London Review of Books June 19th, Short Cuts, John Lanchester
I’ve said before that I’m very tired of my bibliophilic brethren discussing books as if the physicality of reading is a non-issue. My friend and colleague Mark Sarvas and I differ on this one. He doesn’t care if a reviewer/journalist/pundit reads a book in the bathtub or while skydiving. He cares about what they have to say about what’s inside. A fair opinion.
I, on the other hand, think we only benefit from treating reading as a real world (and that means physical, sensual and yes sexual) activity rather than solely a cerebral one. Those in the business of books and those of us who love them do more than enough to take books seriously and it is not helping matters. Let us now be willing to make reading as delicious and as artistic as fine chocolate.
Now the last place I expected to find a like-minded friend in this argument was in the pages of the reliably stodgy London Review of Books. That was, until I read John Lancaster’s magnificent essay about The Library of America earlier this summer. In it, Lanchester does what many great essays do: Take something we know beneath the water line of our consciousness and bring it above.
The choicest bits…
I am an abject fan of the Library. I own..They are about the
nicest books I have. American books are in general printed to much
higher standards than British books. The Library takes that
tendency about as far as it will go: it’s hard not to take the volumes
down from the shelves and stroke them, like a Bond villain fondling a
cat.
What is really hard, though, is to read them. The books are
so gorgeous, so marmoreal, that I find them unreadable. Not unreadable
in the Pierre Bourdieu/Edward Bulwer-Lytton sense, and not unreadable
in theory – I want to read them, I really do. It’s just that in
practice, I don’t… As for the Pléiade, my record of ownership is fairly
strong, but equally unblemished by actual reading. I have six volumes:
three of Proust, two of Simenon, and one of Taoist philosophy (don’t
ask). If pressed, I would say that the Pléiade volumes are
theoretically more readable, or less not-readable, than the Library of
America; something to do with the sexily diminutive format. This is
pure theory, however. In practice they are both equally easy to
not-read.
And then…
That makes 16 volumes of beautifully produced and entirely unread great
writing. What is it about these amazingly gorgeous books that makes one
not want to read them? Perhaps it’s to do with having a palate
corrupted by paperbacks. I buy more hardbacks now that they’re cheaper
– sales figures suggest lots of us do – but in my head I still think
that the paperback is somehow the real form of a book. It has a
cheapness and democratic availability, and it doesn’t matter if you
drop it in the bath or lose it or discover that it’s been ‘borrowed’. I can’t shake off the sense that a hardback is a slightly over-posh relative of a real book.
Bringing it home…
There’s a risk that memorialising writers, consigning them to Culture, is a way of ignoring them.
Genius. I didn’t know who John Lanchester was until I read this piece. Now he’s made himself a fan here in America.