As its title suggests, Will Self’s latest book – Why Read – collects pieces that coalesce into the form of a manifesto. In the opening article, he argues that reading is “self-evidently to do with your enjoyment, experienced as the free play of your imagination, the stimulation of your intellect, and the engagement of your sympathy”.
A later piece offers guidance on how we should read: voraciously, indiscriminately, “not expecting to comprehend all that we read” – reassuring when you’re struggling to decipher the complex, nuanced argument of articles like The Printed Word In Peril.
In that piece, he laments the “tyranny of the virtual” and the multifarious distractions of the web for the writer, but also accepts the inexorability of the digital revolution, embracing the advantages of onscreen reading and welcoming the “flowering of talent” and “clamor of new voices” that the revolution has brought.
Why Read contains ruminations on notable old voices (Burroughs, Kafka, Conrad), as well as a poignant Playboy article on how a visit to Chernobyl “made time visible”. There, Self observes that “our era seems to specialise in the creation of ruins”, and in The Death Of The Shelf, a beautifully phrased elegy for physical media and the piece that personally resonates the most, he describes CD towers standing “in the gutter, leaning lopsidedly, pathetic stained-wood menhirs marking the sites of the old religion of recorded sound, while overhead scuds the great crackling, emphatically digital cloud”. Badgered into having a “book pogrom” by your long-suffering wife? Know the feeling, mate.
Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021, Will Self (Grove)
Price: £16.99. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD