A confession on method and references

The editor has allowed me to put this article together from blogs and articles I have written over the past 12 years. I tell you this so that I won’t be accused of self-plagiarism. Well, I am self-plagiarising, but I’m telling you so. There is no deception, and, as I heard once at a conference on publication ethics and misconduct, «disclosure is almost a panacea.»

I have written around 3000 blogs, which have been posted on the BMJ or Guardian websites and on my own website. A high proportion of them are about books. I have been reading good books since I was about 10 (I’m now 71), and the chain has never been broken, even when I was a junior doctor working more than 80 hours a week. This is not a boast (well, perhaps it is), but I tell you to show how important reading has been in my life. For the first 55 years I did not keep a record of what I read, but these days I record everything I read on the website Goodreads. I write something about every book and usually I write a blog, which has at the end multiple quotes from the book. I see myself as squeezing every last drop from every book.

But you never get to the end of great books, and as I approach the end of my life I’m rereading many books. Usually, I enjoy them even more. Having said that there are not many books that I’ve read three times, but among them are Middlemarch by George Eliot (««one of the few English novels written for grownup people,» said Virginia Woolf snootily), The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (one of the few great books that is accompanied by a great film), and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (a book that can be read in two hours.)

I need to say something as well about references. This article mentions many famous books, and I don’t intend to reference them all. You will know many of them and can find them in an instant on the internet, on Amazon, or in the library. I will reference the blogs I have cannibalised in writing this essay.

The editor asks me where I source my books. Although my mother was a great reader, our house contained few books. Instead, we went every week to Rotherhithe Library and filled up with books. Libraries are one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Once I had an income, I began to buy books, almost always paperbacks, and stopped going to the library. As my waistline swelled so did my library, but as soon as e-books appeared I bought a Kindle—and my choice is to read on a Kindle. I like that I can enlarge the print, read without putting the light on when my wife is sleeping, highlight sections and copy them out afterwards, and search the text. I’m irritated when I have to read a physical book because it’s not available as an e-book, particularly when it’s a fat book. The only exception to my choice to read on a Kindle is poetry—because the layout on the page is part of the poem.

Maybe I am a reader above all else

I am many things, and I have been many more. I’m or have been a son, brother, husband, grandfather, friend, writer, blogger, chair of various bodies, manager, leader, walker, dreamer, cook, doctor, television performer, poet, teacher, and speaker; and I have been a student, feeder of locusts, farmworker, traveller, editor, boyfriend, chief executive, painter, musician, and listener. Some of those things I’ve done well and some poorly. But one thing that I love, have been longer than I have been anything apart from son and brother, and think I am good at is being a reader (fig 1). Could the one thing that best defines me be that I am a reader (1)?

Everybody, you think, is a reader. Everybody reads. You can’t define yourself as a reader. But I’m much more a reader than I am a doctor, although I have a degree in medicine, was once registered with the General Medical Council, and treated patients. That was a long time ago, and I never felt a doctor as I feel a reader. Similarly, I was an editor for 25 years, but I’m not now—and being an editor didn’t capture me. I’m a writer of sorts, and writing is important to me—but I’m a far better reader than I am writer.

From early on I became discerning (my wife would say snobbish) about what I read. I’ve steered clear of newspapers and, I must confess, medical and scientific journals (even though I spent 25 years editing one) and have concentrated on books. I strongly support the British novelist Martin Amis’s assertion that «the truth is in the fiction,» and so a novel always comes first in my reading. A friend advised me to read no novels published in the past 30 years but let time sort out the best novels. I haven’t followed his advice to the letter, but I’ve probably read more novels that are older than 30 years, many of them 19th century novels, than more recent ones; and I’m often disappointed by newer novels but rarely disappointed by the older ones.

I have, I believe, become a better reader. Because I read «good» books I never speed read, and I read many paragraphs twice. Poems I always read twice, and there are many I’ve read a hundred times.

I’ve come increasingly to believe that when we read a book, particularly fiction, we read ourselves (more on this later).

My wife thinks that I’ve been driven mad by reading too many books. When she said that I immediately quoted Don Quixote, illustrating her point. It is true that the books I’m reading and have read become part of my life. One consequence is that I often refer to them in my conversations because what we are discussing reminds me of a book. This must, I fear, sound pretentious.

