Better Dead Than Always So Well Read
If there’s one thing that gets me down, it’s people who make a big production of their love of the written word and, above all, of the fact that they read books. As it happens I am generally in favour of books, but I also don’t believe that reading them is any proof, in itself, of intelligence.
It is always immensely irritating to be faced with those professional readers who huddle at writers festival events, or anywhere else that you can witness an author speak into a microphone, and wear capes and berets and take copious notes. Wasn’t university enough boredom for a lifetime for these people? Then there are those individuals who claim to have read and enjoyed the many, many examples of creative writing that it is almost impossible even to finish, let alone take any genuine pleasure in, such as Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and virtually anything by Peter Carey.
This brings me to book clubs; their number is increasing, it seems, and they are perhaps the most hateful manifestation of the proud reader. Why not just meet your friends and have a drink? Why is it necessary to pretend you have any interest in talking about works of literature? Everyone knows that book clubs are almost entirely about canapés: both the grabbing of the moral high ground by making the best ones and the eating of enough of them that you can save money by not having to buy anything for dinner. I need hardly say that book-club membership is overwhelmingly female, which does, I fear, give the whole enterprise a sewing-circle feel. Taking this to its logical conclusion, one can see that the ultimate result of the growth of book clubs will be the reversal of the status of women; the clubs have, after all, demonstrated a mania for books about the lives of Asian concubines.
And how sad it is to think that we are living in a period in which the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club was thought to be a good idea. I would so much rather view a televised execution than watch a person I hate either criticising books I’m fond of or, which is worse, speaking admiringly of books I’m fond of. Isn’t it remarkable how someone you dislike liking something you like never increases your liking for the person you dislike but merely destroys your pleasure in the thing you like?
The consensus among anyone who cares seems to be that books are on their way out and I attribute this directly to book clubs making everything to do with them seem like such an enormous bore. Those people – or, as I should put it, women – I’ve known who have belonged to book clubs have unfailingly ended up buying a whole lot of novels they didn’t like in order to discuss them with various individuals they can’t stand.
Reading wasn’t designed to be a group activity. Unless it’s on your school syllabus, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever come across at the one time more than two people who’ve read the same book as you, except by prearrangement, which is as it should be. I did once read, though, about a man who owned only thirty books and they were all copies of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. The day that someone like him starts a book club is the day I join one.
Avril Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer.
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