Worry about books...

It is payday tomorrow, and to celebrate I went out and spent money that I didn’t yet have. It’s ok though, because I spent it on books, thereby making the only solid investment available to paupers in these pauperising times.

‘My favourite Le Carre, that is to say the one I’ve read the most, i.e. several dozen times…’
These words, uttered pompously by a portly suited man to a fellow portly suited man on the stairs managed to reach me on quite the other side of Waterstone’s. I then decided that life is far too short and full of interest to read any book several dozen times, unless it concerns Moomins, and consequently purchased three by authors completely new to me:

1) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, by Michael Foley
2) What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
3) The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

Ok, so the last author isn’t completely new to me – at least not as a human being. He was one of my English tutors and I, along with the rest of the female portion of our seminars (which was the majority), was comfortably besotted. I rarely spoke in seminars, but I did manage to give him an awkward wave once. It was a high point. Anyway, these three books (good thing it was a 3 for 2 offer) pretty much sum up the threads tangling themselves around my brain at the moment – happiness (or rather the lack of it), love (definitely the lack of it) and the wild (not so much lacking as simply inconceivable in the urban paradise that is SE11).

I read this fascinating article by Jason Epstein from The New York Review of Books this morning; it is the best I have come across so far concerning the (inevitably) digital future of books, and should be of interest to not just publishers and writers, but anyone who reads.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

Embarking on my first real editing job, and being told I could make a good career out of publishing, naturally I am interested in where this industry I have entered is headed. But my feelings in response to this article are more than just professional interest – I am awed, and terrified. I know I should be too young to cling to the old, but books have been the stepping stones of my life. Furthermore, I am jealous by nature – and resentful of the idea that ‘Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author.’ As someone who has thrived on traditional (some would say outdated) structures of success – academic examinations being one – and relishes the letters which say that I have a degree which someone else does not, I am not a little dismayed by this literary free-for-all. And finally, I am by no means immune to my mother’s fear of a worldwide powercut simply vapourising the worldwide web (I have still not been able to get anyone to confirm that this is definitely impossible…).

But then again, I am writing this in a blog. One of my two blogs. Who am I to judge?