Spring Reading Part 2

Posted by litlove

And so to the non-fiction reads of this spring, so far:

I’d read and loved Mangan’s previous book, Bookworm, which was a highly enjoyable trot through the children’s literature she’d loved growing up, and so naturally I was keen to read (or in fact listen to) the sequel. I loved the start of this, particularly her account of finding transitional books before the advent of YA, and reading English literature at university. She can be extremely amusing and it was all very jolly and fun. After graduation, she took a false turn into the law before eventually realising that she hated work as a solicitor and switching careers into journalism. Then, also entertaining, she met a man who she knew was the one when he took her on holiday to Norfolk for the secondhand bookshops (apparently she’s written a whole book about this, who knew?). Then, undeniably, more difficult life experiences took over, including post-natal depression, the pandemic and finally the death of her father. During all these times of stress, books were her mainstay and her passion for them remains fierce and undiminished.

I had two main niggles with this book. The first is that whilst I enjoy reading about books that I’ll never personally choose to read (it can be restful), Mangan has a love of children’s literature that far surpasses my own, and I might have wished for a little less of it. If I’d been reading the book, I could have skipped these sections, but listening to an audiobook it’s much trickier to do. (Oddly, I find I’m struggling to recall any of the authors she wrote about, apart from Jane Austen. the Brontes and Norah Lofts.) The audiobook also forcibly made me aware of the incredible length of many of Lucy’s sentences. It was entertaining for all the wrong reasons to hear her trying to gabble her way to the end of her third or fourth extended subclause before she finally ran out of breath. Generally, there’s a lot to enjoy in this book, but it doesn’t quite reach greatness, though I can’t really put my finger on why.

The following three books were joint reads with Mr Litlove, and this one we both loved. It’s the extraordinary story of Stephane Breitwieser, a young Frenchman who stole an estimated $1.4 billion in artworks from museums and galleries over Western Europe. Throughout this time he was living with his mother, cramming more than 200 key pieces of art into his attic bedroom. Because Breitwieser was that supposedly impossible creature – a thief who stole because he loved art and only wanted to enjoy it. He never sold a single piece. He was aided by his then girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss, who would keep watch while he undertook the most audacious heists. Poor museum security is clearly at issue here, but Breitweiser’s skill and innovation was undeniable. He would throw objects out of windows and retrieve them later, hide silverware up the back of his jacket, small sculptures up his sleeves and stuff paintings into Anne-Catherine’s handbag. He took things in broad daylight, waiting for crowds to disperse and museum guards to go on their breaks, sometimes forced to remove screws from display cases one at a time in unobserved moments before making off with their contents. Finkel does a great job of showing how skill and success went to his head, and how a lack of coordination between the international art theft squads allowed him to keep stealing far longer than seems possible. The story of how he was finally caught, and what happened after that was gripping and sad. We both thoroughly enjoyed this and are planning on reading more by Michael Finkel.

Oh gosh I’ve been putting off reviewing this because I have a lot of criticisms and I’m not sure of their validity. Anyway, this is a book whose premise I was completely behind, as I thought I understood it. Wright argues that exams have become far too important in the education system, to the point that they do a disservice to pupils. He splits his book into three parts – the first asks what school is for, considering the history of education and the political and pedagogic factors that have gone into the current curriculum. The middle part considers what school is actually like, which has a more memoir-y feel as Wright travels around visiting different and innovative kinds of schools, and in the final part he lays out his own plan for how education ought to change.

As a former teacher, I wholeheartedly agree that our insistence on grades and exams has sucked the lifeblood out of education, and placed the weight of its judgement on one single skill that not very many possess and which subsequent life will rarely exploit. I think the over-insistence on exams has destroyed the one thing that really matters in education – intellectual curiosity. It’s the essential factor that brings real joy to learning. When I was working at the university, a whole variety of different ways of assessing students were introduced, including the portfolio option, where students in the Easter term could elect to put forward three essays (unaltered) that they’d written during the year rather than sit the exam. I understand that the rise of Chat GPT has made this kind of assessment problematic. But my feeling is that we need alternatives to the current two hour pressure cooker format because it does little more than check a student’s short term memory, usually at the long term cost of their nervous systems.

