Collectors enjoy great
freedom. Drift into collecting teapots and it’s up to you whether to focus on a
country or period, or instead go after little teapots short and stout. Readers
are equally free to structure their reading; there is a field of possibilities
limited only by our imaginations. If someone told me that this year they were
reading books by authors surname Z that would be intelligible and intriguing. I
would guess that a reader could learn a lot that way. Likewise, if someone
said: This year, it’s writers in translation. From Chinese. And an obvious
policy: Going halves: alternating books by women with books by men. Such
principles could work well but not perfectly - you might end up reading all of
Zola for want of anything else and a small voice in my head reminds me that
there is a Marxist tradition which marks down Zola as a superficial naturalist,
inferior to a robust realist like Balzac.
A
powerful structuring principle would ensure that you read mostly good books and at the same time
familiarised yourself with many real times and places, with varied ideas, and a
wealth of imaginary worlds. What’s not to like?
But does any such principle exist? Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust a
university reading list. Might I trust a friend?
Imagine
a friend in another country who also enjoys reading. And suppose that at the
end of the year you sent each other a list of all the books you had read that
year. And suppose that you made a Resolution to read in the coming year the
books which your friend had just read - exception made for those already
familiar to you.
This
is a more demanding challenge than the habit of taking up occasional reading
suggestions or acting on reviewer recommendations. It’s always a big challenge
to change places. If your friend reads in another language and you can’t read it,
there’s immediately a problem with books not available in translation. Fine,
that will reduce your commitment to something less daunting.
Paris
is a couple of hours away from London but the reading world of a French friend
in Paris is going to be very different from that of an English friend in
London. It’s not a new intellectual situation; Voltaire pointed it out:
A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find
philosophy, like everything else, very much changed there. He had left the
world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. At Paris the universe is seen
composed of vortices of subtile matter; but nothing like it is seen in London.
In France, it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides; but in England
it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon…
Voltaire’s Lettres
Philosophiques were published in English in 1733 and in French the
following year; the London edition a best-seller, the Paris edition suppressed.
That typical outcome reversed in the twentieth century when Paris became the
place to publish books banned in English-speaking countries.
Who knows what it might be like to change reading
places now? Just for a year. Or a lockdown.
