It’s not the act of reading I remember so much as an image and a feeling: a bald history teacher, who had seen me wearing an Anti-Flag T-shirt some weeks earlier and had since tried to become “buddy buddy” with me, now standing above me, looking down. I had the novel on my desk.

“Gatsby?”

I looked up: “Huh?”

“That novel has the best opening paragraph in all of American literature.”

I wanted him to go away.

“In my younger…”, he began, looming over me, looking directly at me.

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I was dismayed. What was happening? At first, when he got to the phrase “my father gave me some advice”, I thought that he was telling me about his own father, but as he continued, I realized that he was, in fact, quoting the aforementioned “best opening paragraph in all of American literature” from memory. I nodded, and he explained to me how important the concept of privilege was.

Gatsby lives on in the American consciousness in precisely this way: it is a high-school novel; a novel one is forced to read at a time in one’s life when one cares more about literally everything in the world other than classwork; and a novel one remembers very little of. It’s a novel about the terror of nostalgic longing, and the American Dream — the romantic delusion that you can become whoever you want, through sheer force of will — but it masks itself in our collective memory as a high-school meme.

My friend Kevin, who teaches high school in Dallas, has his students spend 10 minutes at the outset of each class reading silently. He gives them a list of books they can choose from, and he tells me that all the girls pick Gatsby. It’s nice to know that somewhere in at least one American high school, students are still reading novels. Kevin and I have an ongoing riff, based on a conversation he’d overheard between two students on the day of a quiz, during which one student asked another what The Great Gatsby was all about, and the student replied, “it’s about this guy named Big Joe Gatsby”.

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Over the phone, we concocted a scheme: he would ask his 12th-graders to write answers to the question: “How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t read it?” Here are some of the answers:

“Gatsby is an interesting book with a rich + mysterious theme to it involving mostly Gatsby in that category.” “I would describe Gatsby as one guy crashing out and yearning for a married woman over 100 pages.” “This book is about wealth in society, new money and old money.”

Others identified the feeling of regret: “The Great Gatsby is a book full of the idea of ‘but what if they had just done this?’ As you read [it], you constantly find yourself in the position of asking, ‘But it’s so simple, just do it’.”

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Each of these contains hints of the double-motion of Gatsby in America: a hazy intuition of the classic American fascinations — wealth, envy, complicated romantic entanglement — and a barely literate initial engagement that degrades them over time into their simplest, most flippant form.

In 2013, two years after I graduated high school, a new major motion picture version of The Great Gatsby showed at the theater in my hometown in Ohio. It was the first movie I knew of that had 3D effects. I took pills and went to see it: something with the water — green light — wealth — romance; I remember money flying out of the screen into my eyes. The experience felt profoundly a-literary but also profoundly American — Gatsby no longer as novel, but as parodic, garish gluttony; seductive displays of wealth and a “conversation about privilege”.

In a culture oversaturated with discussions about privilege, some of the more obvious social “insights” of the novel fall flat today, but there are moments of phenomenological acuity, psychological precision, and descriptive defamiliarization — making the familiar strange to reveal it anew. These work to create a compelling portrait not so much of a country warped by wealth, but of a man possessed by nostalgia, and the dream of making and remaking himself.

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Jay Gatsby is nostalgic in a limerent, romantic way; he builds wealth, constructs his own identity, and turns his life into a performance for a memory. But when the fantasy becomes reality, in the face of Daisy, it crumbles. The real breaks through the dream, and Gatsby cracks.

Formally, the novel is less boring than I’d expected when I reread it recently. It produces textual nostalgia in the reader through its formal structure: Nick Carraway tells the story from the future, wistfully looking back on the time of the novel. Thus, as the scholar Niklas Salmose has noted, the reader experiences a kind of phenomenological nostalgia as he reads, which is part of the novel’s genius.

Like America, Gatsby is, in the words of the critic Gautam Kundu, “made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution”; and yet we can’t help but be emotionally drawn into it, even as we stand at a semi-distance and watch with horror.

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Still, cultured people’s relationship with the novel borders on ironic, which is understandable. In 2014, my friend Adam Humphreys, a filmmaker, directed a six-minute film titled Baseball that also centers around a recitation of the first paragraph of Gatsby from memory. The protagonist, played by novelist Zachary German, is having an affair while his girlfriend is out of town. He is at his mistress’s apartment when his girlfriend calls and asks him to read the beginning of Gatsby, which she’d left on the bedside table — “Read from the beginning,” she commands him. “The part you always say.” After fumbling around at his mistress’s bookshelf, he can’t find a copy of Gatsby, so he stands upright and tries to recite it, pretending to read.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins, “my father offered me some advice that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.” The camera switches from the mistress’s apartment to his girlfriend. “He told me there would be times in life when I would feel compelled to judge the actions of those around me, but that I should always remember that not everyone has had all of the advantages that I have had.”

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He takes a long pause; his girlfriend starts silently crying. “He told me that human goodness was not distributed equally, and that it would be unfair to act as though the alternative was true.” The camera pans to Singaporean baseball on TV. “This, giving the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man, has led me to a number of worthwhile moments.”

Today, I searched “Gatsby” in my Gmail inbox, and found: an interview with me that never came out, from 2013, in which the interviewer says that his roommate read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love after “having not read any fiction since The Great Gatsby when we were 16”; nine unopened emails from a rare bookseller; the word “Gatsby” in the Substack of a person whose name I don’t recognize and which I don’t remember subscribing to; The Great Gatsby on a list of Michael Clune’s “25 best American novels”; an email I forwarded to my now-dead friend Russell, who used to write college papers for a now-dead guy named Lucas, who I vaguely knew from Twitter, and for whom I edited the papers in 2015, for money; a screenshot of a one-star review of an apartment building called “Gatsby on Ross”, which ends, “The real Gatsby would be ashamed and horrified”.

“The real Gatsby” made me smile: Gatsby, the commodified literary object; Gatsby, clichéd symbol of wealth; Gatsby, phantom high-school impression; Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio; Gatsby, like all things in America, reduced to two opposites, always in tension with each other but unified in destroying every part of the culture they touch — worship of money and conversations about privilege; Gatsby, Big Joe Gatsby. The Gatsby we forget is the Gatsby we should most remember: a man possessed by a fantasy or fixation because his life has become devoid of spiritual significance.

It’s been 100 years since the novel came out. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Reading the novel today produces, at least for me, a slightly unrelated nostalgia for a time when American literature was more serious and more ambitious. But Gatsby also offers a timely exhortation to those who, giving into this nostalgia, wish to return to a past mode: nostalgic yearning is disguised, impotent pride. Many remain crippled by a kind of longing for an idealized past that never really existed, one that was empty in much the same way as the present, as an excuse for living impotently within the nothingness of modernity.

The Great Gatsby was a failure when it came out, but it is still worth reading a century hence. Its bleak, cynical view of self-determination was unpalatable to American readers then, and, as evidenced by the way culture has preserved it as a butchered meme, may still be unpalatable now. But it feels eerily relevant to today. May it become more than a nostalgic memory.

I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

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In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

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This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.

It must have been August, let’s say… 1980. The phrase “beach read” was a decade away from being coined (it only emerged as a marketing tool in 1990). I was 13, and had spent July at summer camp. While I was away, my uncle Ted — a writer who often received free books from publishers and newspapers — stayed in my room for a few days and left on my bedside table a copy of California Generation by Jacqueline Briskin. There is no way that Uncle Ted, who rightfully fancied himself an intellectual, read this novel before giving it to me. He probably glanced at the first page to see that it featured high-school students, and thought I might like it.

The cover promised “SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION”. And the back-cover blurb: “They’re the California Generation. The golden spoiled youth in a sun-drenched land of dreams — where the stars come out at night to see and be seen, where money, beauty, and sex pave the way to success, and where everyone hopes to ride off into the sunset…”

Briskin’s novel doesn’t disappoint: it delivers almost every kind of sex you can imagine — or, at least, every kind you could have imagined in 1980. But it’s more than just another bonkbuster (a portmanteau that was coined later, in 1989). There’s counter-culture rioting, lots of adultery, and several abortions. It also features a good deal of drugs, including an LSD trip where a dandelion communicates the secrets of the universe.

Did my parents object to me reading about such precocious topics? Did my father phone his brother to rebuke him for leaving wildly inappropriate material in my room? The answer to both questions is a resounding no.

My parents always let me read whatever I wanted. Our living room was lined with bookshelves containing everything from a complete collection of The World Book Encyclopedia to Fear of Flying, and I was free to help myself. Once, when I was staying at a friend’s house, her father caught us reading Judy Blume’s Forever. He roundly scolded us both (“You will not read this kind of trash in my house!”) before confiscating the book. I was fantastically jealous; it would have been much more fun to read Forever if I’d had to sneak around to do so.

With no such limits imposed upon me, I read all about SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION in plain sight — lounging in the living room, or on a chaise lounge in our backyard. I brought it to our country club to read on the pool’s dry deck, and I carried it to the dentist’s office and read it in the waiting room. I looked young, even for my age, so I’m sure I was met with disapproving and/or astonished stares as I flew through Briskin’s 534 steamy pages.

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First published in 1970, California Generation begins on the eve of graduation for California High’s class of 1960, and follows several characters through that tumultuous decade. There’s a vacuous beauty queen who must get married when she gets pregnant before graduation, a movie star’s son who’s addicted to heroin, and a straight-laced social climber who’s “struggling with his own homosexuality” (thanks again, back-cover blurb).

Despite the sensational marketing, the novel intelligently depicts important events and topics of the era, including the civil rights movement, John F Kennedy’s presidency and the Vietnam war. All of the characters are what EM Forster himself would have called round: morally complex, with rich and vivid histories. As a teen, my favourite storyline was the romance between Ken, a Japanese-American artist and son of a gardener, and a rich white girl named Leigh.

But when I think of reasons to forbid my impressionable young self from reading this novel, Ken and Leigh rank chief among them. Theirs is a volatile relationship, and more than once Leigh bears bruises after their arguments. “Masochism’s a nasty habit,” Ken tells her, when she confesses she likes it when he hits her. Both characters are portrayed as highly sympathetic, and a sensitivity reader today might worry about communicating a harmful message.

If my mother had picked it up — which she may well have, noticing how many times I re-read it over the years — would she have become concerned about me romanticising a violent relationship? Doubtful. The only time I remember my parents being troubled about a book was years later, when I was 16 and engrossed with Jean Stein’s oral biography of the tragic Warhol muse, Edie Sedgwick. Even then, my father didn’t tell me to stop reading it. He just explained he was worried I seemed to relate to such a troubled young woman, and asked if I wanted to speak to a therapist. I said, “No, thank you” — and went back to reading.

As a parent, I hewed to the philosophy I was raised on, and always let my daughter read anything she chose. She never picked up California Generation, but if she had, I might have initiated a conversation about many of the attitudes in the book, including the dated psychological analysis of the gay character, Marshall. But I also trust that my child has the ability — and the well-developed prior knowledge — to discard whatever wrongheaded or antiquated attitudes may be embedded within any novel’s pages. I trust her instincts and intelligence, and her ability to interact with a text, rather than adopt it as gospel.

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It never would have occurred to my parents that a book might be a brainwashing device. On those living room shelves, they had both testaments of The Bible, as well as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (the mere title terrified me so much that I used to turn it around, spine facing inward). They also had a copy of Mein Kampf — not because they didn’t find its ideas abhorrent, of course they did; my father’s father died fighting in the Free French Airforce, and my mother is Jewish — but because they believed in the written word as a record of history, and that both the good and the evil were worthy of examination.

The eclectic breadth of my parents’ library, their utter lack of censorship and the conversations I heard them having about books gave me the freedom to retain my own mind, no matter what ideas I encountered on the page. Stories and characters, whether fictional or nonfictional, were never credo, but fodder for my own imagination and burgeoning teenage intellect.