Wright’s premise has nothing to do with getting rid of exams or finding alternative ways of testing. His argument is that exams as they stand do a disservice to the kinds of kids who aren’t academically minded. Well, fish, gun, barrel. My growing distaste for exams comes from the fact that they aren’t serving the kids who actually ARE academic. There has to be a reason why something horrific like a quarter of students at Cambridge are on anti-depressants, and the suicide rate goes up and up. Wright’s book to my mind remains part of the problem. The word ‘privilege’ is used repeatedly and pejoratively, and not just to mean financial advantage, but also a happy or stable home life, and innate intelligence. It seems to me that the more privilege is associated with kids who do well, the more the concept creeps so that ANY child who does well is simply assumed to have benefited from its unequal boost. This is not at all true and it blindsides and negates how much hard work children put into their studies. Wright doesn’t have a single thing to say about children who are clever, which is about par for the course. They are usually dismissed by teachers as being able to just get on with things alone, aren’t they lucky, they don’t need help. Well, maybe not, but it’s amazing how many of them don’t get encouragement or recognition either. They are simply expected to achieve, and when they do, nothing to see here – it’s just privilege doing its thing. I saw how confusing and stressful it was for my students to slave at their studies, often with parents on their backs, fretting about their grades, and suffer all manner of anxieties around exams because of the high expectations on them, and then receive the weird mix that is the manic, over-adrenalised relief of their parents and complete silence from their teachers. These are the kids who beat themselves up over B grades – they are legion.

Now we’re making it harder than ever for children who do well. They go to university where they will rack up enough debt to cripple them for the next two decades, and then there are no entry level jobs into any career that’s even slightly interesting. We live in the era of the unpaid internship. This whole process is awful, self contradictory and absurd, and I’m not in the least surprised that so many children are suffering with their mental health. None of it makes the least bit of sense and kids know nonsense when they see it.

I held other things against Wright, too. At no point in this book does he ever consider that the quality of teaching is paramount in education. The possibility of bad teachers, teachers who take against students irrationally, boring teachers, teachers who can’t keep control of a class, these never appear on the pages of his book. And yet they are responsible for a lot of dissatisfaction in school. I have much sympathy for teachers, who are ludicrously overworked and put under a ton of stress. Teaching is hard and I’m not sure whether there are opportunities for teachers to work on their skills over the course of their career like there are in other professions? I also felt that Wright had a thing against clever girls. The only females who get a properly positive write up from him are the kind who are resolutely non-academic, forthright, jolly women. But whatever. Where he finally ends up, with his alternate vision of the exam system, is to have a kind of basic school certificate at 15, a year earlier than the current GCSEs, and to keep the next year sort of open and fluid for children to try out classes in subjects they may take further. I honestly think that kids who really aren’t academically minded (or who are suffering hardship at home) are a hard sell on even this reduced program, and I predict dire boredom for all the children who are the least bit able.

My alternative scenario, for what it’s worth, would involve revolutionizing the early school years. There was a psychological experiment that was reasonably famous in which young children who liked drawing and colouring were split into three groups. The first group were told that if they drew well, they would get a reward. The second group were given the reward as a surprise afterwards. The third group just drew, with no rewards. What was the outcome? All but the last group subsequently lost all interest in drawing unless there was a reward in it. That last group kept on drawing simply because they enjoyed it. I think the way we’re going about teaching is wrong from the ground level up. We want to find ways to instill intellectual curiosity into children, ways to make them enjoy their learning and understand how useful it is, right from the get-go. I think we have this fear that people won’t do things unless we MAKE them with either a carrot or a stick. I don’t agree. I think it’s a kind of generational trauma handed down through the teaching system. Well, I’ve been banging on and on for ages now and I must finish this post, but I spent a lot of time arguing with this book and Mr Litlove would eventually keep reading over the top of my protests. So I have learned I’m irrational on this subject!

What a waste of potentially excellent material this book was. Setting out to explore the various categories of monster who has created art – from the Woody Allens and Roman Polanskis, through the Nazi sympathisers and abandoning mothers, etc, etc – with the aim of getting to the bottom of this problem that is great art produced by dodgy people. But it’s a tissue of inconclusive wittering in which Dederer can’t bear to come down against anyone’s opinion, really, but thinks if she goes on and on enough, she’ll somehow produce an overview. There must be so many theoretical sources she could have called on to bulk out her arguments or view the dominant arguments in new lights. But no. She lost me after a long chapter on critics in which she argued at great length that it was dreadful to assume your readers held the same opinions and that the use of ‘we’ was a kind of cultural bullying, only to embark on the next chapter saying ‘We think this…’ ‘We experience that….’ without the tiniest bit of self-awareness or regret. Mr Litlove and I felt worn down and unenlightened and we abandoned it after about four or five chapters.

