Don't Blame the Reader

It is interesting how there’s such a brouhaha in recent times about people not reading enough. I agree. Every bookseller, including yours truly, is complaining.

With over twenty-five years of experience, I decided to stop whining for a brief while and look deeper. It was part of my job to do so.

Then I realized that we were perhaps holding the wrong end of the stick.

When we were growing up in the sixties and seventies why did we read so extensively? It could not have been that we had no distractions or that we were simply a very bored lot.
A lot of it went into the fact that we were swept off our feet by a generation of master story-tellers, the like of which may never emerge out of the shadows once again.

We read stories with plots, with no socio-political messages being hammered into us. Enid Blyton’s mysteries and adventures were followed by authors who kept us on the edge of our seats, crafting masterly stories, plain and simple There was Jeffrey Archer’s twisted tales, Alistair MacLean’s superb action, Agatha Christie’s mysteries, John Grisham’s legal thrillers, Robin Cook’s medical thrillers, and Ken Follett’s historical fiction. Even populist authors like James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins who were looked down upon, were devoured by us and everyone else across the globe.

Masterpieces like No Orchids for Miss Blandish by Chase and a Stone for Danny Fisher by Robbins blew us away, Westerns like Louis L’Amour and the horror genre of Stephen King had their own devoted following. Our classics were Saki, O Henry, Maupassant. Plain and simple storytelling at its best.

While the discerning did read literary fiction, we averted our gaze from the difficult Bookers, and dug into comics like Archies, Phantom and Batman. We were looking for a simple story, well told.

This was the crux of the matter- we wanted to be entertained.

We didn’t want to be made particularly aware of what was going on in the world. We were taken up by smart romances by Georgette Heyer and spicy stuff by Barbara Cartland. PG Wodehouse provided the laughter.

Bring back those authors and lighten up the world. Of course, the world was airier too, and we breathed in purer worlds. Bring back those straightforward days of reading for pleasure and see how education, creativity and vocabulary are restored.

The art of reading depends primarily on the art of writing.