Several years ago, a friend of mine house-sat for me with her teenage girls, who stayed for a few weeks in my daughter’s bedroom. My friend is a stricter mother than I, and had forbidden her 12-year-old from reading John Greene’s The Fault in Our Stars. When I got home and changed the sheets on my daughter’s bed, I found that very book wedged between the mattress and box spring. Did I rat the girl out to her mother? Of course not. Instead, I laughed, and slid it onto my daughter’s bookshelf, where she could find it any time she might want it.

The thing about books that contain adult content is that they also contain adult ideas. The best ones do not telegraph moral messages. At 13, while being thoroughly entertained by Briskin’s just-salacious-enough storylines, I was also learning about the sexual revolution, and the history of birth control and the evolution of the very ideas that may have led to my parents being so permissive about reading material.

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Surely, in this age of TikTok and unfettered internet access, there’s much to appreciate about first encountering adult material in the form of words, rather than video clips. And, unlike your average influencer, a novel will never tell you what to think. In this age of memorising hashtags and calling them opinions, what better exercise for young minds to get lost in stories from which they must draw their own conclusions, and develop their own ideas?

I know just what the child was thinking — she had plagiarism in mind, not yet being aware of the formative, the directive effect of reading. She would be doing it — reading — but did not yet know what it was doing to her. It is hard to explain to a child the way in which fiction arrives, for anyone who tries to write it, out of a personal and specific system of thought that has been primed by all sorts of things — life experience, opinion, outlook, and by the life of the mind, by reading.

Books beget books. Intertextuality, the critics like to call it. I am at the end of a writing life; I just read now. So, the process whereby reading so often became writing is over, for me. It has been an almost unconscious process, from childhood on: I have read for enjoyment, for instruction, for education — but most of all in the serendipitous way that has supplied the essential prompts for 50 years of writing fiction.

It all began in Egypt, where I was born and spent my childhood, most of that during the Second World War. Home educated, my favourite reading matter was Andrew Lang’s Tales from Greece and Rome, the 19th-century retelling of the great mythologies. Part of the fascination was that I was right in there anyway — Penelope — and at eight or nine your grasp of the distinction between fact and fiction is somewhat frail. I simply felt that all this had some direct personal relevance — the siege of Troy, the wanderings of Ulysses, the lot.

The trouble was that I was in there with the wrong role. It is made clear that Penelope is not as beautiful as Helen. She is wise and good — qualities that did not have much appeal. Furthermore, Ulysses is not a patch on Hector or Achilles — he is short in stature and is perceived as unreliable. So, I did some expedient re-jigging of Andrew Lang — re-wrote Penelope’s part and brought things more up to date. The backdrop of our lives in Egypt at the time was the Libyan campaign, with Rommel’s armies pounding their way towards Cairo, and columns of tanks and armoured cars a familiar sight on the roads. So, I set Penelope up with Achilles, and kitted him out with tank and bren gun — no more stuff about swords and horses.

I couldn’t know, of course, that I was operating in a fine tradition — re-working the Homeric stories has gone on for centuries. But for me it was the start; what I read began to direct the imagination. And that has gone on ever since, more often opportune than deliberate, a book I stumble across serving up the idea that will take wings and become the basis of a novel.

Not every reader feels impelled to write, but some do, as though the reading had been some involuntary training for something. I am a great fan of Elizabeth Bowen, who offers a perfect example of one piece of fiction leaving its mark upon another. She has a wonderfully atmospheric story called “Mysterious Kor”, in which a pair of lovers wander the deserted streets of night-time London in 1942. Her descriptions of the moonlit facades of blitzed buildings, the sense of emptiness, abandonment, reads as though there were undertones of something else — and she herself wrote later that she had realised that this was owed to the memory of reading, as a child, Rider Haggard’s novel She, with its mysterious abandoned city.

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These influences are made apparent in Alberto Manguel’s lovely book The Library at Night, which is all about reading, what it does to you, what it has done to him. He says: “Every library is autobiographical… our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and where we have been… What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice.” A great library — a great national library — is a metaphor for memory. But so, in its small way, is the collection of books in anyone’s house. They tell you where the owner has been, what the collecting mind has been up to.

I have written 17 novels, very many short stories, several rather maverick forms of memoir, and that is that — I am done. If I look along my own shelves, I see their origins. My library reveals an intense concentration on history and archaeology: this has been my favoured reading territory, for 50 years or more. So, it is no accident that several of my novels have featured historians or archaeologists as central characters. Within this area of interest are individual books from which the lightning struck: if I had not read a biography of William Stukeley, the 18th-century antiquarian who mapped Stonehenge, I might never have written a novel about archaeologists (and much else) called Treasures of Time. Picking up a booklet about Martin Frobisher, the Elizabethan seaman, gave me the backdrop for a London novel, City of the Mind. I owe to Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life, about the Cambrian fossils of a rock face in Canada, the sudden explosion of an idea for a novel about choice and contingency — and a love story — Cleopatra’s Sister.

Here is the answer to the child’s question. Ideas come from books — not in any sense of derivation, but entirely in the sense of fertilisation. Something is read that slots in with long-term preoccupations and sets a story going. The account of that gentleman pottering around Stonehenge with his charts and his measuring ropes; the concept of those strange fossils preserved in the Burgess Shale deposits, one of which is ancestral to ourselves.

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The books that made me

By Michel Houellebecq

About 3,000 books line the walls of my house. Most of them I shall never read again, but they must stay there. They define me; they remind me that I thought this, was interested in that; they reassure me, as I hurtle towards 90. Occasionally I shed a few books, but to get rid of many of them would be like discarding part of my mind.

Old age is strange and unexpected territory. I say unexpected because most of us don’t much think about old age until we find ourselves in it. When you are young, it is never going to happen, so why bother? When it begins to appear on the horizon, like a foretaste of bad weather, you look away and get on with something else, which is entirely sensible. Only when you find yourself in it do you appreciate what a new and different life situation it is. A number of years ago, I enjoyed writing a book about my view from 80, Ammonites and Leaping Fish. I was putting my own life into context, setting it against the historical process during which I had lived — the Second World War, the Cold War years, feminism, the legalisation of homosexuality.

