No. 140 The Trusty Servant thus( theoretically) avoiding anything about sex or adolescence.
Anyone who has read The Mill on the Floss, however, knows that just as much is to be gleaned about passion and desire from George Eliot as from Judy Blume, but I think that one of the things I gained from this apparent restriction is a love of long books – in fact, the longer the better, because they let me remain in that curious drowned state of immersion other addicts will recognise.
Pupils who read fantasy novels now have a similar tolerance, reading thousands of pages, book after book; and I think the current trend for books that come in series – Malorie Blackman’ s Noughts and Crosses, for example, or The Hunger Games – could be partly understood as representing a similar desire never to
have to leave the world on the page: reading for pure escapism, yes, but also showing powers of concentration that the world is worrying are becoming increasingly scarce.
I’ m currently teaching Raymond Bradbury’ s Fahrenheit 451 to my JP div – a book I avoided reading until my thirties because its thesis seemed so unbearably preachy – and apart from admiring Bradbury’ s extraordinary powers of prescience – how did he invent the AirPod, for example? – and the beauty of his language, we have inevitably ended up discussing his core question: what are books for?
When my mother was at university in the sixties an influential book on education by David Holbrook was popular, called, unapologetically, English for Maturity, and I think that if you scratched any English teacher they would admit to a feeling that somehow books, with their capacity to give you access to the emotions, thoughts and experiences of others, can make you a nicer person – though their pupils might disagree.
The way my div put this, less pompously, was‘ people need stories’, and their emphasis was on the access to variety and difference that books give you, and the ways in which they widen your experience almost without your noticing. Stephen King calls writing‘ telepathy’, and the opportunity to see inside someone else’ s mind is perhaps what those of us who love books, and ceaselessly, tediously, bang on about them to our classes, most want to give to a generation that we think is missing out.
An inadvertently immobile Leave-Out well spent
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