Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in! SCHOPENHAUER
A few posts ago I mentioned I'd been reading John Sutherland's 50 literature ideas you really need to know. In his final chapter he writes about 'literary inundation', and reflects on how to deal with the flood of literature and information overwhelming us today. Sutherland guesstimates that in Shakepeare's time there were only about 2000 volumes in print. So the 'well-read' men of his period (few women, sadly) could have read everything worth knowing. Nowadays the amount of printed matter has rocketed to stratospheric proportions. There are 15 million books available on-line thanks to the Google Library Project. Three times as many new books are published each year as were published even as recently as the 1980s. How do we cope with all this stuff?
Sutherland suggests three possible solutions:
1. Just continue to read within the limited area of your own personal 'comfort zone'.
2. Discriminate and rigorously select, if you can, only the 'best' books: the classics, the cream of new writing, the books by the leading 'authorities' in their field.
3. Read, or more accurately surf, the whole ocean of literature. Kind of indiscriminately. Treat it as a vast, ever-to-be-replenished smorgasbord of wonder and delight.
I must say I identify with, and indeed subscribe to, all these three strategies:
1. I'm at home with my own literary likes and dislikes - liking above all poetry, fiction and travel; and biographical, philosophical and spiritual books. I like things that are authentic, well-written, inspirational. I don't like money-making celebrity autobiographies, self-promoting and self-excusing political memoirs, manipulative self-help books, dishonest bestsellerdom-seeking non-books, badly written genre novels.
2. As you get older, you have to discriminate somehow. There just isn't the time to read everything. In fact we can only ever read a tiny fraction of even the good stuff out there. I do read and love the classics - and, my God, there are so many more to read - and I do read some book reviews (particularly in Saturday's Guardian). These reviews inform me about what is potentially my bag, what may be important, what I can afford to disregard.
3. This appeals to me: the vast, suck-it-and-see smorgasbord approach to literature. Of course, it risks superficiality, dilettantism, a knowing-a-little-about-a-lot mentality. However, I think that by keeping a broad and open-minded attitude you can encounter surprising, unexpected treasures - gems you would not have come across had you simply kept within your own literary 'comfort zone' or stuck only to the classics.
Some books I've read fast (Julian Barnes: Before She Met Me), some I've read slow (Tolstoy: War And Peace), some I dip into all the time (The Penguin Krishnamurti Readers), others I dip into now and then (Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters), and many above me here on the shelf I fear I'll never read at all. Does it matter? Not a lot, probably.
Though I really do love a good book. It's one of the joys of my life. I've just begun Gerald Brenan's South From Granada, which is shaping up to be the best book on Spain I've ever read ...
Sutherland suggests three possible solutions:
1. Just continue to read within the limited area of your own personal 'comfort zone'.
2. Discriminate and rigorously select, if you can, only the 'best' books: the classics, the cream of new writing, the books by the leading 'authorities' in their field.
3. Read, or more accurately surf, the whole ocean of literature. Kind of indiscriminately. Treat it as a vast, ever-to-be-replenished smorgasbord of wonder and delight.
I must say I identify with, and indeed subscribe to, all these three strategies:
1. I'm at home with my own literary likes and dislikes - liking above all poetry, fiction and travel; and biographical, philosophical and spiritual books. I like things that are authentic, well-written, inspirational. I don't like money-making celebrity autobiographies, self-promoting and self-excusing political memoirs, manipulative self-help books, dishonest bestsellerdom-seeking non-books, badly written genre novels.
2. As you get older, you have to discriminate somehow. There just isn't the time to read everything. In fact we can only ever read a tiny fraction of even the good stuff out there. I do read and love the classics - and, my God, there are so many more to read - and I do read some book reviews (particularly in Saturday's Guardian). These reviews inform me about what is potentially my bag, what may be important, what I can afford to disregard.
3. This appeals to me: the vast, suck-it-and-see smorgasbord approach to literature. Of course, it risks superficiality, dilettantism, a knowing-a-little-about-a-lot mentality. However, I think that by keeping a broad and open-minded attitude you can encounter surprising, unexpected treasures - gems you would not have come across had you simply kept within your own literary 'comfort zone' or stuck only to the classics.
Some books I've read fast (Julian Barnes: Before She Met Me), some I've read slow (Tolstoy: War And Peace), some I dip into all the time (The Penguin Krishnamurti Readers), others I dip into now and then (Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters), and many above me here on the shelf I fear I'll never read at all. Does it matter? Not a lot, probably.
Though I really do love a good book. It's one of the joys of my life. I've just begun Gerald Brenan's South From Granada, which is shaping up to be the best book on Spain I've ever read ...
I wonder how all of you deal with this age of over-information and superabundant expression?