I can see that novels of mine written in later life — Consequences, How It All Began — are more reflective about the course of a life, which is a marriage, for anyone, of choice and contingency. These thoughts were prompted both by my own experience of getting older, and an interest in the ideas behind chaos theory, the scientific discussion of the way in which one event triggers another: a butterfly in Brazil flaps its wings and provokes a typhoon in Texas. The science is hard to follow but the implication is fodder for a novelist — in anyone’s life there is an apparently random sequence of events.

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Publishing will never be fair

By Kat Rosenfield

This is something you appreciate fully in later life. My late life reading is focussed upon enjoyment and enlightenment, though I know that the lifelong habit of pouncing on something just because it looks promising is still operative, even if the something is no longer going to be the possible prompt for a novel or a story. I seem to have come full cycle — back to the reading addiction of my childhood, with the writing years as a legacy in the middle. There has been a re-read of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus — goodness, what a stylist, what arresting felicities, what a power to evoke a place, a person, a moment. I have been enjoying our contemporary women novelists — anything by Louise Doughty, Sarah Moss, Carys Davies — and anything by Adam Thorpe, John Lanchester, Ian McEwen. I have revelled in Katherine Rundell’s biography of John Donne, a glittering instance of life writing, intense and evocative.

And there is the way in which this is visible, with what has been written reflecting what is on the bookshelves — the archaeologists and historians who pop up in novels or stories, the themes explored in fiction prompted by subject matter on the shelves. Books beget books.

I thought my life was going to be happy, and I didn’t even exactly imagine unhappiness. Life seemed to me to be a delight and a gift, and reading was one of the joys of this endlessly delightful life.

I was a child. I was happy, and happiness leaves few traces.

Little by little I learned what the life of men was really like; I learned it, too, through their books. Probably my grandparents never paid attention to the age difference that existed in principle between the works of the Bibliothèque rose (Pink Library) and those of the Bibliothèque verte (Green Library); what other explanation can there be for the fact that I was able to find myself reading Graziella at the age of ten?

This book contains the whole of nascent romanticism, in its budding youth and strength, and ‘Le Premier Regret’ (‘The First Regret’), with which the book concludes, is a poem of incredible purity. Never before Lamartine and never after him (not even in Racine, or Victor Hugo) had a poet written, or will ever write, alexandrines with this naturalness, this spontaneity, this impulse straight from the heart.

How could Lamartine, who knew Graziella when he was 18 and she was 16, ever have forgotten her? How could he still continue to live? And how could the reader of Lamartine devote his life to anything other than meeting a 16-year-old Graziella? What fascinating crap literature is, you have to admit it… So pernicious, so powerful, incredibly more powerful than cinema, and even more pernicious than music.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

There were other things, too. There was the nauseating Jack London, whom Lenin loved so much (and it’s undoubtedly Lenin’s overt admiration for Jack London, his cynical acceptance of the struggle for life, poles apart from the supposed generosity that attaches to the word ‘Communism’, which opened my eyes and stopped me in advance, once and for all, from getting close to Marxism). There was the marvellous Dickens (never again will I laugh so loudly, so heartily, never again will I laugh until I cry, great gales of laughter, as I did when I was nine years old and discovered The Pickwick Papers.) There was Jules Verne, there were Andersen’s tales — The Little Match Girl broke my heart, and continues, with ruthless regularity, to break it again every time I re-read it.

I also remember the Rouge et Or collection, with its naive illustrations (a bit more expensive probably, most likely a birthday or Christmas present). I have only good memories of that period. Still, they shouldn’t have let me read Graziella when I was ten. Little girls were seeking my company at the time, and some, I realise today, already had ulterior motives. Anyway, on the whole, things were off to a good start, but soon after that came puberty, just as the fashion for mini-skirts began, I struggled to reconcile that with reading Graziella, I started to reject what was reaching out to me — even though it inspired me with terrible longings — and to look for things in life that weren’t there; in short things started to get pretty screwed up for me, and I still think a bit it’s partly Lamartine’s fault. It was around the same time that I gave up children’s collections for paperbacks.

For me, there were two worthwhile collections: Le Livre de Poche and J’ai lu. I hated Folio and Présence du Futur: too expensive, with off-putting covers and above all horribly poorly made; you only had to open these books a dozen times and the poorly glued pages would fall out and the book would go to shreds — while the books published by Livre de Poche and especially J’ai lu were indestructible, and this was essential because these were the books I opened more than a dozen times. I took them everywhere, to the cafe, to the high-school canteen, on the train — and soon I wasn’t just taking commuter trains, but trains that crossed Europe. It was the time of the inter-rail card. I slept in dusty campsites, in the cellars of damp buildings, and my J’ai lu books are still around. I have them near me as I write. Now I’m rich, I travel in business class. They have nothing to worry about, it’s all okay.

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How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

Later, after my marriage and my professional life broke down, I took up writing. I started, more precisely, to write novels, which were published, which brought me fame and fortune, relatively speaking. Suddenly I started to read my contemporaries, I discovered normal editions. However, I have never stopped reading, or rereading, paperbacks, and it was a great joy for me to be published in J’ai lu — of course, I wouldn’t have refused Folio or Presses-Pocket if my editor had wished it, but, all the same, the moment when I saw myself for the first time coming out as a J’ai lu remains one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

Today I read my contemporaries a little less. I reread more — that’s normal, I’m getting old. I now know that I’ll read until the end of my days — maybe I’ll stop smoking, obviously I’ll stop making love, and the conversation of men will gradually lose its interest for me; but I can’t imagine myself without a book.

I have never felt any particular fetishism for original editions, for the book as object — I’m mainly interested in the content. And I’m gradually replacing my books in regular paperback editions with some of those wonderful objects, so practical when travelling — the Pléiades, the Bouquins or the Omnibus. There are still a few exceptions, for sentimental reasons, and it seems unlikely to me — even if things go wrong again, even if I end up in a furnished room with one or two big suitcases, and that’s still possible, of course — that I will ever part with certain of my books; especially certain of my J’ai lu books.

Michel Houellebecq’s Interventions 2020, where this essay originally appeared, is published by Polity books. 

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

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Can France resist tribalism?

