Is all reading worth the effort?

‘Fear a society that lets go of its literature.’

You might expect your English teacher to keep banging on about how essential reading great works of literature is, but a trendy journalist, working within the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ world of the press?

Isn’t the press all about catching the latest trends, scooping hot stories and reporting breaking news? Don’t the media both contribute to – and concern themselves with – our fast moving modern culture? What time do they have to focus on the past, the ‘has-beens’ of history, the dusty stories of the literary world? It’s just not relevant any longer!

Yet our headline quote was voiced this week by a pacey columnist, Hannah Betts (as seen in The Guardian / Times / Mail / Telegraph). She raises the fear that, if everything we read is just from the best seller list or the product of various effective marketing campaigns (it’s hard to miss a particular trilogy in the UK right now) then we will be at a loss.

Reading the best

As a busy A Level English student, it’s unlikely that you will have had time to make huge progress through the recently re-issued 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but Hannah argues that it is important that you have made a start.

We don’t tend to like the idea that there is a list of ‘correct’ reading – it implies that those who have engaged with it are culturally superior and, therefore, that those who have not are the losers. Yet Ms. Betts argues that:

‘the notion that all artistic expressions are equal has proven a regressive rather than an emancipating phenomenon’.

In other words, some reading is more valuable than others. If people are persuaded only to stick with the best seller lists or accessible written entertainment from the last 30 years, then they will end up excluded from their national culture and socially dispossessed.

Be a mover and shaker

What do you think?

• How far do you agree that a knowledge the works, thoughts and expression of ‘great’ writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and the Brontës, and of the tales from the Bible and classical civilization on which the Western worldview is based, is necessary to understand the culture we live in?
• Or is that outmoded thinking? Can the works of the past really have much to say to 21 st century life?

 Certainly, if we do not understand the culture we inhabit we will never gain any real power within it. According to Hannah Betts, if you want to be a mover and shaker as you enter the adult world, then what you are encountering in your English lessons is absolutely key, though only the tip of the iceberg.

If she’s right, we better get reading!