be restored for several days. Finally, in a supermarket on the ring-road, I located Melville’s great novel. It was one of a hundred classic books in the Nintendo 100 Classic Book Collection, a cartridge for the Nintendo DS handheld games console. I don’t know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park – I doubt you have – but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamour of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.
I accept that this story illustrates that it is technically possible to buy a copy of Moby-Dick on what passes for the high street. It might also be advanced as further evidence of the adaptability of the book. But to me it demonstrates how marginal good books might become in the future. Surely Moby-Dick deserves to be something more than just a sliver of content on a screen? I feel much the same when I see books piled up on pallets in supermarkets, like crates of beer or charcoal briquettes, and I am shocked to be reminded that there is nothing intrinsically special about books unless we invest them with values other than ‘value’ and we create spaces in which to do it.
Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church.
So it has been my mixed fortune to be occupied with this book about books in a period of frenetic cultural upheaval, with further trouble ahead. Several competing forces threaten to alter the way we think about reading, what we read and how we read it – the Internet, bookstores, libraries, our governments. Meanwhile, the last decade has given us blogs, book groups, festivals,