By Boyd Tonkin

Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

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Young Russians love Stalin

By Daniel Kalder

Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

“Let no damn Tory index my history!” Such, it’s said, was the declaration of the historian Thomas Macaulay on his deathbed. It may surprise some to learn that the innocuous piece of apparatus that you barely notice in the back of a book could inspire such vehemence. But in the 18th century, when the “index wars” raged, it was a political weapon. Whig and Tory partisans took to circulating home-made indexes to their opponents’ works; and, as a hilarious chapter in Dennis Duncan’s new history of the index makes clear, they didn’t even pretend to objectivity.

Here, for instance, is a flavour of “A Short Account Of Dr Bentley, By Way Of Index,” written by one of the theologian Richard Bentley’s opponents:   

The index is also a way of solving the problem of Big Data. As soon as you accumulate even a moderately large collection of written material, the important question becomes not what it contains, but how you make it navigable. That’s where the interpretation comes in: indexers make a body of data useful to its reader. This problem is not new: Duncan’s book draws a historical line that connects Google to the Great Library of Alexandria.

His white whale is the modern subject index. Nowadays, it’s done — or should be — by skilled professionals. I have the honour to serve as honorary president of the Society of Indexers, which trains and accredits the people who do this vital work. Many people — among them, alas, some publishers — seem to think any fool or, ideally, a computer, can do the job. They are wrong. As the words Macaulay uttered on his deathbed make clear, indexes are always — at least if they’re any good — the product of a human hand and a human mind.

Indexers will know as no computer can when “Number Ten” is a metonym for the Prime Minister and when it refers to a building, or that the “Charles” on page 36 refers to the Holy Roman Emperor and that the “Charles” on page 37 refers to the river in Boston. They will have thought about what’s important in the text — what the reader might need to find — and what is not. And indexers specialise: you need to know a bit about physics to index a book on physics, just as knowing a mirepoix from a mirabelle is handy if you’re indexing a cookbook.

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How activists captured publishing

By Sam Leith

 

The English scholar and preacher Robert Grosseteste, who was said to have “got his surname from the greatness of his head, having large stowage to receive, and store of brains to fill it” created a Tabula distinctiones — a list of 440 concepts or subjects with locators (there being no page numbers, he had to use his own set of symbols) identifying where they were to be found in his library. Here was an index not to a single book, but to a lifetime’s reading — and the prototype of the modern subject index.

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Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

That distinction, in one story Duncan tells, saved a man’s life — a 16th-century scholar working on a Biblical concordance escaped execution for heresy only when he could demonstrate that he was doing the mechanical work of reordering the Bible text rather than in any way adding, altering or retranslating it.

The distinction between these two types of index continues to this day. Google, for instance, is not indexing the web in quite the sense that an indexer indexes a book. Rather, it’s compiling a sort of global concordance. No coincidence that its parent company is called Alphabet. Yet, as Duncan observes, the now ubiquitous hashtag on social media is a sort of subject-indexing tool. We still need technologies to make vast data collections navigable — and digital or analogue, those technologies haven’t changed in their underlying nature.

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Harry, the Prince of PR

By Sam Leith

You know the joke about the dyslexic priest who had a crisis of faith? He lay up all night wondering if there was a dog… Well that’s me. Sort of.

Dyslexia takes various forms — and reading out loud can be as much of a problem as spelling. My spelling is a nightmare too. Just ask my editors. However, we do make better spies. This week I learned on GCHQ’s, top secret espionage training scheme are four times as likely to have dyslexia as those on other training schemes. We see the world differently. And those distinctive ways in which dyslexics process information enables us to see things that others often miss.

After that torturously embarrassing sermon, the priest who was training me had an idea. Throw away the script, he said. Get up in that pulpit and tell me a story. So I did. It worked. And I’ve never looked back — or used notes again.

I do prepare though. I think about the matter in hand abstractly — I have always been more comfortable in the abstract than the concrete. And theology, of course, encourages this. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud came up with the controversial idea that because of their suspicion of idolatry — of turning God into something concrete, like a Golden Calf — Moses invented abstract thought. “The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a God one cannot see” became a defining feature of the Jewish imagination, thus “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea — a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality”.

My ideas find their place and are given some sort of order. Then what begins as a kind of philosophy is translated into story form, with a beginning, middle and end. When I preach, I tell a story like others would tell a joke. With this process — abstract first, then conversion into narrative form — my preaching was transformed. I was no longer the stumbling fool. I had found my voice — thanks to my dyslexia.

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Is my Christianity a disguise?

By Giles Fraser

There are 10 things dyslexics are often good at, according to Jillian Petrova: the first is a “Strong memory for stories. the seventh is “Abstract thinkers”.  We dyslexics apparently “understand things that are not tangible, many of which are innate human qualities like bravery, love and deception”. Which may well be why, by working out a different way of doing things, my ‘disability’ did become a kind of superpower. I wonder if the same was true of Moses. The Bible says he had a stammer, and Jewish tradition has him as left handed – both, perhaps, signs that he was not, as it were, neurotypical.

There is a cost. Tasks that are simple for others, are fiendishly complicated for me. Basic organisation is always a problem. I can be absurdly literal when asked a question and rude (or what i would consider clear) in replying. Often, I do not understand even the simplest of tasks if not fully specified. I can’t drive. I still have to say to myself “write with the right” and then wiggle my writing hand to work out which way is right.

If asked a question, I often imagine the line of questioning going forward and answer the third one along. And if I feel I have been asked to do contradictory things, I just seize up, emotionally paralysed. I also have an astonishingly high fidget factor — not good for that calm, prayerful, beatific look priests are supposed to adopt during services.

But there are up-sides. Dyslexics are often good at pattern recognition. I was reasonably good at chess from quite a young age. I could see the whole board in one, rather than as a collection of individual potential moves. And, for those of us who are religious, pattern recognition may be a rather important feature of our faith. Like that great patron saint of all neurodivergent mystics, I totally get it when William Blake talks about seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a flower. I open the curtains to the garden and I see God.