My advice on when to read

Good reading demands your full attention, and you should read when your mind is at its best (fig. 2). That is at different time for different people, but for me it is first thing in the morning. If you are like me, I advise that an excellent way to start the day is with 90 minutes of uninterrupted reading (2). I prescribe 45 minutes of fiction, 30 minutes of non-fiction, and 15 minutes of poetry. The fiction must be deep, deal with issues that matter (death, love, relationships), and have excellent style. The non-fiction should also ideally be well written—because excellent style will get your brain started in the right way. The poetry—and remember that most poetry is bad, so be careful—will give you a rhythm for the day.

Other ways to start the day are prayer, meditation, and yoga, and I always enjoy being in Muslim countries where a day of learning starts with sung verses from the Koran. Reading, I believe, achieves the same end as these alternative methods, particularly as you are still and silent. You are, I suppose, filling your brain rather than emptying it, which sounds bourgeois and consumerist. But you are—if reading correctly—filling you brain with excellent mental nutrition.

We are all familiar with «he must have got out of the wrong side of bed this morning,» and the way we start the day is crucial for the whole day. The reading sets us up beautifully to cope with the inanities, rush, trivia, silly demands, and ugliness that will inevitably occur during even the best of days.

You must make your own choices on what to read (although I am willing to prescribe), but let me illustrate my general advice with the start that I made the morning I first wrote these words. I began with 30 pages of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, specifically one of the furious and barely intelligible arguments between Semprini and Naptha and then a detailed account of the death of one of the characters. I learn that when dying «Even the most manly men succumb to credulous, oblivious self-deception; the process is as natural as melancholy when the process of deterioration approaches its fatal end.» A momento mori is highly refreshing in the early morning. (Ideally you wouldn’t read in translation but in the original language, but I’m too stupid.)

Then to 16th century Venice, an excellent place to start the day, to read of Titian painting Sacred and Profane Love, one of the greatest pictures of the Italian renaissance. What might the picture mean? Nobody knows or will ever know, which is wonderful, but Sheila Hale in her biography of Titian believes it to be the painterly equivalent of a poem written for a wedding, an important Venetian custom.

And to poetry. Stevie Smith’s Away Melancholy:

You might go further and like my friend, Ant (a man not the insect above), learn some verses by heart. Ant learns poems every morning as he shaves.

For the couple, especially the single parent, who must get children out of bed, dress and feed them, send them to school, and then run for the crowded train, my advice will be unrealistic hogwash. And I haven’t started each day in such a privileged way throughout my life, but think on this: might you do better to miss the television news at 10pm, go to bed at 9.30, wake at 5.30 (that’s eight hours) and read for at least 30 minutes?

The case for fiction

A young English friend who is highly intelligent, speaks fluent Russian and Hungarian, lived in Moscow and now Madrid, and has travelled widely wrote to tell me that he had read zero fiction in the last year and that fiction seems a «cop out.» I was appalled. He was making a serious–and, I dared to suggest, a stupid– mistake. I insisted that he change (3).

His logic, I suppose, is that fiction is «made up.» It’s not «real»; the characters «don’t exist.» In contrast, we have the diaries, letters, autobiographies, and biographies of real people, and histories of real events. In addition, we have books of psychology, sociology, science, philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, and the like that deal with the ways of real people. Why would anybody read about imagined people and events when he or she could read about real people and real events?

The core argument for reading fiction is that it’s by far the best way to understand people, relationships, and essentials like love and death. As the physician and best-selling author Abraham Verghese writes in his new novel The Covenant of Water «Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.» Verghese’s book Cutting for Stone, which has sold millions of copies, is, I have argued, a «love letter to medicine» (4). Verghese, a professor of medicine at Stanford, is a great advocate for the value of clinical examination, and in the novel he writes: «How exciting to be able to touch a human being with one’s fingertips and know all these things about them» (5).

