Book Time
An article in the FT by Janan Ganesh suggests avoiding new books and letting time sort out what’s worth reading, including the proven classics of past eras. Many new books touted as “timely” slip quickly out of date, he writes, so it’s better to stick to articles until time provides some distance. He argues for reading no “fewer than 50 pages in a sitting,” citing Philip Roth’s view that a novel should be read within two weeks to maintain its “narrative wholeness.” And “avoid general histories,” Ganesh adds.
In an age of online book- and e-book-purchasing, reviews likely have more influence on book buying. In the past, I’d take a look at a bookstore. I often skip that step now, drawn in by a book’s reception, but fiction especially falls short of the claims made for it. Reissued books, proclaimed as the masterpieces of authors enjoying a revival, can share this problem.
One can get lucky. I bought Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia and read it quickly. It’s my kind of book, which points to something Ganesh doesn’t mention: individual tastes and inclinations. An author’s debut takes place in part to find readers who, if they like it, are more likely to buy others by her or him. This is as true for scholars, critics, and literary novelists as it for best-seller and genre writers, although their sales vary widely.
With publishers putting PR on authors, some opt to sell their books through Amazon, et al. The ambitious place display ads for their books in literary reviews, grouped with others or, more expensively, on their own. (On the wane are ads placed by self-publishing mills that give each new book a stamp-size or smaller pitch.) I read the ads. I used to read all the reviews, because the fortnightlies were better on cultural life than the weeklies and the dailies I also read. This makes Ganesh’s point about time: there’s a definite benefit to retrospect if you want to make sense of something. I still point people to a remarkable article in the New Left Review on the territorial carving up of the Himalayas as a water source, describing matter-of-factly how China’s diversions were making the Ganges and Mekong unnavigable.
If you want to test Ganesh, save up a week’s worth of dailies and read them last to first. You’ll see how journalists contrive to sum things up without adequate knowledge, and then revise it later without ever saying, “I got this totally wrong.” The weeklies have arbitrary print deadlines, just missing some crucial development that alters the story. The fortnightlies not only have a longer stretch of time, but they tend to stretch it out still further, a rhythm set by traditional book publishing, which announced titles, sent out review copies, and set a release date that, for the fortnightlies at least, was more of a gate than a goalpost. Urgency was never the point.
Now, of course, we have the rhythm of social media and everything that feeds into it. Blurbs are the order of the day with books, but reviews also find their way online and are hyped by authors and their networks. This accentuates the positive unless the author is being trolled or the book is “news,” like that biography of Roth that drew #metoo slams after being widely praised. (I recently found a copy of the first run on the street.)
On social media, everyone’s a critic. Amazon got this started and now its reader comments are gamed, I read. I occasionally review books, which means I’m duty-bound to read a book once I agree to take it on. This was the situation at university, also, the piled-high syllabus. Resonance is now my main criterion: “The Pleasures of the Text,” as Barthes put it.
Writing takes place in time, so “the new” is a given. Pace Ganesh, Walter Benjamin noted how the past surfaces as fragments that resonate in any era that values it, even as it sees it differently. Some publishers focus on these acts of rediscovery, like NYRB and Virago, curating the past for new readers. Missing in Ganesh’s arguments is the editorial eye of a good publisher, discerning not just the new, but also the classics, including some that weren’t ready originally for their readers. As Stendhal noted, his slim memoir wouldn’t find readers for 150 years. But then there’s The Leopard, saved by an editor who, ignoring the market’s wisdom, published it, new and a classic.
Janan Ganesh, “What and how to read,” Financial Times, 3–4 August 2024, “Life & Arts,” p.18.