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Autism isn't always a superpower

By Stuart Ritchie

When I was a school, I was at the bottom of the bottom set. We were the dunces, the no-hopers. Sitting a few desks along from me was fellow dyslexic Charlie Dunstone. Like me, he had a reputation for being trouble. His nickname was “stubber” because he was often to be found smoking roll-ups behind the fives court rather than swatting away in the library. “They said I didn’t work hard and I was lazy because I was bored in classes” remembers Dunstone. He left school to go and set up something called The Carphone Warehouse. “It would be a mistake to make dyslexia a problem. We should celebrate it. … In later life [dyslexia] can be great for imaginative, productive people because they come up with loads of ideas and are creative.”

In other words, what counts as an ability or a disability are highly context dependent. Yet our educational system still seems set up to turn us dyslexics into fools. I scraped into University, god knows how. By luck I chose to read philosophy. And almost immediately, I found something I was able to do. I had never got A’s before. Within months, my reputation for being thick had gone. It felt like the difference between a penguin waddling along on land and a penguin swimming in water, free and graceful.

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Our narcissistic view of death

By Giles Fraser

There has been a lot of blah in the press recently about Hull University deciding not to count bad spelling against its students. Admittedly, the issue was slightly different, with much talk of the need to decolonise the curriculum. But I was more sympathetic. Educational environments exist to enable students to find what they are good at. More enlightened educationalists often talk of dyslexics needing “support”. But I want more than support to, as it were, walk on land. I suppose help is useful, but people like me won’t ever be much good at that. I want them to show me the water.

Yet according to a 2019 report, schools are failing to diagnose at least 80% of children with dyslexia. We wait for them to fail and only then intervene says Helen Boden, Chief Executive of the British Dyslexia Association. By which time, they are behind their peers and the curriculum and we are losing them.

I don’t know the science. I don’t really understand what makes dyslexics different. But I do know that what counts as neurotypical or neurodivergent is as much to do with the way society has set itself up — what it decides to count as normative — as much as it has to do with the workings of my brain.

If educational establishments are to get the best out of us, they need to be more aware that certain tasks suit some people more than others. Why, when they’re designing a curriculum aren’t they considering what type of people will do well and who will not. Whose strengths are their curriculums playing to? What the GCHQ experience suggests is that we need people who think differently. We should be able to assess them too. Because often, we see things you don’t.

Yes, I was trouble at school. Frustrated and angry. Academically, a lost cause. Yet within a decade of leaving, I had my PhD and was teaching philosophy at Oxford. If I could go back to school again, this I what I would want to tell them: dyslexia is your problem not mine.

A book by an ornithologist may seem an odd recommendation to be giving the Cabinet. Britain’s brief love affair with hearing birdsong was a feature of the lockdown at its most unforgiving: a reminder of the economic deep-freeze that ministers are desperate now to put behind them. The country needs to get back to work. People need jobs and homes. The great engine of the economy needs to be set humming again. The Government will live or die by its ability to fill roads, and offices, and shops.

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Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

But this only renders my recommendation the more pressing. The solace that people over the course of this unsettling year are finding in the natural world will not have come as a surprise to Mark Cocker. As brilliant a stylist as he is a naturalist, he has a genius for articulating what is felt by many of us, when we take pleasure in the spectacle of wildlife, as something inchoate and unconsidered. In Crow Country, he explained and explored his fascination with the raucous corvids of a single Norfolk valley; in Birds and People, he provided a panoramic analysis of the hold that birds exert on the human imagination across the sweep of the entire globe. Neither book, though, is my recommendation to ministers.

Instead, I offer them Our Place. A study of the role played by conservation charities over the past century, it may — on the face of it — sound rather niche. The kick, though, comes in the subtitle: “Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late?” The answer that Cocker gives to this question is precisely why ministers need to read the book so urgently: “Nature is slipping from these islands: slowly, steadily, inexorably, field by field, dyke by dyke. Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.”

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

Why, in a country that, measured statistically, is the most nature-obsessed on the planet, is this being allowed to happen? Cocker’s book is eye-opening in the way it zeroes in on a bleak irony: that the very obsession of the British with the natural world may have contributed to its degradation. An alphabet soup of charities committed to saving wildlife has served to frustrate any attempt at coherent campaigning — and to break up ecosystems into unsustainably tiny fragments.

Conservation organisations ranging from the Forestry Commission to the National Trust have destroyed swathes of deciduous trees and wild uplands by replacing them with “a loathsomeness of conifers”. The Common Agricultural Policy “effectively bound the country into a federal farming state, against which there was no redress, apart from internal reforms instigated by the EU itself.” The result, over the course of the past half century, has been the ecological equivalent of a doomsday machine.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Why should this matter to ministers grappling with a horrendous array of other challenges and crises? For two reasons. The first is that — with Britain’s departure from the EU — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has opened up to set environmental law on a wholly new track. Those suspicious of the Government’s green credentials may well be justified in fearing the worst — but there is cause for hope as well as pessimism.

As Michael Gove — during his tenure as Environment Secretary — efficiently demonstrated, there is political advantage for the Government in identifying itself with the conservation (or even the re-introduction) of wildlife. It is not only dread-locked activists who fret about extinction. So, too, do fly-fishermen in the Tory shires. And herein lies the second reason. Voters’ appreciation of what the natural world had to offer them during the lockdown will not have faded now that the lockdown itself has been eased. Ministers have a political as well as a moral responsibility not to let the “cold stains of absence” in the map of this country’s wildlife spread any further.

If they do want guidance on the sheer monstrous scale of the problem, and the possible solutions to it, then Cocker’s book — at once a hymn of love to our flora and fauna, and a sombre jeremiad — is the place to start.

For instance, a 24-year-old PhD student, Shelby Judge, goes on a visit to Sterling Castle and takes exception to something she reads in one of those little Mr Men books on sale in the castle gift shop. In the book she flicks through, Mr Clever is patronising Little Miss Curious, who cannot understand why the Forth Bridge is so named. “What happened to the first, the second and the third bridges?” Miss Curious asks. “It was going to be a long day,” sighs the book’s narrator. According to Ms Judge, this story reinforces antiquated gender stereotypes. “It is meant to be a funny joke but then it’s always at the expense of women.” “Mansplaining,” Ms Judge later tweeted, with a picture of the offending page. It was that tweet that went viral and became “a story”.

