I quite like the Guardian, and I’m an occasional subscriber to the paper’s website and book section. http://books.guardian.co.uk. Normally I find the news bits there quite interesting, though I sometimes forget to check as I’m – understandably – usually more focused on computing news. But today on looking over the news bits, and reading an article by John Crace, I had to ask myself just what the hell he was blabbering on about. Please, if you’d rather prime yourself before reading on, the article is here.
Now from what I can make out – though Mr Crace seems unsure himself, swaying this way and that before what seems a veiled attack on the British reading public and books in general – the theme of the piece is ‘how we read’. How quickly we read holds his attention briefly, and there’s a picture of a guy on a train supposedly struggling to live up to his standard of 60 pages per hours.
‘Writing the Digested Read for G2 may mean I get through rather more books than most, but that’s because I read in working hours.There again, even a couple of pages a day is a positive sprint for many.’
Is it just me that’s offended here? I’m sorry we don’t all speed through pages like Johnny 5. And do you know why it may be that guy on the train is struggling to read (as I was in the same position yesterday). It’s because there’s a very loud and distracting person on the phone, saying (truthfully) things like:
‘Well he’s got Skin Cancer, he deserves it of course……I mean he’s so arrogant…. oh he’s always been…’
‘But I’M not living with my mother-in-law! Can you imagine that? Nooo, she can have the flat in South Africa for all I care. ‘
‘And do you know how much we paid for it? £850,000. And it’s now worth £1.1million. A quarter of a million in two years! I know Maggie, I know!’
This is the reason many of us aren’t up to your mark Mr Crace. Loud people speaking during one of the only times those of us that commute get to read.
But my personal experiences aside, the article then spirals towards lambasting our Prime Minister for Mr Brown’s horror at a ‘new report from the Office for National Statistics [which] reveals that a quarter of people in the UK haven’t read a single book in the past year’. Frankly I think Mr Brown’s well within his rights to be horrified, the book being (far more than Crace’s offered suggestions of Art Galleries and the Theatre) the one of those three that is most widely available.
‘As with so many writers, you can’t help feeling the PM has rather lost the plot. You won’t find ministers in a tizzy about non-attendance at art galleries or theatres. So why are books so elevated?’
Why? Because of what I’ve said above. Not everyone can afford to go to theatre, and people are easily put off by galleries. Books – as he should know writing in the Books section of the website from one of the champions of literature - are the most level of the playing fields in the art world.
He goes on:
‘You can only imagine the government is infected with the same virus that causes nearly half the population to lie about their reading to make them look intelligent. Books are the yardstick by which most of us are found wanting. Haven’t read War and Peace? You’re on a cultural asbo.’
People lie about what they read? If so I don’t really believe that they do it to look intelligent. It’s a case of not wanting to feel like you’re being left out. And a ‘cultural asbo’ indeed! What are there, ‘Book Police’ all of a sudden? I’ve certainly never read War and Peace, and nor do I have the great urge to.
‘The problem for most of us is knowing where to start. There are more than 100,000 books published a year and – take it from me – most of them are rubbish. And you can’t necessarily trust the reviews because they’ve probably been written by a close friend or a sworn enemy.’
Seriously, the argument against him writes itself. (I’m skipping parts here to give my bile a rest), but he goes on to comment:
‘you could start with How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by the French academic Pierre Bayard, which exposes the pretentiousness of many of the smugly well-read.’
I mean, come on, the ‘smugly well read’? What does he think this is, powerplay by the Royal Society of Literature’?
‘Best of all, though, you could wait until October and get my forthcoming Digested Read of the 20th Century. After all, if you’re like many Brits, you won’t have anything to read before then’.
And funnily enough, if you’re like those that have read his article, you’ll have probably been insulted by his wild accusations and self-important, pea-soup writing style.
Of course it could all be very dry irony…but in that case it’s just as badly delivered.
My favourite part of it is that he offers a solution! Buy his book!
Of course he’s applying some high-brow-humour to his ramblings, yet you do get the sense that he is trying to distance himself from the plebs.
I’m not entirely sure how the reading information has been collected, though if it is accurate, I would have to say that it is terribly worrying. It could be that the constant bombardment of other medias has diluted people’s time spent with their noses in books. Home cinemas, computer games and the like seem to take up increasing amounts of free hours for many. I would say availability and convenience play a strong role these days.
Perhaps electronic delivery of books to the kind of convenient electronic hand-held readers that we see in sci-fi films will become widespread in the near future, and not the sole preserve of the rich and the geeks.
I would say, without refreshing myself of his wittering, that he merely skimmed over the practical, socio-economic factors involved, preferring instead to lambast those who will glorify themselves on the back-drop of these figures: the reading elite. And of course, promoted his book… what a load of self-serving twaddle.