Blogging about books I haven't read

My colleagues—and indeed a large part of my generation—often complain about how hard it is to get young people to read books. If Marx and Engels were to publish The Communist Manifesto today, there would be only two ways to get enough people to read it to start a mass movement:

1. rename it as "Harry Potter and the Communist Manifesto";*
2. break it down into small enough chunks to be circulated around FaceBook (preferably with a short video clip of a specter haunting Europe).

But, as this example shows, the problem isn't that "Johnny Can't Read" because either his brain has been mangled by progressive teachers or Marshall Macluhan's post-Gutenberg revolution has abolished the printed word. Yes, children, there was a time long ago when we thought everything would be on TV, so we wouldn't need to read: no SMS, no e-mail, no blogs, no FaceBook.

The complaint, then, is not really about how little young people read, but about what kind of things they read. But this too has a familiar ring. Back in the nineteenth century, the complaint was about "penny dreadfuls" and I vaguely recall Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey starting with a defence of the novel against those who dismissed it as a lower form of reading. I can imagine some Babylonian priest complaining "This so-called 'cuneiform' reduces young people's attention spans to that which can be impressed on a clay tablet."

Now we have Web 2.0 (or at least 2.0 beta), the complaining has moved on a stage further. Andrew Keen has stirred up an interesting controversy by complaining that this user-created web means that people will now be spending most of their reading time on works created by people very much like themselves: ignorant amateurs. His book The Cult of the Amateur claims that user-generated content is (as the book's subtitle puts it) "Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy". I haven't read the book yet** so I'm relying on Tim Dowling's review in The Guardian. Keen is, in his own words, "very uncomfortable with the radical altruism—in some ways it's a legacy of the hippy culture—that lies at the heart of Web 2.0; the idea that we're all happy to give it away. I don't think that's the case. I think the majority of us need to work for money." Well yes, most of us do. We also need to be careful how we spend the money that we work for, which is why we like free web content (and why young Victorians bought penny dreadfuls rather than guinea novels). On the other hand, if, like Jane Austen and Lord Byron, we choose to spend our spare time dabbling in literature, we do not feel guilty about putting professional writers out of work.

Speaking of Jane Austen, I recently committed lèse majesté on our department e-mail list by admitting that I didn't manage to get through any of her books until I was thirty, quoting Tom Shippey's opinion that she wrote about "boring people doing boring things". I also confessed to not having read anything by Eliot or Thackeray (actually not true—I forgot that I'd read The Rose and the Ring as a child). This produced an outraged response from one colleague: "If you haven't read and appreciated authors of the caliber of Jane Austen, Wm. Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot, you've read nothing—and you do yourself no favors by publicly flaunting your ignorance." Ouch. Subsequent mails were a little more friendly, possibly because I redeemed myself by sprinkling my reply with references to Hardy, Conrad and Spenser (all of whom I have read, although I only got as far as Book IV of The Faerie Queene).

All of this was provoked by Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, another book that I haven't read, and probably wouldn't read even if it were free on the Web, since "Bayard's approach is Derridean" and the book contains lines like "saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy." On the other hand (as I said in the post that provoked my literary excommunication) "as an English Literature graduate, I can testify that being able to talk about books you haven't read is a valuable skill. I coasted happily through many tutorials and seminars, discoursing sagely on authors I had never read … Now I need to find a way to communicate with my students about Harry Potter without having to read any books about the irritating little twerp."

Now I await comments along the lines of "If you haven't read and appreciated Harry Potter fanfic, you've read nothing."

 

* Sorry, that's not an entirely original joke, but I don't know the proper way to cite "something I heard on the radio and adapted a bit".
** That "yet" is to imply that I probably will, although in fact, I probably won't get round to it.