It was hardly a shocking or surprising comment. Even Telegraph readers cannot have been shielded all their lives from the existence of feminism.

No, it was a story for some simple reasons. First, it provided the opportunity to print some colourful images of Mr Men that worked well to offset all the dreary stuff about the election. Second, it played to the cultural prejudices of its readers — the “po-faced feminist academics taking offence again at a simple bit of fun” attitude. But also — and here, I suspect, is where that deeper and elusive quality of ‘a story’ comes in — it put its finger on one of those cultural anxieties about how we bring up our children, and what moral lessons we are exposing them to. It represents a battle for the ethics of the bedtime story.

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Every evening at about half past seven, I settle down to read my three year-old son a succession of bedtime stories. Bathed and in his fire-engine pyjamas, with his warm milk, this is my time with him. He sits on my lap and we get through maybe three or four stories every night. Our current favourite is The Runaway Pea a terrific tale of the adventures of a solitary pea who thinks there must be more to life than ending up on a plate for tea.

Every evening we fire up our imaginations with tales of Vikings who want to make dinosaur stew, Mog the cat hiding on the roof from the Christmas tree, or Harry and Gran and his robots. As I snuggle down with my son and kiss him goodnight, I do not want this moment to become some sort of ideological battleground, the next space to be conquered in the ever-widening gyre of our increasingly rancorous culture wars.

But politics keeps banging on the bedroom door. A is for Activist is a classic of the genre. B is for banner, C is for Co-op, X is for Malcolm X: you get the picture. I Have the Right to be a Child explored the United Nations’ 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child for a children’s audience. A few months ago, Afua Hirsch published a children’s book about Lady Hale and the importance of the Supreme Court. And best of all, The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks — a children’s book by Amy Kean published last year:

“Elodie-Rose was a girl on a mission
In a town where girls act like obedient kittens,
Sing soft the same tune and dance neat the same jigs
Wear the same flowery dresses and pretty blonde wigs.
But Elodie-Rose vowed to change this old world.
Because Elodie-Rose isn’t like other girls.”

In many ways, these books share much in common with the very earliest of children’s literature from the 17th century, all being pious and instructional. First published in the 1640s, the Puritan minister John Cotton’s Milk for Babes was a collection of improving religious stories and prayers, designed as a catechism for young children. It goes through the Ten Commandments, the nature of the church and grace, the last judgment and so on. This was characteristic of much of the children’s literature that followed.

Further reading

Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

The new moralism in children’s literature replaces the church with the courts, the Ten Commandments with human rights, prayer and the inner life with authenticity, being true to yourself, not giving a fuck. Yet the purpose today is exactly the same as it was back then, to pass on to children the parent’s view of the world. In other words, when liberals denounce religious parents for brainwashing their children, the truth is that they are up to exactly the same sort of thing.

And so they should, by the way. It is absolutely right to use children’s literature for moral instruction. It is a parental responsibility to nurture your child’s moral and spiritual sense as much as to look after his or her physical needs. The idea that a parent shouldn’t intervene morally, should respect the child’s autonomy and wait for the child to grow up so that the child can choose their own values (see my piece on the problems with adult baptism) is a load of old nonsense that liberals sometimes say they believe in theory but never accept in practice.

But apart from the fact that my own worldview is in many ways closer to 17^th-century Puritans that to 21st-century liberals, the thing I most have against the modern moralism in children’s literature is that it is so clumsily issue based. Here is one author introducing a reading list of “Nine books for woke kids”:

“It is a challenging time to be a parent right now. Thousands of families have lost their homes in the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. Los Angeles is burning. White supremacists are marching in plain view on our city streets. The president has just declared that children of immigrants should be punished for the ‘crime’ of growing up American. Climate change is real. Bigotry is on the rise. And on top of all this, the unthinkable threat of nuclear war is getting more real every day. How do you help your children make sense of all this?”

by the same author

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

It is not a problem that children’s literature reflects adult concerns — it always has, it always will. But I question the idea that value transfer can be successfully achieved through stories that have little sympathy with a child’s mental world, and that are merely picture-book illustrations of things only an adult would recognise as moral.

Here the Mr Men stories are much better at moral instruction. Mr Noisy learns how to be considerate. Mr Rude learns that anger doesn’t always help. Mr Tall learns self-love. Part of the success of these books is their use of archetypes. That’s why they can be successfully translated into Chinese and Icelandic and Hebrew. On the other hand, I don’t know how much a Chinese child would gain from the improving story of Lady Hale and the Supreme Court. Or what they would make of Elodie-Rose in Nigeria.

What makes for a story in newspaper land is the current, the immediate, the topical. And, too often, woke children’s literature fails because it follows this very adult sense of what counts as important. The best of young children’s literature — though written and bought and read out by adults — knows that children think differently. The Oi series of picture books are a favourite — so much fun, so much to laugh at together: “Cats sit on mats, hares sit on chairs, mules sit on stools, gophers sit on sofas and frogs sit on logs.” Seemingly, not a moral message in sight.

And then, after reading them night after night, you realise there may be. Louie starts telling me that things in his bedroom have to go in specific places. The world is ordered in a certain way. A place for everything and everything in its place. There are rules. Until the revolutionary Frog comes along and changes them. Perhaps there is nothing more properly basic in moral and political philosophy than the battle between order and chaos.

It’s all so much more subtle, funny, and interesting than the flat-footed moralistic instruction of those who are only really using children’s literature as a delivery mechanism for their own narrow ideological concerns.

Consider this very modern problem: I have given a test drug to 20 patients, and 15 of them responded positively. That’s a 75% ‘response rate’, in the jargon, in this sample of patients.

But common sense will tell you that 75% isn’t the drug’s true response rate (would you expect exactly 15 patients to respond out of every further 20 who were exposed to the treatment? Or sometimes 14, sometimes 18, and so on?) So: the observed response rate isn’t the truth. But – and again, applying merely to common sense, and with the supposition that I didn’t rig the trial in some way – surely a response rate of 75% is more probably the true response rate than, say, 25%?

