Why do we bother reading? Nobody’s forcing us, after all - at least after we’ve left school.
Yet according to the Office for National Statistics, in 2002 75% of the UK population read at least one book ; over 50% of adults read 5 or more; and 20% claim to have read a minimum of 20. The government-sponsored Library and Information Statistics Unit reports that in the year 2000/2001 there were no fewer than 406 million book borrowings, of which 71.2% were fiction - that’s an average of almost 7 for every man woman and child in the country. According to a poll commissioned for World Book Day 2001, the average reader spends between 4 and 6 hours a week curled up with a book; in Scotland, it’s precisely 5.8 hours. That’s getting on for an hour a day. And a survey of 1,000 adults for Bedtime Reading Week 2002 (!) found that 65% of us read mostly in bed, 25% in the bath and 10% (mainly men, of course) in the toilet. Half always read on holiday, and a third indulge their hobby on the way to work. (1)
I find these figures hugely encouraging. And they’re the basis on which I used the word ”armies” to describe the body of non-professional readers in this country at the start of Part 1. There’s a lot of us. Which is as it should be.
But these figures can’t tell us what we’re getting out of reading, and why books command such loyalty in an era when the leisure industry is constantly bombarding us with new ways to spend what free time we’ve got.
So in this part I’ll be looking at what literature means to us. Not so much what individual titles mean, but what literature as a collected body of writing represents - what it is and what it’s for. It’s more about how we react to literature than how we interpret it. And by ‘literature’ I’m not just referring to the ‘posh’ end of the market; there’s plenty of room for Catherine Cookson, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer in this survey too.
To that end, we’ll firstly examine the history and significance of the printed book, that (usually) oblong slab of cut paper that is the carrier of literature; that’ll tell us a fair bit about why we read and our patterns of consumption, past and present. Second, we’ll explore how literature and the reader interact, how meaning is created during that interaction, and how it can be communicated from reader to reader; lastly we’ll look at how that meaning survives to the point where it’s self sustaining, and, therefore, timeless.
So, in sum, this section is the story of the ongoing relationship between man and print, which, judging by those statistics is still in pretty good shape, all things considered.
That’ll keep us out of mischief for quite a few pages.
"No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence,
or whose attitude is patronizing."
American essayist and ‘literary stylist’ E.B. White
I can remember first learning to read on my own. It must have been what walking unassisted felt like, only I was too young to remember. But reading, as the cliche goes, opened up an entire new world that enabled me to communicate without the need for speech or gesture. With complete strangers. From anywhere on the planet. We all like to feel that our personal experiences are somehow unique, but it’s quite clear that Alberto Manguel, author of the excellent ‘A History of Reading’ felt exactly the same rush I did:
Then one day, from the window of a car . . . I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it just slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming, shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were. I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality . . . I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silent respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read. . . It was like acquiring an entirely new sense . . .
And so, I hope, it was with you. It’s a hugely significant moment in anyone’s life to learn how to decipher text.
From that milestone onwards, we become part of the huge family who are privileged to possess the gift of reading, the ability to turn written or printed symbols into meaning.(2) And don’t just take my word for it: Virginia Woolf once imagined God and St Peter having a conversation on the Day of Judgement wondering what benefits they could bestow on those who had been gathered up into heaven. “We have nothing to give them,” says God ruefully, “They have loved reading”.
And old Ginny knew a thing or two about why we mortals read, and the manner in which we digest literature. Not only, of course, was she a novelist and critic, she also co-founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 with her husband Leonard which signed up TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Sigmund Freud and Maxim Gorky, among others - not a bad little roster for an indie. In her collections of essays, ‘The Common Reader’, two volumes of which were published (by Hogarth) in 1925 and 1932, she makes the following observations, which I think are worth quoting in full:
There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. ". . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours." It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man's approval. The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole--a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.
In an uncharacteristic act of intellectual generosity, Virginia Woolf makes some excellent points about the way most of us organize our reading (or don’t):
1) Our consumption is mainly random; very few of us have a ‘programme’ for exploring different avenues in literature, even assuming that’s an ambition we’ve set ourselves. We’re like the silver ball in the pin table, careening off the buffers and being randomly propelled from one side of the machine to the other as we search for new stuff that might interest us. We either lack the initiative or knowledge to make many structured decisions about what we buy or borrow. So we’re not likely to have a full grasp of what’s available, and hence, what we might enjoy. And this lack of science is reflected in another set of official statistics: 40% of us regularly rely on friends’ recommendations for our choices, and 16% get tips on what to read from their work colleagues. 24% place our trust in reviewers and 14% of selections are governed by what adverts we chance to see. 8% don’t even know why they read, which brings us to Miss Woolf’s second point; (3)
2) While we might claim to read for a purpose beyond simple pleasure, at best we’re only dimly aware what that purpose is. We don’t, for example, approach or read a text in the way an academic would; usually, the level of time and attention we’re able to routinely invest in our reading doesn’t stretch to what might be termed a considered interpretation. More of us, according to figures originating from the National Literacy Trust, apparently read for ‘information’ rather than ‘entertainment’; but in the absence of a definition for either of those two terms in their survey, I would take this to mean that we expect to get something tangible or expressible from our reading labours, something meaningful we can take away and perhaps communicate to others. This would help make sense of the fact that “interest” in the subject matter is most regularly cited as the reason we pick up a book (71%); that kind of involvement is felt to be more satisfying than simply wallowing in a text and not being able to justify the investment of time to ourselves. (4)
3) Although the voice of the Common Reader is seldom heard in the media, it’s our patterns of attention and consumption that ultimately validate a book, and, yes, give it meaning. A book is nothing without a readership, a point I’ll expand on in a moment.
