BY JOE NUTT

I’ve always empathised with the charming character Bill Nighy plays in the Richard Curtis film, About Time. He uses his peculiarly inherited ability to time travel, for the most admirable of purposes; he rereads Dickens. I’m perfectly aware that that statement alone risks losing readers, not just because sitting quietly on one’s own, engrossed in a fiction isn’t high up on the virtue signallers’ rainbow, but also because Dickens is one of those authors even educated adults often guiltily admit to never having ‘got.’ But hang on in there and I think you’ll find what follows might just make you reflect productively on what, and more interestingly why, you read. In such a predominantly urbanised culture, readers of Country Squire will be self-evidently choosy, but with luck you might find it actually leads to you reading material that repays the time you invest in it. 

Silicon Valley has of course dramatically altered human reading habits and practice. It has decimated, and arguably destroyed journalism as a profession. It has turned book publishing on its head so that instead of promoting writers for crafting admirable prose, publishers promote celebrities who have got someone else to cobble something grammatically sound together, and now it genuinely threatens to replace the single, human author of anything, with a machine.

Today’s authors aren’t really that different from George Eliot’s wonderful creation, Silas Marner, a lonely, itinerant weaver whose special, valuable skill is about to be mechanised by the industrial revolution. Whether you write novels, magazine articles or just project management prose for one of those Silicon Valley brands; someone, somewhere is working right now on how to replace you with a machine.

As a professional writer you’d expect me to be concerned. But like all writers I am also a reader. The two are inseparable talents, and all this frenzied commercial activity has got me thinking hard about what and why I now read, because having worked in the Silicon Valley world myself, I know those are the two questions no one there will be asking. Technocrats never stop to assess the potential damage of pursuing a specific technology development or not, other than the profit and loss risk involved. Cultural impact only recently became a thing when the nerds gifted AI tools to the general public. Whatever Silicon Valley likes to pretend, AI ethics is really an academic, not a commercial concern.  

I suspect I’m not unusual in having observed my reading life imperceptibly divide itself into two distinct halves; print and screen. I still read books of course, and for all the same reasons anyone ever has done since a handful of monks in a stony monastery somewhere sat down with a feather and parchment, to beautify a capital letter with a dragon. But it’s that momentous shift to the screen I’m most interested in because the mobile phone and the easily portable laptop invite you to sit and read in ways a paperback or glossy magazine simply don’t. Reading from a screen now takes up quite a proportion of my day.

One of the reasons I screen read is because it’s there where I most conveniently find authors I’m most interested in listening to. And I mean listening because so often it is their opinion I’m seeking, rather than their original thought. I’m convinced that is easily what drives the overwhelming majority of on screen reading. Some form of brief comment appears in front of you, courtesy of the algorithm underpinning the software, which points you towards something more substantial to read. The whole concept of social media following relies on this process, on that precise pointing to a longer text you decide is worth your time.

There is an entire genre of writer who relies entirely on this process and this process alone, to reach their readers.

Their views are as predictable as their prose, and their purpose is never to enlighten or inform, whatever they might think. They only exist because they can regurgitate. They promulgate a frighteningly narrow range of politicised opinion. They don’t write at all: they fulminate. Although I have an interest in listening to them, I find I have very different opinions to theirs.

There is another reason I screen read, which is both more important and more rewarding. A smaller number of writers attract my attention precisely because I don’t know their opinions and they rarely volunteer them, so I have learned to anticipate them offering me new, interesting or valuable information. Information is valuable in this sense when it allows you to participate in off screen life more rewardingly, because it provides you with knowledge or information you can share and discuss with others. I’m not a monk. These writers make me think, not least because they invite me to. It is perhaps the single most striking characteristic that distinguishes them from promulgators. In their tone and in their mode of address, they never assume you are like them. They respect their readers. Promulgators assume precisely the opposite. They treat their readers as inferiors, acolytes or worse; as mere fans.

But there is a third, and tiny corps of writers whose work I will always positively seek out because their artistry is unique. I was lucky enough in my education and career choice to have been able to spend an inordinate amount of time with my head buried in books. As a postgraduate I had my own little room in the university library and as an English teacher for two decades, I actually got paid to read English literature. So it seems only logical to believe I may have more material than most readers to compare. That means when a writer exhibits distinctive skill, whatever the material they have chosen to write about; when their prose triggers my admiration as well as inviting me to think for myself, they cross a line into a place reserved in the off screen reading world only for the historically great voices; the literary artists.

It may be their wit, it may be the elegance of their prose or the originality of their syntax but whatever makes them distinctive, it is always some aspect of the art of writing that I find myself admiring. At their best, and very rarely, such writers actually make me feel something.

Yet just think how common that same sensation is in the off screen reading world. If you’ve never felt a sense of loss at the closing of a book, I doubt you can call yourself a reader. I once recommended Antony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence of twelve novels to someone, who told me later that she cried when she finished the last one, because she knew she could never live that incredible experience ever again. Franz Kafka is often quoted in this respect when he wrote, A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. The reason I now read barely any contemporary fiction is because so much of it is by promulgators.

So I would encourage you to identify the on screen promulgators, then treat their work with the contempt it deserves. I’d also suggest that you seek out those rarer writers who respect you. But most especially I would urge you to try to find your own tiny corps of the most artful, whose work may even melt a little ice. Meanwhile, off screen, I’ll continue to reread Dickens, amongst many others who knew how to wield an axe.  

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Joe Nutt is the author of five books, mostly about poetry and as an essayist he writes regularly for a number of magazines.