Real Hope For Dark Days

Posted by litlove

It’s a sore trial living in the UK at the moment. After three years of the shambolic Brexit debacle, in which zero progress has been made, we’re now forced to witness a leadership contest that showcases the most dismal collection of candidates – more of a police line-up than a beauty parade. Worst of all, Boris Johnson is supposed to win, which makes me feel like I’m living in a piece of Dadaist theatre except they tell me it’s really happening. How a man who has been sacked twice for lying, who caused chaos in the Foreign Office and wasted millions as Mayor of London, who basically has no principles and is known to be lazy, self-serving and ready to give up at the first obstacle can possibly become Prime Minister beggars belief. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t sat here laughing at Trump all this time. Anyway, enough. It’s just depressing to acknowledge what the plausible leaders of our country now look like.

It’s just as well, then, that books can offer genuine hope and solace. If you have inadvertently glanced at the online comments on the Guardian website lately and lost all hope in humanity, I have two books that will restore it. Growing Pains by Dr Mike Shooter and Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy are both non-fiction accounts of lives spent helping children to find their best and most promising selves. Mike Shooter is a child psychiatrist in the NHS, Kate Clanchy teaches English in a multi-cultural comprehensive, and they have brought much joy and inspiration into our house lately, with narratives that are a patchwork of fascinating case histories.

Growing Pains is the story of Mike Shooter’s career listening to adolescents (and their families) in crisis. He begins the book with an honest account of his own depression and his early work in medicine. It’s one particular encounter, at 2am on a terminal ward that changes the course of his life. He is following the Senior Registrar – ‘aloof, taciturn, straight-backed’ – to check on a Mr Dobbs, who is dying of an aneurysm. They find, as one might expect, a terrified man.

Simon sat on his bed and asked him if he was frightened. Mr Dobbs nodded; he was beyond words. Then Simon, straight-laced, Simon, the man we thought more suited to a brigade of guards than patient care, took him in his arms and rocked him to and fro like a baby, while Mr Dobbs sobbed into his shoulder.’

The next morning, Simon is absent and Mike Shooter is asked if he’ll talk to Mr Dobbs instead. He is so afraid of the prospect that he goes to see the Dean of the Medical School instead, to tell him he’s quitting. But the Dean, a wise old soul, says no he isn’t; he’ll make a good doctor one day, but he’s depressed. ‘And the worse you feel about yourself, the harder you work to prove you’re wrong. You’ve been fighting against what you really feel for years. This was bound to happen. Mr Dobbs was just the final straw.’ The Dean arranges for him to see a psychiatrist, and over the course of the next few years, the treatment Mike Shooter receives makes him realise that this is the field he wants to dedicate himself to. The ability to ‘see beyond [the] patient’s symptoms to the human being behind them’ was the rule he wanted to follow.

Well by now you might be able to see beyond the words of this review to the readers behind them – the only problem we had with it was that it kept making Mr Litlove cry. And if Mr Litlove cries, then I cry, that’s just how it goes. I need to stress that these were not tears of sadness, but the more complicated throat-tightening tears of beauty and humanity. And I should also stress that this is not at all a manipulative book. Dr Shooter never dwells on any part of his story and in consequence the narrative was not harrowing, despite the subject matter. It was inspirational, in the most grounded and humane ways. One of the stories that stays with me still concerns another middle of the night emergency call that summons Dr Shooter to a household in crisis. An eight-year-old child, Danny, is threatening to kill himself. When the doctor arrives, the child is on the landing, his pyjama cord around his neck, the other end tied to the banisters, and his desperate, angry, fearful parents are hypnotised by the situation. Mike Shooter’s response is to come in as if everything were normal, exclaim at the lateness of the hour and express a strong need for a cup of tea. He asks if Danny would like a snack before bedtime, and the spell of craziness is dispelled by the autopilot of ordinary hospitality. Everyone comes and sits around the tea tray in the middle of the living room where it becomes apparent that the man is the mother’s new partner whom Danny is rejecting and that ‘they all wanted to change things but didn’t know how to do it without tearing each other apart’ A problem with which I imagine we are all familiar, and where salvation can come so much more quickly with someone calm, kind and firm to help.

Kate Clanchy’s book also focusses on individual students as they struggle and triumph on the battlefield of education and the stories she tells are just as fascinating, whether it’s the way the word ‘gay’ has signified in classrooms across the years, or what the parents of excluded children are up against when they try to get their kids a fair educational deal. Kate is also a poet and her poetry club becomes one of the major features in her stories, as she finds it can be a real liberation for all kinds of children, including those who have English as a second language or who suffer from dyslexia. She tackles knotty subjects like selection in schools – both streaming in classes and the nightmare parents face when trying to decide what school to pick for their children. And she talks about the pleasures and pains of teaching English.

There are so many stories I love, I don’t know which to tell you about. But just off the top of my head, there’s Allen, a large, capable boy more suited to open spaces, but bright and interested in English literature. He was that mythical beast, an adolescent boy willing to talk about emotions, and as such he stimulated real class discussion. It just so happened that this class was one in which Kate could exercise her own judgement to some extent and choose the books that would best inspire her students (not something that happens these days). Twenty-five years later she looks him up on Linked-In and finds out that he runs an engineering business and is a self-made millionaire, He in turn remembers her lessons as a place where ‘I learned who I was.’ ‘English:’ Clanchy writes, ‘the lesson where you laugh about sex, and argue about war, and talk about jealousy. English: where you grow up.’ The problem is that English, like poetry, does not ‘WALT’ well. WALT stands for ‘We Are Learning To’ and has become the staple of ‘formative assessment’ which the government likes a lot. It comes from the best of motives, Clanchy explains, the desire to open up a learning process that might appear hidden or opaque. But what works well for a science lesson is altogether harder to pin down in the arts and humanities. The consequence has been that WALT dominates lesson plans and the non-WALT aspects of education, like artistic creativity and all that nebulous maturation process get left out of the curriculum.

The stories in both books inevitably bump up against politics because both authors are working on the cliff edge where the vulnerable and the economically-nonprofitable clash with government funding. But these are not polemical books. They are about thoughtful people who are really good at their jobs understanding the pressures on all sides and doing their best for children, however that shakes out. Listening to these books has made me think a lot about what’s wrong with the world today, and for my own part I think it boils down to an insufficient engagement with reality. I blame the media mostly, for their two-note grizzles of sentimentality and outrage, emotions that reliably sell papers, but which have made us all happy to be ignorant. It takes terrific courage to face the truth of our lives, and mostly we are invited to side step that reality and find someone else to blame. Or we end up letting ourselves be sold ideals of perfection and purity that are equally dangerous.

What I loved about these books is their authors’ readiness to talk about getting things wrong. Clanchy produces such an admirably nuanced description of Cheyenne, a poor working class child who spent her time pushing Kate’s middle-class buttons and stalking her children, whom Kate could not truly like. And I loved the story in which Mike Shooter is called to deal with a psychotic break in an adolescent who has been wrongly placed in the adult ward. Hassan escaped his nurses and ran around the grounds of the unit, talking in Somali and scooping mud and grass into his mouth. Shooter thought it possible that he was just terrified and involved in some kind of prayer ritual he didn’t understand, so he called the Somali elders from the community to come and advise him. After a few minutes they turned on him. asking how he dared call himself a doctor and telling him to get the boy some medication. It’s not about mistakes – if you’re a human being engaged in something you care about, you will be making mistakes. They are inevitable. What these stories show is that it’s about the process – the process of finding out what’s wrong and of learning and becoming more self-aware in consequence, possibly the most important process that we are called upon to practice on a regular basis and which we avoid and fumble and foul up out of embarrassed pride or some weird, punitive notion that it ‘shouldn’t happen.’

These have both been terrific books, loved and admired equally by myself and Mr Litlove. They have made us laugh and cry and feel deeply in touch with both the difficult business of growing up and the authentic hope embedded in the care of people like Mike Shooter and Kate Clanchy that we might actually make it. For they have a lot to teach adults too, as a quick glance around the political candidates for Tory party leader can tell us. They’ve made me want to have a completely different kind of identity politics, one in which gender, skin colour, race, religion, none of these thing matter, but where the identity is question is that of a grown-up and it’s an identity to which we all aspire.

Decades of capitalism have encouraged us to stay children with the goal of becoming spoiled children. I think it’s given us very complicated feelings about people who are able shamelessly to make a fool of themselves in public, and that sometimes such people can be used to assuage us about our insecurities. This is an indulgence – something that makes us feel better in the short-term but worse in the long-term. What we need is to admire the grown-up again, the sensible, grounded person who doesn’t make a fuss about things, but who won’t sit passive when they could offer help. The sort of person who, currently, says the wise, placatory thing on social media and is totally ignored. We need the kind of grown-up who has a strong moral compass and a great deal of compassion, who has emotional intelligence, self-awareness and the courage to look reality in the eye, even when it is ugly. The kind of grown-up who can sit with people in emotional distress and not make it about themselves. We need more Mike Shooters and Kate Clanchys, basically, and the fact that they have written these books shows that such people are out there, it’s just that we so rarely get to hear about them. For me they’ve been a properly optimistic antidote to everything going on in the news, and the embodiment of an aspiration that is as difficult as becoming rich and famous but infinitely more desirable.

Learning The Hard Way

Posted by litlove

Why is it that the student-teacher relationship is such a potent and hypnotic one? Inevitably, this is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years, not least because of a strange sense I always had that teaching is easy. I loved the relationships I had with my students because teaching was the one place where I felt I knew exactly what was expected of me, and exactly what my students needed. Most relationships have an opaque quality, a nagging suspicion that we’re not sure of doing or saying the right thing, the necessary thing. But my students, I felt sure (and do correct me if I’ve been labouring under a delusion), just wanted to be seen, truthfully – though they preferred that truth to be palatable – and then guided kindly in the right direction. Because those things together, truth and guidance, are transformational. To be told by someone whose judgement you trust that you are either okay, or on the path to being okay, breeds confidence, which is a properly magical quality. I’ve seen clever, able students completely crippled by a lack of confidence and students with ostensibly fewer abilities soar to amazing heights on its warm thermals. Confidence is mostly very hard won, but a few beings can confer it upon a person, and teachers are one of them.

So it’s unsurprising that the relationship between a teacher and a student can become unbalanced with all sorts of emotional messiness; truth and guidance can topple over into love and obsession, they can welter in hatred and resentment, they can breed cynicism or despair. No wonder then that it can make for some pretty fascinating pieces of fiction.

Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing was an excellent novel. The story revolves around teacher-guru Will Silver, a young, handsome and brilliant professor of philosophy at an international school in Paris. The story begins at the end of one summer term, as students say their heartfelt goodbyes to Mr Silver, thanking him for changing their lives, for opening their minds, and giving them experiences they will never forget. Graduation melts into a party at the grand flat of one of Mr Silver’s students, and he ends up going to the nightclub with a gaggle of teenagers. There he meets and dances with Marie, an encounter that spills over into unexpected eroticism, but he leaves it alone, no damage done.

The new school year begins and Mr Silver embarks on his voyage of discovery with a new group, that includes Gilead, a young man with troubled parents who is looking for a hero, Ariel, Marie’s best frenemy, Colin, Marie’s angry ex-boyfriend and Abdul, a Muslim boy with powerful parents. This gets awkward when the topic under discussion is Existentialism, a philosophical movement that denies the existence of God, and which the class debate with the gloves off. Before long, that dazzling ability of Mr Silver to open up students’ minds is finding disfavour with the school authorities, who believe it is incompatible with respect for less open-minded religions. And what they don’t know yet is that Marie has come back into Will Silver’s life.

The narrative swaps hands between Will, Marie and Gilead, with different perspectives often going back and forth over the same events, showing the difference in the way they have been experienced. The hothouse atmosphere of further education: adolescents exploring their sexuality and their intellects, crushed by disappointments, longing for stable role models, breaking away from family difficulties, is brilliantly portrayed. Paris makes a glorious, vibrant backdrop, and most enigmatic and mesmerising of all is Will Silver himself, a man aware of the power of his teaching, and the emptiness of his soul. This is a narrative that starts quiet but builds inexorably. If I had a criticism, it would be that the ending becomes obvious from three-quarters of the way through and happens without surprise. But it’s a quibble, really, about a very, very good book.

The Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes shows what radical differences can be achieved by similar ingredients. Alex Morris is a theatre director fallen on hard times. A personal tragedy has destroyed her life, and she has come to Edinburgh out of hopelessness and helplessness. Her most beloved old university tutor now runs a Pupil Referral Unit for kids who have been kicked out of all the obvious schools. He has given her a job, filling in for a teacher who has left on maternity leave, and Alex has taken it with no real idea of what she is letting herself in for. Her class is a mere five students, but such troublesome and troubled ones that keeping control is out of the question. Alex is there to teach drama, and they end up reading Greek tragedies together. We know from the opening pages that somehow, this has ended in disaster.

Alex is another enigmatic teacher, but her secrets will form the basis of the story. The reader learns what they are in the same time frame as the students – one of whom, a deaf girl, Mel, has become exceedingly curious about their careworn, unhappy mentor. It’s Alex’s own vulnerability that has attracted Mel’s attention to her, and with very little else to occupy her mind, Mel is intent on discovering what has happened in Alex’s past. As she does so, the plots of the tragedies they are reading, and the meaning the class draws from them, become entangled with real events as they unfold.

This is a good book, well-written, but slightly marred for me by implausibilities. No way would any teaching establishment for difficult kids take on an inexperienced teacher like Alex, or stand for the haphazard way she runs her classes. Nor do troubled teens come out with impressive insights into Greek literature that they have no real interest in. I can see why Natalie Haynes makes these choices – her plot depends on them – and probably if you didn’t teach literature to students they wouldn’t mar your enjoyment of the book (and a story full of the accurate grunts and sighs of bored adolescents would be no fun to read). So. More generally, I was a bit fed up with all the slow reveals going on in the early sections – what happened in Alex’s past, what happens in her time at the unit – common thinking is that readers love this sort of suspense, and that it pulls them through the story, but I much preferred watching a situation build in the Maksik novel. Saying all of this makes it sound like I didn’t like The Amber Fury or that it isn’t a good book. And that would be wrong. I thought the ending of this novel was the best part of it, and that Haynes nailed it perfectly. The referral unit is vividly portrayed and the expositions on Greek literature are interesting. There’s a lot to enjoy.

Finally, I’ll mention The Lessons by Naomi Alderman, but this was a miss for me. It’s an Oxbridge-group-of-friends novel, split into two parts: the first describing their time at Oxford together, the second describing the fallout of their relationships in the world after graduation. The main protagonist is unhappy, struggling James. He’s followed older sister, Anne, to Oxford but is unable to emulate her glittering success. Instead, his physics tutorials are incomprehensible, the loneliness threatens to overwhelm him, and then, an accident leaves him with a painfully damaged knee. By chance, he falls in with a group of friends surrounding a wildly wealthy but unbalanced undergraduate, Mark. Mark lives in a huge, ramshackle pile and likes to throw dangerous parties. He has A Mother, the beautiful, much-married Isabelle, who sets a local priest on him to make sure he is keeping up his Catholicism. Mark cuts himself in mute protest. The priest nabs James and tries to turn him informer.

I confess I skim-read the second half, in which things go from bad to worse. This is another exquisitely written book, but somehow I wasn’t in the mood to read about screwed, self-destructive people screwing their lives up and destroying themselves. There’s a glimmer of hope maybe at the end, but I had to go through a lot of yelling ‘No! Don’t do it!’ at the book, while the characters went ahead and did it, before getting there. For me this was not really a bleak midwinter option, but you shouldn’t let that put you off if you like a bit of darkness and melancholy. The language and characterisation are both sharp and impressive.

So what do we learn from all of these? Well, that fictional teachers ought to be like doctors and have the same option of being struck off; that fictional schools are full of crazy students; that a little learning, particularly of literature, can be a dangerous thing. Does that sound more exciting than your school days? It was all a lot more dramatic than my teaching ones – thankfully.

Making Choices

Posted by litlove

On Friday I completed what I think will be my last survey for an online market research forum into contemporary books. When I first received the email inviting me to join, I liked the idea of filling in surveys about the books I bought and read. The reality has been surprising, however.

The vast majority of questionnaires have been about supermarket books, the most mass market romance and thrillers to which I don’t pay much attention. The most persistent questions concern the covers and the blurb, as well as the endorsements that feature there. I’m not sure whether I have ever convinced the shadowy forces behind these surveys that I really do not buy books for their covers. And certainly not supermarket books whose covers are far from innovative. Time and again the questions back me into a corner. Of three dull and ordinary covers, which one do I like the best? Reluctantly, I click. And what do I like most about this cover? (Please be as detailed as possible.) I struggle to find a polite way to say: absolutely nothing, but I prefer it to the other two, which I sincerely hate. The survey presses on. Which one of these blurbs makes me most interested in reading the book? Where is the option to say I am not interested in reading this book at all, regardless of blurb or endorsement or cover? In the eighteen months or so that I’ve been responding to these questions, there have only been two surveys about literary books, one of which was about repackaging modern classics for book clubs. The rest of the time I’ve been doing what I thought was impossible – responding to questions about books in which I actually have no interest. It’s not even that I wouldn’t buy a supermarket book from time to time; it’s just that scrutiny of them reveals a sort of painful banality.

Yesterday, in the spirit of Bank Holiday spring cleaning, I decided I would finally tackle the great heap of academic books that came back from my university rooms and which have been lying for almost three years now under a throw. The hope was that they might have the vague appearance of a table, but they have never really looked like anything other than the corpse of my intellectual life. I’ve done a lot of book culling this year, and before storing what I wanted to keep in plastic containers in the loft, I knew I ought to make a serious attempt to reduce their number. When I first took the throw off it was like unveiling a time capsule, packed full of books I had completely forgotten about. I sat back on my heels, thinking how smart I would have been, had I managed to read all of them. The question now was how many to keep, which translated as: how smart did I think I would be in the future? There was an honest answer to that and an idealistic one. Which to choose?

It occurred to me that these two experiences concerned the books at the furthest ends of my reading spectrum. I’ve always really liked reading everything. I’ve never wanted to define myself by being the ‘type of person’ to read only one genre or another, high literature or low. I never wanted the possibility of a book foreclosed to me before I even knew what it was about. When I was a teenager in the 80s, I loved reading Jilly Cooper and Judith Krantz, Susan Howatch and the sort of family saga that reached a zenith with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles at the start of the 90s. After that, there was a great phase of witty, sharply observed women’s writing, by authors like Kathy Lette, Anna Maxted, Victoria Clayton and Caro Fraser. All the time I was reading these books, I was studying Beauvoir and Proust, Camus and Sartre, Colette and Duras, Hermann Hesse, Kafka, Goethe, Barthes, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Derrida. Why not? As the new millenium approached, I spent an hour a night reading children’s literature to my son and loving that, too. The more the merrier. I loved the feeling of imaginative expansion, all these ways of seeing, all these approaches to storytelling.

But in the past few years something has definitely changed. I suppose it is probably me. I decided with great reluctance to give away the pristine, untouched books I owned by Deleuze and Guattari, philosophers I barely understood when I was at the height of my intellectual curiosity. And I have to say that I don’t like a lot of the mass market fiction that’s currently being written. The Girl on the Train was its epitome (or nadir?) for me – a narcissistic narrator, a silly, overly sensational plot and badly written. It’s that flat, first person present tense narration that I truly hate, all cliché and ultra-conventional emotions laid out as if they were insightful. I find myself much more drawn towards Dorothy Whipple, Angela Thirkell and Barbara Pym for my essential comfort reading, as all three can turn an exquisite and characterful sentence.

In one way it’s sensible to focus in on the authors that I appreciate the most. However much I want to read everything, I don’t have the time for it. And I seem less able to tolerate the styles of writing that displease me; I’m more critical than I used to be, and I’m not at all convinced it’s a good thing. I’ve never thought that the greatest powers of discernment when it came to books had anything to do with value judgement. Instead, I valued elasticity, the ability to look at any book on its own terms, and engage with what it was doing and how it was doing it. But my tastes are narrowing. However much I don’t want to make choices in my reading life, I seem to be making them anyway.

Maybe for that reason, I found I couldn’t give away many of my academic books. Instead I sorted them into different areas of criticism and theory, packed them into storage containers and let Mr Litlove struggle under their vast weight to the loft. In all honesty, I’m not getting any smarter. But I decided I’d keep the hope that one day, it might happen.