The Big Sleep ..er, Read.
There’s no need for me to rant against the BBC’s Big Read campaign because the attractively truculent Jeanette Winterson has done it for me. I shall have to read one her novels. One day.
The totalitarian jauntiness of The Big Read disgusts me. It’s no surprise then that often I am accused of preferring ‘obscure’ books because of their obscurity. There is some truth in this. But there is an obscure pathos or bathos (I’m not sure which it is; perhaps both) to the neglected books that seems to say something about literature in general, and so gives me more than the loudly-approved works of Culture. Today, this drab, overcast, typically English day, I unpacked a lot of them from boxes. How exhileratingly sad it is. Yet one of the books seems oddly appropriate to be off the shelves, lost somewhere: Marcel B�nabou’s self-explanatory book Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. I could go through these boxes and explain in detail why I have not read any of these books. Nor given them to Oxfam. Yet.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