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why the Unabomber's Manifesto is essential reading

By Jamie Bartlett

To peer at the truth about a theory concerning the world (in this case, the true response rate of the drug) usually requires an act of inductive inference: from experimental observation (“We observed a 75% response rate in this study”), to statement about the truth (“The true response rate is more likely to lie between 50% and 90% than it is to lie below 10%”). You’ll never know the truth (shades of Jack Nicholson) – you can’t expose every possible patient throughout the Earth’s history to the drug, and count how many of that infinite set would respond – yet you can still make valid claims about it. Roll that thought about your head a moment, and then tell me Statistics isn’t sexy.

That there exists an inductive logic that more or less works is thanks in part to the Reverend Thomas Bayes, whose simple inquiry in the 18^th century provides the answer to what I called a “very modern problem”.

Here’s his version, posthumously published by his friend Richard Price, in 1763:

Other than f-for-s, this is essentially the “what is the probability that the true response rate for this drug lies between 50% and 90%, given that we’ve observed a 75% response in this trial?” question with which we opened.

Bayes answers like this: we have some hypothesis of interest; in this case, perhaps it’s “The true response rate for this drug is higher than 50%”. Call that hypothesis H. Before the trial, I must have some positive belief that H is true: call that Pr(H). Pr(H) must lie between zero (H is impossible), and 1 (H is certainly true) (and if Pr(H) didn’t lie between zero and one, there could be no justification for the experiment).

After the trial, the evidence – that 15 out of 20 patients responded – must alter that belief to an extent warranted by the observed results (else why do any experimental science at all?). “All” Bayes’ theorem makes plain is how you should modulate your pre-trial belief, Pr(H), into your post-trial belief, Pr(H, given that 15 out of 20 patients responded). Mathematically, it’s almost trivial. Inferentially and scientifically, it’s a revolution.

Almost every bit of tech you use pivots on his theorem – every Google auto-complete, not to mention the search algorithms themselves; Turing’s work at Bletchley; astronomical investigations of far-flung galaxies; medical imaging; genetic markers for disease predictions; nearly everything with the modern label “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning”: all of these and thousands more exercises in human ingenuity make use, explicitly or otherwise, of the theorem which carries his name.

In one of those dead-ends to which civilisation can sometimes be prone, however, early 20th-century Statistics turned its face against Bayes: theories are either true, or false, and so to discuss them in terms of probability – worse, in terms of “your” probability – was an unwarranted intrusion of the subjective – of the self – into science, which (as every fule kno) is supposed to be entirely objective.

Further reading

Don't fight dirty with statistics

By Tom Chivers

Ronald Fisher, geneticist and statistician – a genius, a giant, but occasionally totally wrong – wrote Bayes out of the statistical universe, by inventing most of the methods that are taught to undergraduate scientists to this day, all of which pivot on “falsificationist” notions. As Popper held a theory to be scientific only to the extent to which an experiment could prove it false, so Fisher attempted an inductive logic by which data could “reject” a hypothesis.

Statisticians were aware of the limits of Fisher’s pseudo-objective approach (it often doesn’t work, it’s incoherent and, ironically, it is also unavoidably, enormously subjective), but continued to teach it – in four undergraduate years at the University of Glasgow, I received nine hours of Bayesian lectures, against heavens know how many hundreds of hours on ideas that flowed from Fisher.

Further reading

How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

I don’t have space to deal with Fisher’s issues here; suffice to say that Bayesian subjectivity isn’t an excuse for the post-modern relativism which is destroying the social sciences and nor does it imply that “there’s no such thing as the truth”. The biggest roadblock to Bayes wasn’t philosophical, but mechanical: for all but the simplest problems, the maths required to make the Bayesian machine work in practice is too “hard”.

And then the second Bayesian revolution happened. I started my PhD research just as that revolution picked up pace, in the early 1990s, with the “Gibbs sampler” publication of Gelfand and Smith. I’m blessed now to count among my direct colleagues (and friends) Professor Nicky Best (this year honoured by the Royal Statistical Society) who, along with coworkers David Lunn, Christopher Jackson, Andrew Thomas and the brilliant David Spiegelhalter invented BUGS: Bayesian inference using the Gibbs Sampler.

Gibbs sampling allows the statistician, no matter how complex his or her mathematical model – his or her representation of the theory under investigation – to draw simulated observations from that model’s idea of the world and to use those simulations for valid inference.

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

“Given this noisy, blurred MRI scan of your brain: what is the representation of your actual brain that has highest probability? Which areas are most likely affected by stroke?” – my PhD questions were identical, mutatis mutandis, to Thomas’s 1763 “PROBLEM”, and in theory could be answered by application of his theorem. Prior to Gibbs, however, this was practically impossible: afterwards, it was (almost) trivial. Suddenly, every scientific problem that had a perfect Bayesian solution in theory almost always had nearly perfect Bayesian approximate solutions in practice.

Statistical science was rescued from its obscurity not by Fisher’s dead-end significance tests, but from a mechanical solution that made Bayes’ 1763 theorem relevant and applicable in almost any setting. Without doubt, the portrait for the new 50-pound note should be of Thomas Bayes, a truly Great Briton.

Two highly readable books by philosopher Ian Hacking also shaped my understanding of how, in his words, the “quiet statisticians have changed our world”: The Taming of Chance explains how the concept of statistical “laws” came to rival those of the physical world in terms of their impact on human affairs. And An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic is a great exposition of probability and the ideas of both Fisher and Bayes (and others). Probability, the language of uncertainty, is the thing that everyone (including undergraduate statisticians) thinks they “get”, until they think about it carefully and realise they don’t.

If you’d like to read more, Howson and Urbach’s Scientific Reasoning is magisterial. In the same year I wasn’t being taught Bayesian methods by Glasgow University’s statisticians, Peter Urbach’s partner, who headed the Drama department, gave me a copy of this book, and it changed my life. I recommend it to everyone; Howson and Urbach were philosophers of science, not statisticians, and it’s very readable. For completely un-mathematical friends I’ve been recommending Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram.