The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life Read Free

and some were not. School libraries suffered a similar fate. In bankrupt California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to scrap new school textbooks in favour of ebook and Internet access as the state’s main portal to knowledge: ‘It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form.’ 3
    Not very long ago, my family and I were staying at a cottage in the country. In the mornings, I worked on the second draft of this book – which was overdue – but in the afternoons we would explore the surrounding countryside or drive to the nearest town to pick up supplies from the local shop. The cottage was an authentic retreat and had no telephone or Internet access. One morning, I needed to double-check something I had written about Moby-Dick in Chapter VI. However, my copy of Moby-Dick was at home on the Shelf of Betterment. Never mind, I thought, if we go into town this afternoon, I’ll find a copy and look up what I need.
    But Moby-Dick was nowhere to be found. The town’s bookshop had closed down the previous year and the library did not hold it in stock. I asked the volunteer behind the desk if I could use one of their Internet terminals but she told me their server was down and they weren’t expecting it to be restored for several days. Finally, in a big-box store on the ring-road, I located Melville’s great novel. It was one of a hundred classic books in the Nintendo 100 Classic Book Collection , a cartridge for the Nintendo DS handheld games console. I don’t know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park – I doubt you have – but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamour of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.
    I accept that this story illustrates that it is technically possible to buy a copy of Moby-Dick on what passes for the high street. It might also be advanced as further evidence of the adaptability of the book. But to me it demonstrates how marginal good books might become in the future. Surely Moby-Dick deserves to be something more than just a sliver of content on a screen? I feel much the same when I see books piled up on pallets in big-box stores, like crates of beer or charcoal briquettes, and I am shocked to be reminded that there is nothing intrinsically special about books unless we invest them with values other than ‘value’ and we create spaces in which to do it.
    Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church.
    So it has been my mixed fortune to be occupied with this book about books in a period of frenetic cultural upheaval, with further trouble ahead. Several competing forces threaten to alter the way we think about reading, what we read and how we read it – the Internet, bookstores, libraries, our governments. Meanwhile, the last decade has given us blogs, book groups, festivals, all the chatter of the social network, developments which, while they may indeed be progress, are not the thing itself. They are not reading.
    Having begun on the back foot, let me finish on the front. I have wasted enough ink telling you what this book is not. Over the course of a year or so, the slow process of reading these fifty great books, and the other two, gave me back my life. The actions I describe here, inspired by a particular volume or a passage of writing, were often the direct result of chatting with no one except myself. I was my own 3D Facebook; number of friends: one. And therefore, as you read this book, please consider it a passionate defence of those two elements I consider most at risk from our neophiliac desire to read fashionably, publicly, ever more excitedly: patience and solitude.
    Because, when you stop and think