OF READING AND BOOKS


The Eskimo’s (Inuit) are famously held to have a great number of words for snow.[1] I have always felt the same should also be true in the English language respecting the concept of ‘reading.'

A few years back I was asked whether I read the Metro on my way to work. I shot back that you didn't read the Metro you looked at it. Leaving aside that such a remark was way too smart arsed, there was a deep truth to what I was saying.
We say that we are reading when looking at a advertising hoarding, thumbing through a tabloid newspaper, trying to understand an instruction manual, or absorbing War and Peace or Schopenhauer. All involve deciphering symbols on a page but they represent profoundly different phenomenon.

Real reading, if I can call it that, is an intense experience, also it is a two way process, good books read you as much as you read them. By this I mean that the process of reading great writing challenges you to examine your own thinking, your way of viewing the world, the processes at the heart of your sense of self.  This though is less than half the story.

The most potent aspect of reading is its intimacy; it takes place within an indefinable cocoon, the drama and emotion of a great novel like Crime and Punishment or Middlemarch take place within this cocoon. A Tardis, closed and intimate yet vast and panoramic. Here too in this intimate space ideas come to life and new ways of seeing the world are born.

I took part in  a group warm up exercise a few years back when each member was asked in turn to name the greatest achievement of their lives to date. I had no hesitation in stating “learning to read.” This time I was not being a smart arse. Without the ability to read my life would have been indescribably poorer. I see illiteracy as much a catastrophe as being blind or deaf.

By speaking of learning to read I am not of course referring purely to the basic process of deciphering hieroglyphics, this represents merely the first step. I am talking of becoming acquainted with books.  Books have the power to break down prison walls and transform people, set the imagination on fire and produce tears of sadness and despair. Books can induce the gentle melancholy of reflection and produce the indignant rage of revolution. It is no wonder that for centuries books were so expensively bound, knowledge acknowledged as a precious material.

Though never, as they say, judge a book by its cover; a cheap Penguin copy of Hamlet or Plato' Republic carries the same valuable contents as the most expensively bound copies.

In speaking of books I am aware that to some I may already be sounding anachronistic, aware of the emergence of the e-reader. Now I am sure that devices such as Kindle have their merits,* however they miss one vital component of books and that is physicality. Books have weight, they have shape and form and of course you may experience all the pleasures of possession. Few things for me are as aesthetically pleasing as shelves filled with books of every shape and size. Each an undiscovered land, for it is a common mistake to assume that the mere purchase of a book means that you ‘own’ it, you only truly own a book once you have read it. So I am now going off to do some serious reading.  

A book sits on my coffee table, ‘Afghantsy, The Russians In Afghanistan 1979 -89,’ by Rodric Braithwaite, a door that I will soon open.  

*They strike me as very useful devices for reading and storing magazines.

THIS POST WILL SHORTLY BE MOVED TO THE BLUE ROOM 
[1] It seems this is somewhat exaggerated. http://www.princeton.edu/~browning/snow.html Still as an idea this feels that it ought to be true.


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