We are a nation that doesn't read
Today is World Book Day. Designated by UNESCO, and in its 20th year, the day is a celebration of books and reading, marked in over 100 countries.
It’s a good day to think about what books mean to us. Because the truth is, books mean very little to us nowadays. Growing up in the 1980s, when television wasn’t the force it is now, my world was shaped by books. I read whatever my mother gave me to read: Illustrated mythological tales for children in Avadhi, published by Gita Press, Gorakhpur; folktales from India and around the world, published by the National Book Trust; Biggles, fighter pilot; C S Lewis’ Narnia series; Tolkein’s The Hobbit, among others.
Reading requires patience. It requires leisure. Every sentence you read and digest, leads to a new thought, evokes a memory, feeds one’s imagination. The act of reading is both meditation and provocation.
My friends in school didn’t read. In fact, most of the people I know now don’t read. Books are strange objects, intimidating and useless at once. People walk into my house filled with books and make some distressingly honest observations.
"Have you read all these books?" "When I was reading, my parents always discouraged me from reading; they said: go out and play." "Yaar, give me something to read, something easy." "Brother, I just got my house redone. Books look so nice... I don’t have any... You have so many... Can I please take a few from your shelves to fill mine?" This is not a nation that reads.
Once I was at someone’s place and he said: "Have you read Robert Ludlum?" "No." "Have you read Sidney Sheldon?" "Maybe one.’ “Have you read Robin Cook?" "No, but I’ve seen Coma." "Haha, my friend, then what have you read...and you call yourself a writer?"
But then, the book is a hardy survivor, which cannot die because storytelling is a fundamental human impulse. See, for instance, the ballads, parables, anecdotes and legends in Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories. It shows us how the storyteller’s art occupies a central place in the world of our feelings.
Books change the world, not least because they change human consciousness. Rousseau’s ideas had a profound effect on the French Revolution, while Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby led to long lasting reforms in the English school system. Darwin’s The Origin of Species proved to us that the man in the mirror was an ape.
It’s not necessary that you be literate to enjoy literature. This story is from Cuba. Rolling cigars by hand is a laborious process. While the cigar-makers, los torcedores, sit on benches and roll leaves of tobacco, a hired reader sits on a raised platform, reading from a book into a microphone. Everyone loves a good story.
The world of books is a contradictory one. On the one hand, figures show that Kindle sales are down; the old-fashioned book is still thriving. Digital hasn’t killed the book, far from it. In India, every small town now has a litfest — which is a good thing. That these litfests are headlined by Bollywood stars is another matter.
While fewer people want to read in the modern age, more and more people want to write books. Every middle-class Indian who knows English, feels there’s a novel inside of her waiting to be written.
Literary fiction is a bad word these days. Publishers will say: "This won’t sell. Why don’t you write this instead..." Books are outsourced now: The writer executes what the publisher’s marketing team has in mind. When you say: "I can play chess," they say: "But why not snakes and ladders?"
Literature is dying. Novels that are successful in the West are related to whatever is in the headlines: immigration, fundamentalism, the refugee crisis etc. Novels are exotica and infotainment, and novelists glorified edit page opinion writers. Few novelists now dare explore quiet individual stories; they explore "themes" instead.
At the same time, there is the sexing up of the book trade. As the Yugoslavian genius Dubravka Ugresic writes in Thank You For Not Reading: "A book’s blurb is more important than the book itself, the author’s photograph on the book jacket is more important than its content, the author’s appearance in wide-circulation newspapers and on TV is more important than what the author has actually written."
While serious literature struggles to survive, publishing has been taken over by folks who have nothing to do with books. Ugresic writes with ferocious cunning: "How has it come about that all sorts of people are now rushing into the places formerly reserved for outsiders, bookworms, romantics and losers. What is so romantic about the literary profession today that it makes so many people mill around the market place awaiting their starry moment? Money? Perhaps. But then why do even financially secure movie stars rush to try their hand at a children’s book or a novel, in addition to the autobiography which is expected of them? Why do serious people — literary theoreticians, psychologists, doctors — do the same thing?... In the contemporary media market, literature too has acquired an aura of glamour."
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)