But before we do, let’s fast forward to 2001, and Nick Hornby’s novel ‘How to Be Good’, in which a more up-to-date Common Reader, GP and mother Katie Carr describes her experience of reading, or rather, her frustrated attempts to read:
I wanted someone wise to teach me things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life. And I know it’s pathetic that it should have been a children’s science fiction film telling me this - it should have been George Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Virginia Woolf. But then that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? There is no time or energy for Virginia Woolf, which means that I am forced to look for meaning and comfort in my son’s ‘Star Wars’ video.
It appears things haven’t changed much for the Common Reader in the last 70 years. Whereas Virginia Woolf (and Dr Johnson) had the good fortune to be able to dedicate that most precious (and increasingly rare) of commodities, time, to their experience of reading, the majority of us unfortunately don’t. And it is a time-consuming habit, as well as being an essentially selfish one which, if pursued single-mindedly, excludes pretty much all other outside factors - wives, boyfriends, children, the ironing, driving, TV, anything practical or social. And because it monopolizes the attention to such a degree, it’s not always easy to find space for it. Hence Katie’s having to resort to videos. She can at least make some pretence at spending quality time with her children while looking for the ‘meaning and comfort’ she’s after.
Now add to that something else that’s changed out of all recognition since Virginia Woolf was writing about her notional reader - the way we’re sold books. These days, books are not such much the clay tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai; they’re gradually assuming the status of a commodity, bought, sold and valued like any other, whether it be CD’s, fridges or tins of baked beans.
Not only are there many more books available than ever before (a staggering 120,000 appeared in the UK in 2002 alone, a figure which currently shows a modest rise each year0 (5), they’re being marketed using techniques that make traditionalists shudder (6). Heavens, we’ve now got book charts, just like pop music. And, following the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, booksellers can actually discount the things they sell. Just like any other retailer! So our relationship with books will have necessarily changed as a result of this consumer (and profit)-focused revolution - as we’ll discover, publishing is now a major player in the leisure industry, and not just a recreational activity for arty gentlemen with a bit of spare cash.
So I reckon it’s time to update our conception of ‘The Common Reader’, and his experience of this activity. In fact, let’s construct a whole new biography for him.
I think we’ll start by giving him a new name, since, being brought up in Lancashire, I’m acutely aware that ‘common’ may bring pejorative overtones into the discussion (as in ‘not out of the top drawer’). Let’s call him ‘The Recreational Reader’, since that represents more accurately that type of reading that usually ends up with the book thudding to the bedroom floor as he falls asleep mid way through a sentence he’s already scanned five times because he’s too tired to concentrate. And, as I admonished at the start of this book, for ‘he’, please read ‘and she’ throughout.
So let’s join our Recreational Reader as he stands by the door of the bookshop one Saturday morning, wondering what he’s going to buy with his hard-earned disposable income.
1. For stats junkies, there’s more on the National Literacy Trust’s excellent website at www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/STATS/keystats3.html#Reading
2. Yet that family may not be as big as we’d like to think: in the USA, it’s estimated that around 95 million people “lack a sufficient foundation of basic skills to function successfully in our society.” Which translates as ‘functionally illiterate’. And if you believe Michael Moore’s evidence in his disturbing book, ‘Stupid White Men’, this figure includes President George W. Bush. And we’ve no room for complacency over here. A 2002 report by the Basic Skills Agency indicates that well over 20% of adults in the UK have the same problem.
3. I presume, because these figure add up to more than 100%, that respondents were allowed to put their ticks in more than one box.
4. Of course, people tend to be on their best behaviour when taking part in cultural surveys: most of us, naturally watch TV exclusively for the documentaries, and most men turn straight to the short story in ‘Playboy’, by-passing the centrefold.
