Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby

the most muscular brain engaged for weeks. Indeed, the carriages are full of people exercising their intellects the full length of their journeys. Yet somehow, the fact that millions daily devour thousands of words from Hello, the Sun, The Da Vinci Code, Nuts, and so on does not inspire the hope that the average cerebrum is in excellent health. It’s not just that you read, it’s what you read that counts.” This sort of thing—and it’s a regrettably common sneer in our broadsheet newspapers—must drive school librarians, publishers, and literacy campaigners nuts. In Britain, more than twelve million adults have a reading age of thirteen or under, and yet some clever-dick journalist still insists on telling us that unless we’re reading something proper, then we might as well not bother at all.

      But what’s proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that’s for sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell—were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters. I have on my desk here a James Lee Burke novel, a thriller in the Dave Robicheaux series, which sports on its covers ringing endorsements from the Literary Review, the Guardian, and the Independent on Sunday, so there’s a possibility that somebody who writes for a broadsheet might approve… Any chance of this giving my gray matter a workout? How much of a stretch is it for a nuclear physicist to read a book on nuclear physics? How much cleverer will we be if we read Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck’s beautiful, simple novella? Or Tobias Wolff’s brilliant This Boy’s Life, or Lucky Jim, or To Kill a Mockingbird? Enormous intelligence has gone into the creation of all these books, just as it has into the creation of the iPod, but intelligence is not transferable. It’s there to serve a purpose.

      But there it is. It’s set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work; otherwise they’re a waste of time. And so we grind our way through serious, and sometimes seriously dull, novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive. Please, please, put it down.

      And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book—The Da Vinci Code, maybe—because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don’t mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that’s what you want to read, it’s fine by me, because here’s something else no one will ever tell you: if you don’t read the classics, or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.

      The regrettable thing about the culture war we still, after all these years, seem to be fighting is that it divides books into two camps: the trashy and the worthwhile. No one who is paid to talk about books for a living seems to be able to convey the message that this isn’t how it works, that “good” books can provide every bit as much pleasure as “trashy” ones. Why worry about that if there’s no difference anyway? Because it gives you more choice. You may not have to read about conspiracies, or the romantic tribulations of thirtysomething women, in order to be entertained. You may find that you’re enthralled by Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or Great Expectations. Read anything, as long as you can’t wait to pick it up again.

      I’m a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I’m scared they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I stopped. (They’re interesting people, and they know a lot of interesting things, and I’d miss them.) I’m a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how. Sometimes, yes, I read to find things out—as I get older, I feel my ignorance weighing more heavily on me. I want to know what it’s like to be him or her, to live there or then. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide—film can’t get in close enough. But the most important reason of all, I think, is this. When I was nine years old, I spent a few unhappy months in a church choir (my mum’s idea, not mine). And two or three times a week, I had to sit through the sermon, delivered by an insufferable old windbag of a vicar. I thought it would kill me—that I would, quite literally, die of boredom. The only thing we were allowed for diversion was the hymnbook, and I even ended up reading it, sometimes. Books and comics had never seemed so necessary; even though I’d always enjoyed reading before then, I’d never understood it to be so desperately important for my sanity. I’ve never, ever gone anywhere without a book or a magazine since. It’s taken me all this time to learn that it doesn’t have to be a boring one, whatever the reviews pages and our cultural commentators tell me; and it took the Polysyllabic Spree, of all people, to teach me.

      Please, please: put it down. You’ll never finish it. Start something else.