Let’s be honest. Is reading books the best way to gain wisdom and joy? If that was the case, I’d bet my copy of Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? that many more people would be reading bound sheaves of printed paper than they do.
I smell a scam. While the romance of curling up with a paperback or digging one’s nose into a hardback continues to be perpetuated by the author-publisher-reader nexus, we forget that book-reading is a pretty young leisure activity that many folks, wise men included, happily did without to no serious civilisational damage. It’s one thing to read manuals or textbooks that tell you how to fix fridges or carry out bone marrow operations or make relationships last if one didn’t have the chance to attend a polytechnic, med school or an ashram. Even this, however, makes little sense these days with DVDs, websites and television making things more accessible. I mean, between reading Nancy Friday’s Woman on Top and watching Debbie Does Dallas which one would you prefer?
So what’s this fetish for reading? Surely, content can be (and is) ingested through more direct, less tiresome devices than a book? It’s just a scheme to make the millions who don’t read and aren’t successful feel crummy.
{{/usCountry}}So what’s this fetish for reading? Surely, content can be (and is) ingested through more direct, less tiresome devices than a book? It’s just a scheme to make the millions who don’t read and aren’t successful feel crummy.
{{/usCountry}}There are those who go into raptures about the joy of reading a good book. Sure, there’s a certain happiness you obtain when you enter a ‘telepathic zone’ with a book writer who tells you a good story, or conjures up a nice image, in the total privacy of your head. But you can get the same joys by listening to audio-books and watching a good narrative. I’m yet to hear a solid argument defending the supremacy of reading Richard III over watching Richard Loncraine’s Ian McKellen-starring version of the play.
OK, so there’s something lovely about reading the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” But hang on. What Nabokov does is recreate an aural phenomenon, make soundless sounds that need to be read out and listened to. It’s just the dogma of putting the reading process above the listening and viewing ones that makes reading Lolita seem la-di-da-special.
Not every literate person reads books. In fact, reading comes in the way of more fruitful pursuits like inventing objects, running empires, or writing books. You’re just being a snob if you think that reading books rather than flipping mags or scrolling websites or watching documentaries is a finer experience.
But then that’s where the power of reading books lies: as a snob’s weapon in these democratising times. When the likes of Mukesh Ambani get along fine by not reading books, you don’t stand a chance by whipping out a Khushwant Singh or a Harry Potter.
Which is the only reason for a book reviews page to exist. No, not to tell you what book to read, but to tell you what book to carry that will make you stand out in a world where hating books has become passé while reading Paulo Coelho or Chetan Bhagat is as common as sleeping around. As for yapping about books, just read the reviews that appear on this page.
The Pen Pusher is a bitter soul whose manuscripts continue to be rejected by mainstream publishing houses