5. For more stats, see www.publishers.org.uk
6. Compare that with the 1800’s, when an average of only 95 titles per year were published - or the early 1900’s, when the number had risen to 600
Yet according to the Office for National Statistics, in 2002 75% of the UK population read at least one book ; over 50% of adults read 5 or more; and 20% claim to have read a minimum of 20. The government-sponsored Library and Information Statistics Unit reports that in the year 2000/2001 there were no fewer than 406 million book borrowings, of which 71.2% were fiction - that’s an average of almost 7 for every man woman and child in the country. According to a poll commissioned for World Book Day 2001, the average reader spends between 4 and 6 hours a week curled up with a book; in Scotland, it’s precisely 5.8 hours. That’s getting on for an hour a day. And a survey of 1,000 adults for Bedtime Reading Week 2002 (!) found that 65% of us read mostly in bed, 25% in the bath and 10% (mainly men, of course) in the toilet. Half always read on holiday, and a third indulge their hobby on the way to work. (1)
I find these figures hugely encouraging. And they’re the basis on which I used the word ”armies” to describe the body of non-professional readers in this country at the start of Part 1. There’s a lot of us. Which is as it should be.
But these figures can’t tell us what we’re getting out of reading, and why books command such loyalty in an era when the leisure industry is constantly bombarding us with new ways to spend what free time we’ve got.
So in this part I’ll be looking at what literature means to us. Not so much what individual titles mean, but what literature as a collected body of writing represents - what it is and what it’s for. It’s more about how we react to literature than how we interpret it. And by ‘literature’ I’m not just referring to the ‘posh’ end of the market; there’s plenty of room for Catherine Cookson, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer in this survey too.
To that end, we’ll firstly examine the history and significance of the printed book, that (usually) oblong slab of cut paper that is the carrier of literature; that’ll tell us a fair bit about why we read and our patterns of consumption, past and present. Second, we’ll explore how literature and the reader interact, how meaning is created during that interaction, and how it can be communicated from reader to reader; lastly we’ll look at how that meaning survives to the point where it’s self sustaining, and, therefore, timeless.
So, in sum, this section is the story of the ongoing relationship between man and print, which, judging by those statistics is still in pretty good shape, all things considered.
That’ll keep us out of mischief for quite a few pages.
"No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence,
or whose attitude is patronizing."
American essayist and ‘literary stylist’ E.B. White
I can remember first learning to read on my own. It must have been what walking unassisted felt like, only I was too young to remember. But reading, as the cliche goes, opened up an entire new world that enabled me to communicate without the need for speech or gesture. With complete strangers. From anywhere on the planet. We all like to feel that our personal experiences are somehow unique, but it’s quite clear that Alberto Manguel, author of the excellent ‘A History of Reading’ felt exactly the same rush I did:
Then one day, from the window of a car . . . I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it just slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming, shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were. I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality . . . I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silent respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality, I was all-powerful. I could read. . . It was like acquiring an entirely new sense . . .
And so, I hope, it was with you. It’s a hugely significant moment in anyone’s life to learn how to decipher text.
From that milestone onwards, we become part of the huge family who are privileged to possess the gift of reading, the ability to turn written or printed symbols into meaning.(2) And don’t just take my word for it: Virginia Woolf once imagined God and St Peter having a conversation on the Day of Judgement wondering what benefits they could bestow on those who had been gathered up into heaven. “We have nothing to give them,” says God ruefully, “They have loved reading”.
And old Ginny knew a thing or two about why we mortals read, and the manner in which we digest literature. Not only, of course, was she a novelist and critic, she also co-founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 with her husband Leonard which signed up TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Sigmund Freud and Maxim Gorky, among others - not a bad little roster for an indie. In her collections of essays, ‘The Common Reader’, two volumes of which were published (by Hogarth) in 1925 and 1932, she makes the following observations, which I think are worth quoting in full:
There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. ". . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours." It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man's approval. The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole--a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.
In an uncharacteristic act of intellectual generosity, Virginia Woolf makes some excellent points about the way most of us organize our reading (or don’t):
1) Our consumption is mainly random; very few of us have a ‘programme’ for exploring different avenues in literature, even assuming that’s an ambition we’ve set ourselves. We’re like the silver ball in the pin table, careening off the buffers and being randomly propelled from one side of the machine to the other as we search for new stuff that might interest us. We either lack the initiative or knowledge to make many structured decisions about what we buy or borrow. So we’re not likely to have a full grasp of what’s available, and hence, what we might enjoy. And this lack of science is reflected in another set of official statistics: 40% of us regularly rely on friends’ recommendations for our choices, and 16% get tips on what to read from their work colleagues. 24% place our trust in reviewers and 14% of selections are governed by what adverts we chance to see. 8% don’t even know why they read, which brings us to Miss Woolf’s second point; (3)
2) While we might claim to read for a purpose beyond simple pleasure, at best we’re only dimly aware what that purpose is. We don’t, for example, approach or read a text in the way an academic would; usually, the level of time and attention we’re able to routinely invest in our reading doesn’t stretch to what might be termed a considered interpretation. More of us, according to figures originating from the National Literacy Trust, apparently read for ‘information’ rather than ‘entertainment’; but in the absence of a definition for either of those two terms in their survey, I would take this to mean that we expect to get something tangible or expressible from our reading labours, something meaningful we can take away and perhaps communicate to others. This would help make sense of the fact that “interest” in the subject matter is most regularly cited as the reason we pick up a book (71%); that kind of involvement is felt to be more satisfying than simply wallowing in a text and not being able to justify the investment of time to ourselves. (4)
3) Although the voice of the Common Reader is seldom heard in the media, it’s our patterns of attention and consumption that ultimately validate a book, and, yes, give it meaning. A book is nothing without a readership, a point I’ll expand on in a moment.
