This book will move you, will capture you, amuse you, hold you hostage, transport you to another world. OK – I’ll admit it, some of these words are borrowed – or adapted – from Mark Kermode, the well-known film critic. That’s what good films can do. And that’s what good books do too. The difference is that the cinema screen is inside your head. Ideas, images, a story, characters grow, move, interact and though they evaporate when the pages close, a good book will always leave its mark long after it has returned to the shelf.
Books have the power to change the world, to do more than merely entertain or inform. It’s a dangerous business, opening the pages and being drawn in. All sorts of things can be lurking inside, waiting to ambush you. Insurrection, betrayal, crime, passion, intrigue; you never quite know what might be coming at you from around the next corner, from within the next chapter. Politics, history, travel and suspense all mingled in with those fundamental driving forces behind the human condition – power, sex and wealth. Books are risky, perilous and can put you out, right on the edge of reason.
Knowledge is power, the cliché says, and the power pack that continues to drive the acquisition of learning is the humble book. Books threaten – they chip away at the foundations of ignorance, erode the cornerstones of prejudice and intolerance and open the windows of the mind to let the sun flood in. Surely it’s that that explains why books have been burned throughout history because they are too dangerous. The symbolic destruction of books on the pyre of political idealism is still happening today – for example by Al Qaeda Islamists in Mosul in 2012 or even in Canada in 2014 – liberal, clean, tolerant Canada – where restrictions on research meant that documents were locked away or destroyed. The dangers of Fahrenheit 451 exist in the modern age, as much as they did before 1440 and Gutenberg’s printing press. ‘A book is a loaded gun in the house next door’ one character warns in Ray Bradbury’s novel, arguing for why they must be burned and their knowledge erased. ‘Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?’
All a bit high-flown you might think, and in some ways you’d have a point. But society is built on education, and learning is built still on books. That’s why reading is important – for all of us. Everytime I write an email my e-signature at the foot of the message declares what I am reading at the moment. What’s on the Smallwood bedside table at present – ‘Any Human Heart’ by William Boyd – a novel in the form of a journal through the turbulence of the last century. And by the way, just in case you’ve been living in a parallel universe for a while, I happen to be a geologist, a scientist, not an English teacher. I happen to think reading is important. Books break down barriers, dissolve partitions and translate ideas between people on otherwise parallel tracks.
The question is for you though. What will you read next? Summer is coming, bookshops are open, the library is full of adventure, travel, history and science. There will be a box of books in tutor rooms soon so that you can choose your next journey.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, and a vast monument to the humble book. In a speech at the library in 1980 the historian and novelist Barbara Tuchman said ‘books are the carriers of civilisations – without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill’. I visited in 2016 and was simply blown away by the scale, the history, the passion of the place.
She is right of course. The question is – what will you read next?
SDS
