Are books worth reading?

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Are books worth reading?

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Recently, I came across a blog on a site (from several years ago!) by the self-confessed conservative blogger Jon Swift (http://jonswift.blogspot.com/). He wrote an article entitled ‘Who Needs Books?’ I thought it would be a perspective of why books are so important, but after a little reading found this paragraph which states:

For a long time I have been saying that actually reading books is overrated. Now I have an unlikely ally: librarians. The librarians of Fairfax County, Virginia, have reinvented the idea of the library for the 21st century. “A book is not forever,” says Sam Clay, the director of the system. “If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.” So Clay has set out to purge from Fairfax Public Libraries all 40 feet of tulip books, which were apparently purchased during the great Tulip Mania of the 17th century. But it’s not just books on tulips he’s tossing into the dustbin of history. Aided by a computer program that earmarks books that haven’t been checked out in two years, he has ruthlessly weeded out outdated works by such long-dead, irrelevant authors as Virgil, Aristotle, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and many others, all to make room for ten more copies of the latest bestseller by John Grisham.”

What caught my eye here was not that Fairfax County Libraries were purging books (that is only natural with the number of books published each year and the limited capacity of local libraries) but his ironically satirical comment (I’ll come to that later) on ‘long-dead irrelevant authors’ to be replaced by the likes of John Grisham. As if John Grisham is a lesser contributor to the world body of knowledge, he makes it seem as though people only read tosh. I would argue that John Grisham is a fair contender in the literature game on par with Aristotle. So is it fair to ditch Aristotle in favor of Grisham? That depends. Just think back to the popular reading of the day. There was John Dunne’s 16th-century erotic Elegy XXIX: ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ ‘ who Carloyn Korman of the New Yorker (february 14, 2013) says of Dunne ‘was a rake and a bawd’; Johnathon Swift’s 18th-century and horrific baby eating satire ‘Modest Proposal’; Jane Austen’s 18th-century naughty novels; and Joyce’s 20th-century nearly banned Ulysses. Imagine, pamplets, poems and novels, once popular, that have something to say, if you only care to look. Often, however, you’d be surprised how often we use what other people wrote about.

John Dunne in his literotica wrote: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself..’, and ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Common phrases penned centuries ago that probably still hold weight even to people who don’t like to read. But all universal truths move on and are copied, transformed or corrupted, but the crux of the meaning is still the same. These metaphysical poets, like Dunne, are known for their ability to ‘startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as conceit’. It is the power of language that makes books great.

Publishers have long taken the liberty of rewriting classics into simple children’s books. While the language is simplified, the books are no less valuable and no less important. They are just popular books books for the masses that no one seems to recognize as classics. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula, and Verne’s First Man in the Moon have become mass entertainment; they are, on the surface fun, adventurous books for kids and adults alike, but underneath, satirical commentary wielded against an immoral government, a survival journal praising the values of monarchy and conservative middle class values, or feminist, political and industrial revolution commentary in the Gothic novels and a scientifically real possibility of going to the moon. But we wouldn’t have that without the seed that germinated an idea.

Isaac Newton wrote “if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. It is because of the writings of Aristotle, Plato, De Cartes, and Locke that we have individuals who are not content to be serfs but who instead decided that maybe they could do more than want to do to something interesting, they could actually do it. Their books made it possible. And if the popular books like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Dan Brown and John Grisham replaced Aristotle, and those same books offer up an idea, a thought, an imaginative impulse, then they are every bit as valuable as the unread ‘boring’ classics.

If you are not trained to read classics like Aristotle, Virgil and Locke, no matter. It is from these writers that words live on whether they are in books from Gulliver to Green eggs and Ham. So, I would argue that without Aristotle we would not have Grisham. And one good thing for the writer of the blog, even though his boring books from Fairfax Library were binned, the ideas will live on through Grisham and others like him. Conceit , irony and satire might be innate, but my guess is the author learned it from books.

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