But before we do, let’s fast forward to 2001, and Nick Hornby’s novel ‘How to Be Good’, in which a more up-to-date Common Reader, GP and mother Katie Carr describes her experience of reading, or rather, her frustrated attempts to read:
I wanted someone wise to teach me things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life. And I know it’s pathetic that it should have been a children’s science fiction film telling me this - it should have been George Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Virginia Woolf. But then that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? There is no time or energy for Virginia Woolf, which means that I am forced to look for meaning and comfort in my son’s ‘Star Wars’ video.
It appears things haven’t changed much for the Common Reader in the last 70 years. Whereas Virginia Woolf (and Dr Johnson) had the good fortune to be able to dedicate that most precious (and increasingly rare) of commodities, time, to their experience of reading, the majority of us unfortunately don’t. And it is a time-consuming habit, as well as being an essentially selfish one which, if pursued single-mindedly, excludes pretty much all other outside factors - wives, boyfriends, children, the ironing, driving, TV, anything practical or social. And because it monopolizes the attention to such a degree, it’s not always easy to find space for it. Hence Katie’s having to resort to videos. She can at least make some pretence at spending quality time with her children while looking for the ‘meaning and comfort’ she’s after.
Now add to that something else that’s changed out of all recognition since Virginia Woolf was writing about her notional reader - the way we’re sold books. These days, books are not such much the clay tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai; they’re gradually assuming the status of a commodity, bought, sold and valued like any other, whether it be CD’s, fridges or tins of baked beans.
Not only are there many more books available than ever before (a staggering 120,000 appeared in the UK in 2002 alone, a figure which currently shows a modest rise each year0 (5), they’re being marketed using techniques that make traditionalists shudder (6). Heavens, we’ve now got book charts, just like pop music. And, following the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, booksellers can actually discount the things they sell. Just like any other retailer! So our relationship with books will have necessarily changed as a result of this consumer (and profit)-focused revolution - as we’ll discover, publishing is now a major player in the leisure industry, and not just a recreational activity for arty gentlemen with a bit of spare cash.
So I reckon it’s time to update our conception of ‘The Common Reader’, and his experience of this activity. In fact, let’s construct a whole new biography for him.
I think we’ll start by giving him a new name, since, being brought up in Lancashire, I’m acutely aware that ‘common’ may bring pejorative overtones into the discussion (as in ‘not out of the top drawer’). Let’s call him ‘The Recreational Reader’, since that represents more accurately that type of reading that usually ends up with the book thudding to the bedroom floor as he falls asleep mid way through a sentence he’s already scanned five times because he’s too tired to concentrate. And, as I admonished at the start of this book, for ‘he’, please read ‘and she’ throughout.
So let’s join our Recreational Reader as he stands by the door of the bookshop one Saturday morning, wondering what he’s going to buy with his hard-earned disposable income.
1. For stats junkies, there’s more on the National Literacy Trust’s excellent website at www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/STATS/keystats3.html#Reading
2. Yet that family may not be as big as we’d like to think: in the USA, it’s estimated that around 95 million people “lack a sufficient foundation of basic skills to function successfully in our society.” Which translates as ‘functionally illiterate’. And if you believe Michael Moore’s evidence in his disturbing book, ‘Stupid White Men’, this figure includes President George W. Bush. And we’ve no room for complacency over here. A 2002 report by the Basic Skills Agency indicates that well over 20% of adults in the UK have the same problem.
3. I presume, because these figure add up to more than 100%, that respondents were allowed to put their ticks in more than one box.
4. Of course, people tend to be on their best behaviour when taking part in cultural surveys: most of us, naturally watch TV exclusively for the documentaries, and most men turn straight to the short story in ‘Playboy’, by-passing the centrefold.
5. For more stats, see www.publishers.org.uk
6. Compare that with the 1800’s, when an average of only 95 titles per year were published - or the early 1900’s, when the number had risen to 600
