Confessions of an Electric Reader - Guest Post by Bob Newman

Gone are the days when the haunting of second-hand bookshops was one of my chiefest pleasures. Many of them have gone out of business, often because of the pandemic, and those that remain are so much more trouble than searching on AbeBooks. Besides, although we have bookshelves in practically every room of the house, they are all full. My wife is agitating for a “one-in, one-out” rule, as is already in force for my T-shirts. Old-fashioned books of paper and ink are still around me all the time, but rarely get a look-in, even the ones I really want to read. However, there is (obviously) no question of getting rid of them, and new ones do still occasionally reach the house by some kind of osmosis. A crisis may be brewing. 

Most of the reading I do nowadays is on my Kindle, and the changes to my reading habits are more profound than I would have expected. For one thing, I regularly have about twelve books on the go at once. I would never have done this with physical books. To have a dozen of those lying around, each with its own bookmark, would not have been very practical. Nowadays, typically I am timeslicing between two straight novels, two crime, two SF, one classic, one foreign fiction, one collection of short stories, and a couple of non-fiction, plus one or two other odds and ends according to whim – such as a slim volume of poetry. 

The consequences of this are mainly positive. I am reading things I would not otherwise have read (more non-fiction, especially), and finishing books I would not otherwise have finished. Persevering with Ben Okri’s The Famished Road paid off; I did eventually realise how wonderful it was. Most spectacularly, I finally finished Gravity’s Rainbow, more than forty years after the first time I started it. I’m still intimidated by Pynchon’s maximum opus Against the Day, but the likes of Moby Dick and Ulysses are looking achievable. I hope it’s not naïve to think that these might be good for me. Almost anything is going to be digestible now, if I can leaven it with the occasional pinch of Caimh McDonnell or Saki. I hope this won’t be considered heresy. I know there are going to be books that deserve my undivided attention if I am to appreciate them properly, and also books that don’t deserve to be finished, but during 2021, among the 66 I read, I only encountered one of each. The book I need to re-read is Sophie Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments. I won’t name and shame the one I would have liked to throw with great force. 

Another change is that I am now, you might say, a follower of the White Rabbit – I much prefer books where you start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop. I don’t like messing about with footnotes, or appendices, or maps and family trees that you have to keep referring back to. I found The Wake hard going, for example - it’s written in an invented version of Old English which is not reader-friendly, and I didn’t realise there was a glossary at the end until I bumped into it after slogging right through to the end of the story. I’m sure though that Riddley Walker – with its own very different invented dialect, and in fact a far better book all round – would not have been a problem even on Kindle. Pooh and Lord of the Rings would be perfectly enjoyable without referring to their maps, but some of my favourite books would be a pain, notably The Dissertation, the middle volume of R M Koster’s Tinieblas trilogy, in which the footnotes are as bulky as the main narrative, and you really need two bookmarks. Illustrations can be a problem too, though this may depend on the reader’s eyesight, and possibly also on the age of the Kindle. So give me a straightforward narrative please, not a multi-media experience. 

How one decides what to read is a major issue. The amount of choice has increased – perhaps genuinely exponentially - but average quality has tended to go the other way. I dare say there are more good new books than at any time in history, but they are in danger of being swamped by a rising tide of dross. They are becoming harder and harder for the poor reader to identify. 

Established publishers have gone far downhill in various ways (too many books by ‘celebrities’, too many series churned out by the yard, too little editing or proof-reading, too much left in US English that the UK reader has to like or lump). A lot of good stuff that didn’t get published in the past would now be self-published, if the author could be bothered, but wouldn’t be read much, unless they were prepared to spend large amounts of time and effort in self-promotion (and hence write a great deal less). For balance, and at the risk of being controversial, it’s only fair to point out that publishers are sometimes right, even when turning down books by famous authors. John Wyndham’s early effort Plan for Chaos, which came my way last year, deserves to be even less well-known than it is. In my opinion, I suppose. I’m certain that not every book that’s self-published is a major contribution to the world’s literature; on the other hand, I have encountered a few unexpected semi-precious gems, such as Tents and Tent Stability, about a camping holiday in Germany, and RAF Bomb Mechanic, a straightforward account of his wartime experiences by the grandfather of one of my work colleagues, which I saw as an exemplary piece of first-hand social history. It’s not great literature, but it’s exactly what the author was aiming for. 

How can one identify books that one is going to enjoy? Amazon’s algorithms are not terribly good – noticing my liking for South American fiction, they once suggested I might care for Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter in the original Spanish, a language I don’t speak. The Kindle daily deals are a mixed blessing, and not always the best way to introduce yourself to a new author – the titles that appear here are often the justly neglected ones. The Goodreads site is a worthy attempt at a readers’ self-help co-operative, but seems to be used mainly by people who come from the USA and/or have tastes markedly different from my own. Personal recommendations do sometimes pay off – I’m grateful to the friend who put me onto the Bobiverse series of old-fashioned ‘hard’ SF - but it turns out my wife and I are incompatible when it comes to book preferences. (Corrected from ‘literally incompatible’ – Ed) I tried joining a book group, but soon resigned from it when I realised I much preferred to make my own decisions about what I was going to read. (And not to foist my own choices on others. Often pearls before swine…) 

In practice, I rely mainly on a combination of serendipity, reviews in Saturday’s Times, and the long lists for the International Booker. Plus the Electric Authors, of course.

You can find Bob's poetry website here and he has four books available on Amazon. Three of these are poetry, with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Pigs probably the most entertaining of them. Between Timid and Timbuktu is a collection of his short fiction.