July means one certain thing. Summer reading lists are upon us \u2013 magazine and newspaper editors sit around and, with some effort, dash together a 20-or-so long list of the books you should bring on holiday. <\/p>\n
The lists usually look like some combination of the following: an obscure new novel, authored by a friend in need of a favour; the second book of the most recently zeitgeisty novelist \u2013 quality of these vary; something from the \u201csmart thinking\u201d or popular science category (designed to make you feel clever, actually makes you dumber); a history tome so dense and unfriendly it is hard to imagine any normal person wanting to read it, let alone on a beach; a blandly feminist pamphlet titled something glib such as Women Are Powerful; a crime thriller, ordained to be on every popular reading list by some unknown force of the universe. <\/p>\n
The publishing houses are happy, the featured writers too. Meanwhile, the newspaper believes it has paid a service to its reader \u2013 but of course it has done the opposite. Because it is abjectly implausible that even five of the books on these lists will stand any kind of longevity test, let alone all 20 (how many books are there are in total from, say, 2002 that have had lasting impact on the culture?). <\/p>\n
The summer reading list necessarily emphasises the new. This comes at the cost of recommending the quality. And so the likelihood that these lists are stuffed with duds and wastes-of-times is so strong it is approaching inevitability. <\/p>\n
In a bid to avoid gutting but predictable disappointment, this summer \u2013 with the exception of the books I am lucky enough to read for work \u2013 I have committed myself to the act of rereading. Why risk something untested when I know for sure that most of Hemingway<\/a>\u2019s are pretty good? I will have a good time with Cormac McCarthy<\/a>, I always do. If you\u2019re an Austen fan, check out Pride and Prejudice again, you\u2019ll love it. <\/p>\n This is an obvious and dishonourably parochial instinct. There is a whole world out there I am cutting off from myself: what about the great Malay playwrights (I assume there are some); or Danish masters of genre fiction (Danes, enlighten me); or Afrikaans poets; or the next VS Naipaul surely hovering somewhere on the horizon waiting to be plucked from obscurity and rocketed to fame one summer reading list at a time? What secrets of the universe am I wilfully keeping from myself? <\/p>\n Well, I\u2019m contented with not knowing for now. This is the ultra-Maga approach to reading: self-serving, isolationist, retreating from all those cosmopolitan obligations somehow acquired over the years, harking after an imagined halcyon past when books were good (and jobs were American!). Hell, I might even buy a red hat. <\/p>\n