Let me enlarge on Martin Amis’s quote of the truth being in the fiction by using the example of his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard. She lived a long and colourful life and wrote many novels. She didn’t write an autobiography, but there is a biography of her life–and she left letters. What should we read if we want to understand Howard to know what it was like to be her? An autobiography if one existed would be both partial and censored. A biography is one person’s view of a mass of facts and events; it’s necessary to impose some sort of narrative to make the book readable, and the result will be selective and distorted. Letters are written to individuals and have a purpose different from revelation. We learn much more about Howard, I argue, by reading her novels: there she can write about relationships, marriage, affairs, and struggles directly without having to censor. And in doing so she will give us deeper insights into humanity, relationships, and, paradoxically, real people and herself than we can ever hope to gain through reading psychology or sociology.

My young friend seems to contradict himself in his message to me. He writes: «In fact reading Russian literature is less for me about the stories than it is about understanding the country and mentality, for incorporating myself into the ‘Russian mind» (6). Exactly, I respond, the stories are mostly a means to an end not an end in themselves (7). How best to go about understanding the «Russian mind?» Speaking Russian, living in Russia, marrying a Russian, and mixing and working with Russians, as my young friend has done, are probably the best ways, but the understanding will be deeper if complemented by reading. Yes, he should read histories of Russia and biographies of Peter the Great, Lenin, and Stalin, but I think he will get closer to his mission by reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov than in any other way. And through his reading he will deepen his understanding not just of the Russian mind but of all minds.

Or think about how to understand women (if you are a man), love, and death? The best fiction (and I’m unashamed about my snobbishness when it comes to fiction) will take you far beyond any other kind of reading.

The importance of style

Then there is the question of style. Style, which great fiction has and most non-fiction lacks, is crucial to understanding. Martha Nussbaum, one of the leading living philosophers, argues that saying some important things about how to live, one of the traditional tasks of philosophers, depends on style and that literature can answer important questions that philosophy cannot. (8) She observes that modern Anglo-American philosophers use only the pallid, rational, bloodless, hygienic style of the natural sciences–and so inevitably fall short of telling us the best way to live. She argues this in part because of her lived experience. Her love life has been turbulent, and she has got more help and understanding from Dickens, Dostoevsky, James, and Proust (her favourites) than from philosophy. She quotes another writer, Cora Diamond:

«The pleasure of reading what has been written under the pressure of content shaping form, form illuminating content, has to do with one’s sense of the soul of the author in the text, and such pleasure, and such a sense of the soul of the author, is precisely what is irrelevant or out of place in the writing of professionals for professionals.»

The cleansing power of poetry

My young friend doesn’t mention poetry, and perhaps he devotes hours a day to reading poetry. But I fear that, as seems to be common, he may be even more disdainful of poetry than of fiction. This would be a terrible mistake.

Poets are the antennae of the world, detecting the beautiful and the damned before the rest of us do–and transmitting it to us. Poetry can express what prose cannot. Even those disdainful of poetry are driven to it by grief and love. «When power leads man toward arrogance,» said John F Kennedy, «poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.» «Poetry,» according to the English essayist William Hazlitt, «is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself.» Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, came to believe that only poetry not philosophy could answer the question of «What is it like to be a human being?» «Poetry engages us in a way that goes far beyond the mere exchange of information.»

Let me share brief sections from four of my favourite poems, all of which live with me day to day and let me know things I cannot know in other ways. In Snow the Irish poet Louis McNeice writes:

The Greek poet C V Cavafy’s poem Ithaca describes a journey, the journey of Ulysses, the journey of life:

Alfred Tennyson also has a poem about Ulysses.

And Shakespeare from his play Cymbeline.

«Every reader is the reader of himself [or herself]»

I recently read in Proust’s Time Regained «Every reader is the reader of himself,» and it struck me instantly as true and profound; although I’d never thought it before, I had known it before. Now I’m extremely aware of it. We read ourselves not only line by line but also in what we choose to read (9).

I’m also aware that when I reread, as I do increasingly, a different me reads a different book. Of course, the book is not different, but the me– with accumulated experiences, knowledge, and reading together with decay and things forgotten–is different.

Hisham Matar, a Libyan writer, wrote about reading ourselves in the New York Times (10): «…the most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded then that I am really no different from anyone else.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self. These occurrences aren’t merely amusing or disorientating or interesting experiments in «virtual reality.» They are moments of genuine expansion. They are at the heart of our humanity. Our future depends on them. We couldn’t have gotten here without them.

