The book is terminally ill, say those in the know, and lies near death in a private hospital plugged into a life support machine and surrounded by close friends and relatives. Right now, across the world commentators are drafting moving eulogies. Commemorative plates and tea towels are being made. Songs are being written. A mini-series is planned. TV people are putting together five minute montages for the news bulletins which touch on the book’s long and varied history

Everyone is preparing themselves for news because no one wants to be caught off guard. At any moment word may come. The book is dead.

But then, isn’t this is all rather familiar? I grew up in the seventies and eighties and back then top people had said something similar. They said that while the whole world was off watching TV the book had died of neglect in a rented apartment, friendless and alone. A few learned souls, a loneliness of dust-covered professors and dowdy librarians, had even been brought in to identify the corpse.

There had been no elaborate funeral planned for the book then. A pauper’s grave had awaited, and there, we were told, the book had been unceremoniously dumped. No one had wept.

Back then when the news had broken, people had been genuinely surprised to learn that the book had been living amongst them at all, they had assumed the book had died long ago. The book seemed to belong to another age altogether. The dark age before TV.

I suppose the prophets of doom did have a point. I’m sure I remember teachers teaching literature to students who had never read for pleasure. These were teachers who would no sooner expect a student to read outside the requirements of the curriculum than their colleague, the Latin teacher, would expect students to speak Latin outside of the classroom. And, really, these English teachers, the poor servants of an absent master, could only go through the motions. I imagine that any rare successes served only to underline the futility of the whole enterprise. For, to all concerned, the book was dead.

And where imagination still existed, it was nourished by a thin broth of TV and, beyond the thrall of the TV, film. It is easy to forget just how dominant TV was. There was no real competition from any other medium. For thirty years TV ruled unchallenged. Those living in its shadow soon took ill. First the book, and then film. To survive, film pumped out grandiose spectacles of a kind TV could not emulate. Star Wars, Superman, Jaws. But these did not save film. It was the video player that saved film. When film entered the home via the rented video cassette, it occupied the TV. And TV began speaking a new language. The video reintroduced the beginning, middle and end, the natural rhythm of the imagination, which TV had abandoned with its endless stream of programming.

Then the damnedest thing happened, the rhythm of film revived the wider world’s interest in the book. Some discovered that certain films were based on books. On one man’s books in particular, too. As I recall it, the book rose from the dead, beckoned out of the grave by the imagination of Stephen King. Suddenly a few teens were reading. They were choosing to read. They were turning off TVs. This faint heartbeat gave the book a fragile existence.

But the book had never really been dead, had it? No. And the book won’t die now, will it? No.

The book has always lead a double life – a private life and a public one. In the book’s public life its health is judged by sales, media coverage, popular influence and contemporary relevance. In the seventies and eighties because sales dwindled, because media coverage was negative, because its popular influence was nil and because it had no contemporary relevance, the book’s public life did meet its end in a pauper’s grave. And no one wept.

But the book lived on its private life. The wider world does not monitor the health of the book in its private life because it only recognises the book’s public face. Which is to be expected. The public face is a commodity, while in private the book is not bound by the expectations and conventions of business. Its value does not fluctuate according to the whims of commerce, for its value comes from within not from without.

The most baffling thing about the private life of the book, and this is why it doesn’t get any press, is that it belongs to everyone and therefore no one person in particular. So it is both priceless and worthless in the same breath.

The wider world can get excited about books when, as in the case of J.K. Rowling, someone makes a squillion dollars writing them. There is a story to tell and one that is easy to quantify. Books suddenly have a monetary value which can be compared with other commodities.

While I credit Stephen King with raising the public life of books from the dead, it wasn’t until the release and subsequent success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its sequels, that the book was able to walk without the aid of nurses. J.K. Rowling did more for the book than can be measured. The success of these books changed the way people thought about books and reading. Harry Potter Inc. took the book back to the days of its greatest successes – back to the days when Charles Dickens was the most famous man on the planet.

And yet suddenly, when the book seems at its most vigorous, when more people than ever are reading, when publishers and booksellers are finally making some money from the thankless enterprise, news comes that the book is ill, terminally so.

But the news is false – a rumour started by an accountant at work in unimaginative publishing house. Both the public and private manifestations of the book are well. More than well, robust. In a digital world of unimpeded exchanges of information, of open ended discourse, of perpetual updates and addenda, the book is a refuge, a closed circuit, something complete, a place where captured thoughts have ripened and matured. Truth be told, the wider public has developed the habit of thinking well about the book so that today there are more readers than ever before, reading more widely than ever before, with access to more books than ever before. So regardless of the format the wider public chooses to read – hardback, paperback or digital – until they can be persuaded that an alternative is better, the book, with it’s beginning, middle and end, is here to stay.

Were all publishing to cease and were all writers to fall silent the book would still live on. No-one can undo what has already been achieved. Our future, as our history, is permanently coupled with the book. So much so that when the end does come, it will be the end for both the book and humanity, which leaves no-one to make the pronouncement – the book is dead.


Originally published on the Booktopia Blog

A literary classic. A classic of literature. A great work. A work of genius. A masterpiece. A classic. The classics.

You know War & Peace? It’s a classic. Les Miserables? A classic, too. And Jane Eyre. And Plato’s Republic. And Moby Dick. And Hamlet is a classic, as well. We call them all classics. It’s our shorthand way of assigning them a special place. Of differentiating them from others by their value to humanity, their enduring qualities, universal appeal and their apparent excellence.

