Do we read fewer books?

Are you suffering from reader’s block?
UK publishers launch 116,000 titles a year. I seem to trip over most of them on the way to the loo

Sathnam Sanghera

Times 26 November 2009

Untitled Books, the rather cool literary website, got in touch the other day asking whether I’d like to contribute 200 words or so to a feature that it was compiling on the literary highlights of 2009. I said I would, but never got around to doing so. In part because, when I sat down and thought about it, I realised that two of the three books I enjoyed most this year — One Day by David Nicholls, In Other Rooms by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz — weren’t actually published in 2009. But mainly because, when I sat down and thought about it, I realised that I’ve actually read only three books for pleasure this year.

It’s difficult to explain just how bewildering this development feels. Every two weeks throughout my childhood, my father, though illiterate himself, walked me more than a mile to the nearest library so that I could borrow four books. I studied English literature at university, reading, or pretending to read, several books a week. I became a writer and have been going through titles at a similar rate most of my adult life. But it has now been three months since I picked up a novel. What the hell is going on?

Seeking reassurance online, I found it in the form of a reference to “reader’s block” on urbandictionary.com (“when you cannot, for the life of you, pick up a book and read it”); an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2008 headlined “What I Never Got Round to Reading on My Summer Holiday”, in which people such as Maude Hillingdon, the hostess and fundraiser, explains why they hadn’t got round to finishing various titles (“I will always treasure my Anthology of New Zealand Love Poetry. I used it to beat out the forest fire that engulfed our holiday log cabin. Sadly, it is now charred and illegible”); research from 2007, which showed that one Briton in four has not read a book in the past year; and the news that despite the increasing amount of money we spend on books, the amount of time we spend reading books is actually decreasing.

Also, various public figures, intellectuals even, have at various points admitted to forms of reader’s block: Griff Rhys Jones complaining about it in The Times in 1989 (“I am a victim of three-minute culture and the review pages. I cannot get stuck in”); Lionel Shriver remarking more recently that she experienced it after reviewing too many books that she wouldn’t have finished if she didn’t have to (“I get sick of the printed word, and go on strike. Late at night, all I want to do is watch box-set recordings of Desperate Housewives and Brothers & Sisters back to back”); Joanne Harris saying that she went through six months of it after judging two literary prizes; and Howard Jacobson admitting that he got it on being given a load of books to read in preparation for Start the Week on BBC Radio 4.

However, unlike many of these celebrity sufferers, I’m finding it difficult to isolate a clear cause. I went through a period of being unable to read books after university, but there was a simple explanation that time (I associated books with the torture of work and the poverty and tedium of student life) and there was a simple solution (after 12 months I immersed myself in a book that would never have got on to a Cambridge reading list: Man and Boy, the cloying, sentimental but nevertheless hugely enjoyable novel by Tony Parsons).

But now there are all sorts of things behind the aversion: UK publishers apparently launch 116,000 titles a year and I feel that I am sent most of them and I hate tripping over the damned things on the way to the loo; readers need to imagine that they have discovered books for themselves, but when you write one and end up on the literary circuit you get recommended a book every other second, which leads to a kind of paralysis; books remind me of book-writing, a process I find painful, isolating, stressful and difficult, and which I resent because it often means losing contact with friends for months, if not years, as they finish their tomes; my working life involves a large amount of reading, and staring at text is the last thing I want to do at night; and, let’s face it, a large proportion of the zillions of books out there aren’t actually very good.

Also, this time I’ve struggled to find a solution. I’ve tried reading short stories, but as much as I enjoyed the first two in Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, I haven’t got around to finishing it. I’ve tried re-reading an old favourite, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, only to discover it wasn’t as good as I remember. I’ve also tried titles that are variously unliterary (My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle), poetic (The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile by Alice Oswald), non-fictional (The Making of Modern Britain: From Queen Victoria to V.E. Day by Andrew Marr), photographic (The Family of Man by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg), biographical (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama), and economic (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner), but with no lasting improvement.

And after considerable angst, I’ve begun to wonder whether this reader’s block might be more than a phase. I realise that the thought of giving up on books will strike most readers as anathema. It is notable that all the advice on the subject of reader’s block — such as the article I came across, which asserted that “the condition lifts as mysteriously as it arrives, but not before giving the victim a glimpse of how dreadful life would be without books” — stress that it is a temporary thing. And, frankly, I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to face up to the possibility if I hadn’t come across a brilliant, elegant piece from 2000 on the subject by Geoff Dyer, one of my favourite writers from my reading days, in which he admitted that he found it “increasingly difficult to read”.

“This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that,” he began. “On a trip to the Bahamas recently I regularly stopped myself reading because, whereas I could read a book anywhere, this was the only time I was likely to see sea so turquoise, sand so pink . . . Somewhat grandly, I call this the Mir syndrome after the cosmonaut who said that he didn’t read a page of the book that he’d taken to the space station because his spare moments were better spent gazing out of the window.”

Or to put it less elegantly: books have saved me, defined me, opened up a life full of exciting relationships and experiences, and now that I have that life, for a period at least, I want to live it, instead of forever having my nose stuck behind a book.sathnam@thetimes.co.uk