Much has been said about accessibility in literature and how it’s the best thing for everyone concerned. But there’s a fine line between having a book that appeals to a lot of readers and a book with a plot so simplistic, so devoid of any between-the-lines meaning, that you could have heard the story from a colleague at your lunch break.
We live in an age where everything is dumbed down. First, articles devolved into lists, and then lists themselves featured no words, but pictures of people moving. Perhaps underneath those pictures there would be a pithy word to sum up exactly how you felt. Illustrated lists. Infographics. 140 characters. Either the world is getting stupider, or people creating content just think we are.
Popcorn for your brain
And of course, why would you – and I address the you who has just come home from work, braved a long drive, are finally sitting down with your feet up, and you’re so tired, you’ve never been so tired, but you’ve decided that instead of zoning out in front of Masterchef or whatever the latest thing on TV is, you’re going to very virtuously read a book – why would you be interested in something that isn’t going to lull you into a false sense of security while at the same time giving your brain no more nourishment than a bag of popcorn would?
We look after our bodies now, we groom them, we eat right, we consider everything we place on it or inside it, and yet, we feed our brains this diet of spun sugar and cancerous stuff – seriously, some of this un-fact-checked churnalism is toxic for your brain, because pretty soon, all you’ll be able to spew out are the top ten mistakes to avoid in your 20s, or the top ten worst summer beverages, see how could you not click on that last one, I almost did as I was researching for this piece.
Writing and getting published – especially in India – has never been as easy as it has been in the last five years. Signs up at the World Book Fair say, “Aspiring author! Come talk to us!” and so what should be a long, contemplative exercise – Why art? How art? For whom art? – turns into a manuscript written in two months, with events barely disguised from the author’s own life, often badly edited, with a shiny cover slapped on it and given to the world to consume. Which you will: you’re still tired, you want a romp-y story, you want romance, you don’t want to have to look at the dictionary while you’re reading.
Why not learn something instead?
And so, if the Internet is making inane things easier for you to access, I urge you to learn something from the stuff that counts: books. I still remember the first time I saw the word pulchritude. It was in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and it popped out at me from a sentence: “Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.” What a great word, I thought, and said it out loud a few times, holding the feel of it in my mouth. Pul.chri.tude. On the side of simple words and short sentences is Stephen King, but it’s not that his books lack intelligence just because their vocabulary is restricted to two syllables. His time travel novel 11/22/63 is a work of genius, about a man who discovers a wormhole in time that takes him back to 1958, and how he lives in past hoping to kill JFK’s assasin. That book kept me up at night, made me think, and made me research both the laws of physics and time travel as well as America’s political scene in the 1960s. Simple language but powerful plotting.
But our chart-toppers?
Now consider India’s top sellers. There’s Chetan Bhagat (and at the outset, this is not a piece meant to denigrate Bhagat: I am impressed with both the way he changed what bestsellers mean in India and how he gets so many people to read, but I do disagree with his viewpoint here.) Bhagat is a big fan of easy language, but he tells a story straight – what are you taking away from it? Nothing except the story. On his website, he has a FAQ section for Five Point Someone, from which these quotes are taken :
Now of course “the language of real people” is great, it’s fantastic, but the problem is when you assume your real people are limited to a vocabulary of say 200 words and have no desire to expand it at all. “Hey, real people,” you’re saying, in effect, “Here: please stay at the level you’re at, I’m pandering to you.”
And then there is “the primary idea of this book is to entertain the reader.” This is problematic for me, because I started out at this point: I wanted to entertain, I didn’t want to give people a message – so boring! – I wanted to tell a story that some people would be enlightened by and others would recognise themselves in. In the past few years, I have come to change my views.
And so, here’s what I want to read
Part of this was just reading more. I began to get selfish about my reading time – I just did not have the bandwidth to deal with every entertaing but badly written book that came my way. To put it a different way: I finally came face to face with my own reading mortality. There is no way I will be able to read every book ever written in the world, even if I read constantly and all the time.
This made me extremely depressed, until I started looking at reviews again – yes, reviews! – instead of trending Twitter subjects, and reviews on websites known for book reviews, rather than the ones that just summarise the plots. I became old school and evangelical about my reading, and also ruthless about abandoning a book midway if I didn’t like it.
And so I realised that the best books were those that gave me a little something to take away – even if it was just a new word, even if it was thinking about the physics of time travel. I’m still learning: both to read and to write. To ask nothing of your reading material but that it entertain is admitting in a small way that your brain has atrophied. Do you want that?