Books…develop our emotional, psychological and intellectual life, and, by doing so, show us how and to what extent we are connected. This is why literature is the greatest argument for the universalist instinct, and this is why literature is intransigent about its liberty.»

Favourite novels

I have listed 10 favourite novels on my website (11). In brief they are—in addition to Middlemarch and The Leopard, which I have already mentioned: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo; East of Eden by John Steinbeck; The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas; The Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (which is actually 12 novels—Powell is often called «the English Proust» as Knausgaard is called «the Norwegian Proust»); He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (although I love Dickens I love Trollope more); Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout; and Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow.

As I concede, this was a somewhat arbitrary selection, and on another day I probably would have come up with a different list. I notice now that only one of the books was written in the 21^st century, and five were written in the 19^th century; and only two of the books were by women. But I noticed at the time that seven were European and three from the US. I determined therefore to produce a list of favourite novels from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australasia as there are many novels from those countries that I have loved (12).

My list included Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Things Fall Apart (a quote from the great Yeats’s poem) by Chinua Achebe; The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan; A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry; The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa; Boyhood by J M Coetzee; Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thein; The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh; Fiela’s Child by Dalene Matthee; and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. That’s three from India, three from Africa, two from Latin America, two from Australia, and one from China/Canada. (It is, I now notice, 11 not 10 books.) They were all written in the 20^th or 21^st century. Again, I would probably come up with a different list if I did it today, not least because I’ve now read more books.

^{Four non-fiction books for health professionals}

How to talk about books that you haven’t read

I want to end by seeming to undermine my core argument of how important it is to read by sharing how you can talk about books you haven’t read. The advice comes in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by the French philosopher Pierre Bayard (20). I imagined that the book must be a joke, but I was wrong. It’s a serious book, albeit written with a light, teasing tone.

No matter how many books you have read you will have read only a tiny and diminishing fraction of all books. Many of these unread books—most works by Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Marx’s Das Kapital, Dante’ Inferno, the Bible, the Koran, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—are the most important books ever written, books that have shaped and made our world. You know about them, but you haven’t read them. (In fact, I have read some of them, but, as, I will explain in a moment, I am in the same position as somebody who hasn’t read them.)

«Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown,» Bayer writes, «how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain? Reading is first and foremost non-reading.»

Bayer urges you not to read these great books but to talk about them. «Cultural literacy involves the dual capacity to situate books in the collective library and to situate yourself within each book… it is ultimately unnecessary to have handled a book to have a sense of it and to express your thoughts on the subject.»

If you think you must read them, then skim them, argues Bayard. «Who, we may wonder, is the better reader—the person who reads a work in depth without being able to situate it, or the person who enters no book in depth, but circulates through them all?….We must guard against getting lost in any individual passage, for it is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.»

Then there are all the books you have read and forgotten completely—even the fact that you read them. I was halfway through Henry James’s Wings of the Dove before I realised I had read it before. I’d completely forgotten that I’d read George Eliot’s Scenes From A Clerical Life until I went to mark it on Goodreads as «want to read» and was pointed to the words I’d written about reading the book. Bayard asks: «Is a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, still a book you have read?»

And you have forgotten most of the contents of the books you have read. «Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting….What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.»

Plus, what we think we have read is mixed with things that have happened to us, other books, films we have seen, and commentaries we have heard or read, and much else «As soon as we begin to read, and perhaps even before that, we begin talking to ourselves and then to others about books. We will resort thereafter to these comments and opinions, while actual books, now rendered hypothetical, recede forever into the distance.»

We all have, argues Bayard, «internal books» composed from multiple sources, and my internal book may overlap little or not at all with your internal book. «What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.» When we talk about a book that we have both read (and, of course, largely forgotten) we are talking about two different books. Somebody who has not read the book can join the conversation as an equal.

Conclusion

The chances are that if you have ploughed your way through this long essay then you are a reader anyway, and I am preaching to the converted. Ultimately, I urge people, including my children, to read not because it is virtuous or because it will bring wisdom but because it is one of the finest ways to use our limited time on this planet (fig. 3).