Peter Batten muses about which books to read…

Recently, whenever I search for a book on Amazon, I am invited to purchase a ‘Kindle’. This, I am told, will give me access to hundreds of books. But how will I know which I will want to read?

This is a question which several of my English teachers of 60 years ago would have been eager to answer for me. They were very sure of the importance of ‘English’ in the school curriculum. In their view, which had been formed by their tutors at Cambridge, our culture was at a vital moment of change. For several centuries the foundation of our culture had been the study of Latin and Greek, but that foundation was crumbling. Our salvation would be the development of English studies, based on a carefully-trained reading of our literature. As their tutors had guided them, so would they teach us to “discriminate”, to separate the wheat from the chaff and benefit from reading the finest examples of our literature.

Such teachers flourished from the 1940s through to the 1970s; there are still a few of them at work today. Their influence waned because the study of literature expanded to embrace a number of academic disciplines and philosophies: sociology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, Feminism, Deconstruction, and several more. For a time there was an almost overwhelming influence from France. The character of the study of literature in Universities changed remarkably. My teachers of 60 years ago were very short on philosophy, often ignorant about psychology, and generally very narrow in outlook. The explosion of literary studies left them at best bewildered and at worst angrily defensive. If you want an introduction to where things are now, get hold of the latest edition of Literature, Criticism and Theory by Professor Royle of the University of Sussex and his colleague, Andrew Bennett.

I must confess the reason for my interest in this subject. Although I never planned to become a teacher, I have spent much of my life teaching teenagers and adults about literature. Over 20 years ago I became the tutor for an adult class entitled “Reading for Pleasure”, which I still take a few times each year. Part of my job was to try to bridge the gap between the approach of the average educated reader and the way literature is studied at university. But a bigger task was to choose the books for our winter programme of reading. For several years we used a formula: one early novel, one Victorian novel, three recent novels, one European novel, etc.

The same problem faces the Kindle reader, or the members of an untutored reading group, “How do you plan your reading?”. My advice would be that there are benefits, both for learning or just for pleasure, from having a plan. In my own case I tend to stay with an author for some time and read several of their novels. I did this in the past with Iris Murdoch and more recently I have explored some major German novelists and the short story collections of William Trevor. You can find some helpful lists on the Internet, or for a very posh list try How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom. [pub. Fourth Estate]. Good reading!

PS. Two quick suggestions for reasonably short novels: The Victim by Saul Bellow and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. Both beautifully constructed, beautifully written and raising interesting questions. For a longer read why not try Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend?