imagine if
the great book explosion of 2015
Imagine we were all living in a world where almost everyone was carrying a book in their pocket. And was intently engaged in its consumption. And pulled it out of their pocket to read more at every interval and sometimes stood stock still in the middle of the grocery aisle because they had become so lost in reading their great book.
6 comments on “the great book explosion of 2015”
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I remember sitting in a doctor’s office reading a book (rather than the antique magazines with stories of celebrities that have since ‘moved on’) and someone came over and asked what I was reading, as if it was strange or subversive.
It was a small red coloured Everyman hardback that I’d bought for $2 in a second hand shop. I was not living in the present at that moment…. I was somewhere in rural France :)
I just flipped to the title page and showed the man who had asked. It was ‘Germinal’ by Zola.
“You must be really brainy” he said.
“No” I said, “It’s been translated into English.”
He backed away, looking confused. I can still remember the look on his face. I love the book.
I have a Cathoel Jorss ebook on my phone that I’m fond of getting out at odd moments to digest a morsel ;-)
This is pretty joyful to hear, Mark, made me gasp. Thank you! And: you’re right. I forgot they could all be reading literary triumphs. Yet these screens seem to flash ‘n’ bling a lot…
Jane, I was reading Germinal at a work lunch recently (we were all waiting in the lobby, I’m not that antisocial) and one of the guys asked me about it and then said, (when he heard it was a novel) oh I prefer documentaries…I said this is social history! it has incredible value! Zola researched and recorded real working lives! and he smiled and backed away, haha.
It is a shock to be dragged out of rural France into the surgery waiting room when you have managed to elude it. I had a fellow worker at the five-star resort out in the desert near Uluru where I worked, turning 21, come into my tiny apartment for a beer and literally duck her head as though my one shelf of books might be about to hit her. “Oh,” she said, “lotta books.” I guess there has never been a time when most people were confident in their reading. I guess there may never be. But imagine.
Odd how adding ‘aries’ to the end of ‘documents’ makes them so much more palatable. I have never read Zola but you two have determined me to seek him out.
I haven’t read all of the Rougon-Macquart series, but every time I find one in a 2nd hand bookshop, I add it to the collection. I have about half of them. The only problem with collecting them randomly is that there are bits of information that make sense of the family when it’s in order. They are all self contained though. I wish I could read French well enough to try the originals, but even the translations seem to have the social/political commentary intact, from what I understand.