Brace. We are approaching “summer reading list” season, when valuable newspaper column inches are filled with recommendations for floppy paperbacks by zeitgeisty authors, novels easily consumed on a beach, biographies full of blandishment and non-fiction toggled for a Leaving Certificate reading age. All of these lists contain their moments of sparkle – I’m not that miserly – but in general, anything titled “The 90 best books to read this summer” is going to feature more duds than gems. There are not 90 good books published in most given years.
This is why last summer I swore myself off contemporary fiction – apart from when I am (with genuine gratitude and customary grace) assigned to read one for work. The canon is long and I want to be deeper in it than I currently am. And I am afraid that spending my evenings or my vacations with Coco Mellors is simply not going to get me there. I also have to ask: since when did “can be read on a beach” become a valuable literary attribute? “This novel is compatible with sand”?
No. The state of our literary ambition – whether it comes from within, or from the fourth estate – should be much higher than that. Summer is no excuse for lax intellectual standards, and a heatwave never a reason for leaden prose. Literacy rates are plummeting across the West. This well-documented phenomenon has seen students at elite US universities unable to parse Bleak House, and lecturers in the UK reduced to assigning their students summaries rather than full texts. If you are concerned that no one can read any more you should be self-regardingly shoving Proust into your carry-on.
But I have moderated my previously self-imposed restraints. The languorous June days have drawn me to works of extreme length. The epic, the tome, the opus, the doorstopper. With an attention span salvoed to pieces – by short-form video, tweets, pop singles rather than full albums – I found the challenge more necessary than appealing. Could I sit with one story, one universe, one protagonist for weeks? How about months? As such, I am about half way through The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien, part one in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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There is plenty to say about this book, perhaps one of the most commented-upon works of fiction ever. I understand the connotations – isn’t fantasy, while significantly more interesting than sci-fi, for children? Or, at the very least, people with blue hair? To the latter point: it’s possible. To the former: put your six-year-old on to this dragging, dawdling, rambling, warren-y work of haughty moralising and see how well they get on. There are punishing moments – songs that last for pages, too much time spent with auxiliary characters, one particularly insipid hobbit – but guess what, Tolkien really did know what he was doing. The challenge has turned into a delight.
I read David Brooks in the Atlantic writing on the “people who will thrive in the AI age”. I was saddened to learn he didn’t write “opinion columnists”. But he distilled something that now to me seems obvious, but I do not think had been expressed with such lucidity until now. The differential factor between people will not be their intelligence but “their relationship to mental effort” – those still willing to write their own prose when an LLM can do a shoddy but fast job for them, those still willing to watch a slow and knotty film rather than getting Claude to summarise it.
Well, I can point you to a book that requires mental effort. It is not hard to parse the language nor must you interpret a hugely sophisticated moral universe (power corrupts, there is strength in the meek, and all that). But the act of sticking with it is in itself effortful.
I am thinking about this in terms of another recent media development – the rise of the podcast and the audiobook. I – like many of you, I assume – play The Rest is History to fall asleep. I like the cadence and the rapport. It is agreeable listening that is better-suited to bedtime than, say, a Wagner aria. But I can tell you this: I know not one jot more about the Incas now than I did before I listened to its six-part series on the subject. Its episodes on Jack the Ripper were apparently very popular – but whose understanding of Victorian London has really been deepened because of them?
Podcasts are passive learning which – unless you are a toddler or an exchange student studying French by immersion – is barely learning at all. In other words, they require no mental effort. And that paperback romantasy dreck you found on the bottom left shelf of WHSmith at Dublin Airport probably doesn’t either.
Far from me to be worthy, but as we outsource more of our thinking to the machine – so goes the cliche – I am increasingly convinced “mental effort” is not just useful but a moral good. We have brains and powers of cognition – what a shame not to use them.
