Yesterday, Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, gave us the benefit of her views on reading in Free Thoughts, a feature on BBC Radio 3 in which various writers and thinkers (are they separate beings?) each have been giving two minutes’ worth of their own precious distilled experience. Jane spoke of the importance of “an amazing technology" which people have "to explore and record the nature of the human condition”. It comprises “complex grammatical structures, highly flexible metaphors and syntax, and innumerable permutations of form.” She is talking about written language, which “more than any other form represents the sense, the structure, the smell, as it were, of experience itself.” The words on the page move into our brains, altering its chemistry. Reading, she argues, is second only to sex and eating in its primal significance and pleasure. Good writing, she says, is hard to achieve, and hard reading is “so temptingly easy to avoid.” The mental workout of reading Paradise Lost is equivalent to that of going to the gym – seen as good for us, if only we have the time, the energy, the inclination. 

We live frenetic, fragmented lives, into which we fit bits of experience, imagining they make up a whole. Reading hard demands a different pace. It is a paradox that we often assign reading to the last few moments of the day, a throwback to our childhoods, perhaps, when we listened to a bed-time story, or even further when we gathered around the camp fire at night to hear stories that gave sense and significance to our fears and helped to allay them. If nothing else, this should confirm the importance of stories for us. Though it is reassuring that we also choose to use reading as the preferred way to fill time when we are obliged to sit still, on the train or the aeroplane. The need to read is there, always; but if Jane is right, and I think she is, we have lost sight of how much it can do for us and of how much we can do for it.

Like many people, I commute to work, where I spend long hours, and arrive home tired and with the feeling that I’ve done what is necessary, but not what is significant. But I have lately discovered a new found land, my America, in the shape of audio books, easily and cheaply downloadable from the Internet. My drive to work drive lasts 75 minutes each way; enough time to get deep into a good book. So far I have listened to three volumes of In Search of Lost Time, most of Ulysses, most of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina, as well as more recent stuff such as Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. Often I have found myself so engrossed in what I am listening to that I have no recollection of having travelled at all. They may say of me one day that he died of literature!

Useful though audio books are in providing access to ‘difficult’ literature they do not provide quite the same experience as reading it. It is true that they offer fast, direct access to the story, and in a good reading, many of the aural qualities of the text. But because one is swept along by the flow of the actor’s reading one can also miss many of the details that make reading seriously both hard and rewarding.

I wonder how many people who say they aspire to write do not in practice give equal weight to reading? How much is lost if, as an aspiring writer of fiction, one reads Shakespeare with less assiduity than, say, Zadie Smith? or J.K Rowling (I mean, of course, no disrespect to Ms Smith or Ms Rowling).

Jane Davis has devoted much of her life to bringing literature “down from the shelf”, as she puts it, and “into the hands of people who need it.” She states in her Free Thought that we need “the added brain power and meditative reflection that reading can bring”. To do so I think we need to learn to regard and accept classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, to which she refers in her Thought and which was written down 4000 years ago, as being at least as s important to our everyday life as any modern novel or story in the press. Not that they’re the same, but I think that neither should be shrouded in mystery. Gilgamesh is a great read, and its eponymous hero a complex character, full of recognisable virtues and vices, dealing with a problem we can easily identify with.

Thanks to Jane Davis for her insight and her enthusiasm.

 

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