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We live in an age where everything is dumbed down. First, articles devolved into lists, and then lists themselves featured no words, but pictures of people moving. Perhaps underneath those pictures there would be a pithy word to sum up exactly how you felt. Illustrated lists. Infographics. 140 characters. Either the world is getting stupider, or people creating content just think we are.
Popcorn for your brain
And of course, why would you – and I address the you who has just come home from work, braved a long drive, are finally sitting down with your feet up, and you’re so tired, you’ve never been so tired, but you’ve decided that instead of zoning out in front of Masterchef or whatever the latest thing on TV is, you’re going to very virtuously read a book – why would you be interested in something that isn’t going to lull you into a false sense of security while at the same time giving your brain no more nourishment than a bag of popcorn would?
We look after our bodies now, we groom them, we eat right, we consider everything we place on it or inside it, and yet, we feed our brains this diet of spun sugar and cancerous stuff – seriously, some of this un-fact-checked churnalism is toxic for your brain, because pretty soon, all you’ll be able to spew out are the top ten mistakes to avoid in your 20s, or the top ten worst summer beverages, see how could you not click on that last one, I almost did as I was researching for this piece.
Writing and getting published – especially in India – has never been as easy as it has been in the last five years. Signs up at the World Book Fair say, “Aspiring author! Come talk to us!” and so what should be a long, contemplative exercise – Why art? How art? For whom art? – turns into a manuscript written in two months, with events barely disguised from the author’s own life, often badly edited, with a shiny cover slapped on it and given to the world to consume. Which you will: you’re still tired, you want a romp-y story, you want romance, you don’t want to have to look at the dictionary while you’re reading.
Why not learn something instead?
And so, if the Internet is making inane things easier for you to access, I urge you to learn something from the stuff that counts: books. I still remember the first time I saw the word pulchritude. It was in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and it popped out at me from a sentence: “Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.” What a great word, I thought, and said it out loud a few times, holding the feel of it in my mouth. Pul.chri.tude. On the side of simple words and short sentences is Stephen King, but it’s not that his books lack intelligence just because their vocabulary is restricted to two syllables. His time travel novel 11/22/63 is a work of genius, about a man who discovers a wormhole in time that takes him back to 1958, and how he lives in past hoping to kill JFK’s assasin. That book kept me up at night, made me think, and made me research both the laws of physics and time travel as well as America’s political scene in the 1960s. Simple language but powerful plotting.
But our chart-toppers?
Now consider India’s top sellers. There’s Chetan Bhagat (and at the outset, this is not a piece meant to denigrate Bhagat: I am impressed with both the way he changed what bestsellers mean in India and how he gets so many people to read, but I do disagree with his viewpoint here.) Bhagat is a big fan of easy language, but he tells a story straight – what are you taking away from it? Nothing except the story. On his website, he has a FAQ section for Five Point Someone, from which these quotes are taken :
Wow, sounds heavy. Is it?
Oh No! Not at all. The primary idea of this book is to entertain the reader. The genre is humour, and it attempts to bring the reader back into their college days where money was scarce, friends were plenty and even when facing deep life issues – you were having fun.Tell us something more about the writing style used in the book? (sic)
The writing style is extremely informal. This may be reffered (sic) to as modern English, but the idea is to write as people talk in college age. Hence, no flowery language, no tough words you dreaded in a dictation, no set rules. Yet – it works, because it is the language of real people.
Now of course “the language of real people” is great, it’s fantastic, but the problem is when you assume your real people are limited to a vocabulary of say 200 words and have no desire to expand it at all. “Hey, real people,” you’re saying, in effect, “Here: please stay at the level you’re at, I’m pandering to you.”
And then there is “the primary idea of this book is to entertain the reader.” This is problematic for me, because I started out at this point: I wanted to entertain, I didn’t want to give people a message – so boring! – I wanted to tell a story that some people would be enlightened by and others would recognise themselves in. In the past few years, I have come to change my views.
And so, here’s what I want to read
Part of this was just reading more. I began to get selfish about my reading time – I just did not have the bandwidth to deal with every entertaing but badly written book that came my way. To put it a different way: I finally came face to face with my own reading mortality. There is no way I will be able to read every book ever written in the world, even if I read constantly and all the time.
This made me extremely depressed, until I started looking at reviews again – yes, reviews! – instead of trending Twitter subjects, and reviews on websites known for book reviews, rather than the ones that just summarise the plots. I became old school and evangelical about my reading, and also ruthless about abandoning a book midway if I didn’t like it.
And so I realised that the best books were those that gave me a little something to take away – even if it was just a new word, even if it was thinking about the physics of time travel. I’m still learning: both to read and to write. To ask nothing of your reading material but that it entertain is admitting in a small way that your brain has atrophied. Do you want that?