Classic. The word seems harmless enough and yet when I say I enjoy reading the classics or I prefer reading the classics, I often find I have offended someone. At first I thought it was just my manner – I can be a bit of a prig – but then I realised it was more than this. The word classic itself seems to offend people.  Sounds silly, but if I say ‘classic‘ and you hear ‘you’re an idiot‘ the word and the idea can suddenly seem far from harmless.

But why would anyone hear “you’re an idiot‘ when the word ‘classic‘ is used in conversation?

As someone who found himself in the bottom English class during the last three years of school, I have some idea how this can happen. While the smart kids in the top English classes were doing the classics – Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare and Jane Austen – we were making finger puppets.

When we heard the smart kids moaning about having to write essays on the classic writers, bitching about those impenetrable ‘texts’, and saw them biting their nails while reading the battered paperbacks in the playground, many of us were thankful all we were asked to debate was whether the thumb was a true finger or not.

But soon, we, the dummies, realised that there was a subtle change in the way the smart kids were behaving. Having read a classic work and written the attendant essay it was apparent they were pleased with themselves. A teenager does not carry accomplishment well. A certain haughtiness had crept into their manner. Those who had successfully completed their tasks now spoke of the classics in another way altogether. They had crossed into another realm, as it were. They were part of the elite now. The smartest of the smart. (Of course, socially, this meant we had to tear them limb from limb.)

I realised later, that while we were being taught to fear the classics in the bottom English classes, most of the smart kids in the top classes were being trained to hate the ‘classics’. Even those smart kids who seemed most to enjoy the experience, those who read more widely among the classics than was required, stopped reading them when their formal education was completed. Which seemed to reveal their real relationship with the books. They were a chore. They were a means to an end.

If you were in the bottom English, like I was, you may well hear – you’re an idiot – when anyone mentions the classics. It is only natural. Almost instinctual. The end result of all of those years of training. A reaction which is tinged with sadness not anger.

The angry reaction is reserved for those who read and studied the classics at school and university. Many of these people continue to live under the impression that they havedone the classics. And as many of their peers shared their experience at school they can still afford to adopt a truly proprietorial air with the subject. Whenever the word ‘classic’ is uttered amongst their circle of friends, the self-same murmurs of delight, awe and wonder are heard – both as an acknowledgement and a dismissal of the subject.

In those educated circles any further expression of interest in the classics is unwelcome. Anyone insensitive enough to pursue the subject, or worse, to declare a present passion for them, will only draw the ire of their hearers. Why? In such a moment the esteem these people borrowed when studying the classics as youths must be paid back. They suddenly stop hearing classicand hear instead - you’re an idiot. For in that moment the classics have ceased to be their tame pets and have become the beasts they truly are and the educated are revealed as frauds, of sorts. The learnt response of the educated is to lie about the minor details of their qualifications. What they have or have not read, for instance.

The trouble with such a state of affairs is this: not enough people are reading the classics for pleasure. Those taught to fear them at school approach them with an exaggerated caution. The classic is venerated as it is more often than not regarded as a symbol of intelligence. It is an accomplishment to have read one. This often leads those excluded from them as youths to make a study of them as adults. This course of action fails even if it succeeds because such readers believe they must understand every word, comprehend every idea, visualise every description and soon become either frustrated with the books and give up the task or continue out of stubbornness turning what might have been a delightful read into the equivalent of trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone and failing.

Those who have done the classics, the educated, rarely approach them as adults, but if they do (bloody book club), they do so with great impatience. Believing they shouldn’t be forced to return down that path, sure that they’ve probably read it before, but recognising that others will expect them to have read it, they read only to be reminded, making a show of reading quickly, skimming through the pages merely to rediscover ‘the gist’ of the book.

Pride and Prejudice. The two main impediments to our general enjoyment of the classics. Pride in our past glories. Prejudice against our own capabilities.

Reading the classics as adults is one of life’s greatest pleasures. And I encourage everyone to overcome the pride and prejudices which inhibit the enjoyment of them. You did not sanction these prejudices, they were thrust upon you and it is time they were discarded. And pride? Welcome the fall.

Read the classics casually. Take them as you find them. Build up a collection so that you may fit your mood to the right book. Read a few pages, if you don’t like what you read, persevere for a few more pages, then if your opinion is unchanged, try another. There is no way you’ll ever understand everything a great work has to say. If you don’t get something, read on. It may not be that important. If it is, you’ll discover more further along. The more classics you read, the more you’ll enjoy and understand. Knowledge isn’t a shot in the arm, but cumulative process. A person’s taste in literature is not fixed, either. Reading the classics will expand your tastes in literature, art, history, philosophy and on and on. The classics are not a genre.

The classics, or the greats, or literature, or however you may describe the masses of excellent writing produced by humanity, are not a homogeneous whole. They are as diverse as humans are diverse. They stomp across the narrow confines of genre, they defy such classification. Their only shared attribute is that they recommend themselves to you by their superiority as heartily as history recommends them to you by repute. In each you will see reflected yourself, your friends, your family, your hopes, your failures, your lies, your loves and your moments of disgrace.

The classics can never be done. No one has ever read all of the classics.  Forgotten classics are being re-discovered. And, believe it or not, classics are still being written. They are never a part of your past. They are never part of humanity’s past. As long as we retain our humanity they are ever present.


Originally published on The Booktopia Blog