I won't read it, I won't but maybe later
Say what you want about meagre categorisations but there are three kinds of books in the world.
1) Books that need reading as soon as they appear on the market. They can be of the expected or the unexpected sort. A favourite author's newest title (see below for Marian Keyes), or just something that you happen to have been tipped as the hottest new piece of candy the world has ever seen i.e. Richard Milward's exquisite 1st published novel by faber&faber last year called Apples. You wait for it, perhaps you pre-order it
2) Books that have been around for a little bit and have seeped into the good book-reading public's conscience. Perhaps a film has now been made about the book and the author's next book has appeared. Perhaps the well-known book occasionally shows signs that it might out-sell the follow-up book mentioned. Perhaps because of a film tie-in edition or just perhaps because the market has not yet been properly saturated. This book is a zeitgeist indicator. Shows us exactly what it is we should want to read and, once success has been established and proved profitable, a slew of books based on the same psycho-cultural premises appear on the bookshop shelves.
3) The Classics. Books that have been around forever and always will be. This category not only includes cult classics, modern classics as well as ancient classics and everything in between but also the books that are remembered personally by the reader. Think less classics in the Penguin C*****c sense or the Oxford C*****c sense and think classic in terms of a bok that defined exactly what you were doing with your life and seemed to express it better than you ever could. The author could have been watching you and noting down your thoughts so you could see them on paper, in print. Only better. Could have been Dostoievsky, Eliot, Burroughs or Winterson. Think personal. Life-changing on a sliding scale from one to a million.
This may seem like a long-shot but it's only a general categorisation for the purposes of further analysis. Press it too much and it'll just become scholastic and ultimately absurd. There are the obvious exceptions but they can loosely fit into one or other of these categories. It doesn't matter.
The book to be called into question is The Kite-runner by Khaled Hosseini. I don't want to read this book. There is the obvious all-round hyperbole surrounding any new book, of course but I can't shake the feeling that there's something more akin to cultural hypocrisy going on here. Are we, as a general reading public, attracted to books that stand as examples of modern Persian literature merely because the vast majority of the reading public have never even heard of Rumi let alone read Rumi? I'm not suffering from any 21st century guilt just because up until a few years ago Islam and its culture was veiled and incomprehensible without active inquiry.
It's a big question that calls all sorts of tricky personal politics into play. I'm only phrasing it as a question there because it seems to be skirting the knife's edge. We are well used to the Christian hang-ups in Western culture and its lingering effects that are seen in books from Angela's Ashes to Ulysses to Paradise Lost. Persia has been shown to be a cradle of civilisation. Jason Eliot's beautiful pair of books An Unseen Light & Mirrors of the Unseen give us so much that we can't know about modern Persian culture. Reveals to us the standing importance of their ancient roots. The Kite Runner is only the beginning of a general introduction and is a revival of Persian literature as being both internationally recognised and available for us masses. When I say I don't want to read the book my motives are purely personal & completely biased in my own favour. As they should be. Having not read the damned thing I can't comment on its literary merits and am not doing so. I'm simply not comfortable with feeling shepherded for ignorance's sake. I'll read it when I'm good and ready. When I find it as a used paperback in a bookshop I haven't visited before. Or when the film furore dies away.
There is no need to read a book simply because everyone is doing so. It is a mode of reading that has been used since the dawn of Literature. Makes me think of mad monks giggling hysterically at the Book of Revelation pissed on Communion wine "Have ye read this bit here, oh brother?" It has promoted and kept alive interest in reading simply by the fact that we see others reading the book and monkey see, monkey do, monkey want. Just don't bother telling me that it's interesting without being able to tell me the plot or follow up a summary with "Have you seen the film? 'Snot as good as the book." Of course its not the same as the book otherwise we'd be talking about the bloody film wouldn't we?
1) Books that need reading as soon as they appear on the market. They can be of the expected or the unexpected sort. A favourite author's newest title (see below for Marian Keyes), or just something that you happen to have been tipped as the hottest new piece of candy the world has ever seen i.e. Richard Milward's exquisite 1st published novel by faber&faber last year called Apples. You wait for it, perhaps you pre-order it
2) Books that have been around for a little bit and have seeped into the good book-reading public's conscience. Perhaps a film has now been made about the book and the author's next book has appeared. Perhaps the well-known book occasionally shows signs that it might out-sell the follow-up book mentioned. Perhaps because of a film tie-in edition or just perhaps because the market has not yet been properly saturated. This book is a zeitgeist indicator. Shows us exactly what it is we should want to read and, once success has been established and proved profitable, a slew of books based on the same psycho-cultural premises appear on the bookshop shelves.
3) The Classics. Books that have been around forever and always will be. This category not only includes cult classics, modern classics as well as ancient classics and everything in between but also the books that are remembered personally by the reader. Think less classics in the Penguin C*****c sense or the Oxford C*****c sense and think classic in terms of a bok that defined exactly what you were doing with your life and seemed to express it better than you ever could. The author could have been watching you and noting down your thoughts so you could see them on paper, in print. Only better. Could have been Dostoievsky, Eliot, Burroughs or Winterson. Think personal. Life-changing on a sliding scale from one to a million.
This may seem like a long-shot but it's only a general categorisation for the purposes of further analysis. Press it too much and it'll just become scholastic and ultimately absurd. There are the obvious exceptions but they can loosely fit into one or other of these categories. It doesn't matter.
The book to be called into question is The Kite-runner by Khaled Hosseini. I don't want to read this book. There is the obvious all-round hyperbole surrounding any new book, of course but I can't shake the feeling that there's something more akin to cultural hypocrisy going on here. Are we, as a general reading public, attracted to books that stand as examples of modern Persian literature merely because the vast majority of the reading public have never even heard of Rumi let alone read Rumi? I'm not suffering from any 21st century guilt just because up until a few years ago Islam and its culture was veiled and incomprehensible without active inquiry.
It's a big question that calls all sorts of tricky personal politics into play. I'm only phrasing it as a question there because it seems to be skirting the knife's edge. We are well used to the Christian hang-ups in Western culture and its lingering effects that are seen in books from Angela's Ashes to Ulysses to Paradise Lost. Persia has been shown to be a cradle of civilisation. Jason Eliot's beautiful pair of books An Unseen Light & Mirrors of the Unseen give us so much that we can't know about modern Persian culture. Reveals to us the standing importance of their ancient roots. The Kite Runner is only the beginning of a general introduction and is a revival of Persian literature as being both internationally recognised and available for us masses. When I say I don't want to read the book my motives are purely personal & completely biased in my own favour. As they should be. Having not read the damned thing I can't comment on its literary merits and am not doing so. I'm simply not comfortable with feeling shepherded for ignorance's sake. I'll read it when I'm good and ready. When I find it as a used paperback in a bookshop I haven't visited before. Or when the film furore dies away.
There is no need to read a book simply because everyone is doing so. It is a mode of reading that has been used since the dawn of Literature. Makes me think of mad monks giggling hysterically at the Book of Revelation pissed on Communion wine "Have ye read this bit here, oh brother?" It has promoted and kept alive interest in reading simply by the fact that we see others reading the book and monkey see, monkey do, monkey want. Just don't bother telling me that it's interesting without being able to tell me the plot or follow up a summary with "Have you seen the film? 'Snot as good as the book." Of course its not the same as the book otherwise we'd be talking about the bloody film wouldn't we?
