Tiffany Jenkins: Bringing readers to book

A top ten list of Scotland’s favourite tomes reveals most of us haven’t picked up a decent one since school, while current thinking in education is failing to produce new readers, argues Tiffany Jenkins

WhilE clearing out the home of an old family friend recently, after his death, I came across piles of notebooks, pens, encyclopaedias and classic literature, carefully arranged on a bookshelf, in preparation for his attention in retirement. Henry had entered the navy as a very young man and, after a hard working life, planned to educate himself, to study science, history and the great books. Sadly, he didn’t get much time to do so.

A couple of generations on and we, in the West, have all the time in the world to read and to think, in and outside of formal education. And yet, I wonder if we make the most of that opportunity. A poll released this week about our literary habits makes revealing and worrying reading. A top ten list of Scot’s favourite reads puts Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – the murder mystery novel – in the number one spot.

A publishing sensation to rival Harry Potter, it tells the tale of a murder in the Louvre museum, Paris, which somehow connects to a religious conspiracy involving the Catholic Church’s Opus Dei organisation, via a romp around Rosslyn Chapel.

I like an entertaining, diverting read, but this is so poorly written that it’s impossible to reach the end. The New York Times described it as a, “primer on how not to write an English sentence”. The prize winning author Salman Rushdie referred to it as “a novel so bad that it gives novels a bad name”. So, a poll of 1,000 adults came up with a novel reputed for its poor prose as their favourite. Not Jane Austin, Dickens or Tolstoy. Not Robert Burns, Scott nor Stevenson. The shame of it.

It doesn’t get much better further down the list. Dan Brown is followed by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – which, I suspect, is what people remember from school, and two books from the Lord of the Rings trilogy – which, let’s face it, are for bright, but lonely, teenage boys. Where is our national pride? There is no Scottish author on top. And where is our self-respect? The list is embarrassingly low-brow.

The poll, carried out by eye health supplement firm ICaps, is a silly piece of marketing, of course, but it tells an important truth. We have stopped cultivating our intellect and instead are happy enough to wallow in trash. We don’t even lie about it.

That’s if books are read at all. The same survey found that novels come behind websites and blogs in terms of their popularity. TV and surfing the internet has replaced off-line reading. Library loans are down. Newspapers are suffering. Instantaneous, ephemeral social media keeps us trapped forever in the moment.

More serious studies have found the same problem. Academics from Dundee University analysed the reading habits of children throughout primary and secondary education. They found the difficulty of books “declined steadily” from the age of ten onwards, even among the most able. The same applies to teenagers and adults. What we have here is a crisis in reading.

And yet, paradoxically, books appear to have a great deal of validation. There are bookshops on every high street. Most towns seem to have their own book festival, or a writer in residence. There are prizes and lists galore. Governments have invested extensive financial resources in promoting literacy among schoolchildren.

But look a little closer and much of this reveals an instrumental reason for reading. That is, it is celebrated as a means to an end and not an end in itself. For schools, it is the means to a qualification or, worse still, a “skill”. The Curriculum for Excellence barely mentions the verb “to read”, choosing, instead, to describe “literacy skills” and crediting them, according to one document, as developing “successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors”. Note, there is no mention of developing a reader.

The act of reading for pleasure, for understanding and to know more is not to be found in this tick-box, outcome orientated approach. Even book festivals tend to boast about their contribution to tourism and the economy in their self-congratulatory, promotional reports. And while there may be more prizes for this kind of literary genre or the next, engagement with the actual writing and criticism of what is written is in decline.

Universities tend to favour hand-outs and website resources as key documents. The point of attending is to get a job rather than an education. And in their corridors of learning the idea of a canon of great works has been questioned to the point of breaking point by cultural relativism, accused of privileging the old white male. Judging one book better than another, to be read above any other, is deemed elitist and authoritarian.

Is this a lament? Maybe, but with good reason. While there was no golden age, there used to be a quest for self-improvement that we would do well to rediscover today.

From the 18th century onwards, a great tradition of self-education developed across the whole of Britain, across all the classes – more so than elsewhere, as can be gleaned from the magisterial work, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by the historian Jonathan Rose. Based upon almost 2,000 published and unpublished memoirs, Rose paints a picture of the ordinary man – and sometimes woman – determined to teach themselves, who created an autonomous intellectual life.

Scotland has a particularly fine example of such an approach where the autodidact flourished and a vigorous reading culture developed. Horizons were expanded, people connected, and imaginations were stirred.

The phrase “mutual improvement” became common place in the societies of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, which were organisations devoted to self-education. Its roots stemmed from the appreciation for literacy developed during the Reformation. Common people had to understand God’s laws, which meant they had to be able to understand the Bible, so schools were built and people taught to read.

Libraries were erected and were governed democratically. The Leadhills Reading Society was founded in 1741, the Wanlockhead Miners Library in 1756. These were the first working-class libraries in Britain and all incorporated the principles of self-improvement in their rulebooks. Craftsman in the Lowlands, in particular, had higher than average literacy rates.

Library records from 1747-1900 show that borrowers at Innerpeffray Library in Perthshire, near Crieff, numbered 287 and represented 17 trades. Among these, 26 borrowers were weavers and 22 teachers. As for what they read, there was an impressive range of literature: Dickens, Burns, Tennyson, Milton, Ruskin, Marx, and Shakespeare, as well as, admittedly, The Adventures of Tarzan.

Those who demanded such reading material were not only men. Women accounted for 8 and 13 per cent, respectively, of subscribers to Alexander Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey. Among many such inspiring cases, that should give us pause for thought, Rose writes of how: “shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls”.

Books were borrowed by shepherds who left another in exchange in the cranny. Fiction and non-fiction travelled 30 to 40 miles with the shepherds rarely ever meeting one another. I expect, if given the chance, the shepherds would have left The Da Vinci Code in the cranny. It is time to re-discover mutual-improvement and pulp that Dan Brown. Henry wouldn’t touch it and nor should you. Life is too short to waste on trashy fiction.

• Dr Tiffany Jenkins is a sociologist and cultural commentator.