the unbeatable brightness of reading; Alan Taylor celebrates the

RATHER later than I had intended, I read recently an essay by Jonathan Franzen, which first appeared in Harper's magazine in 1996 and which, following the success of his novel The Corrections, has now been republished in a collection titled How To Be Alone (Fourth Estate, (pounds) 16.99). According to Franzen, the essay, Why Bother? is not, as many of his interviewers have assumed, primarily concerned with his ambition to write "a big social novel that would engage with mainstream culture and rejuvenate American literature", but an attempt to abandon his "sense of social responsibility as a novelist". In short, he wanted to write fiction for fun; to celebrate being a writer and a reader.

It is something you don't hear a lot about, though books about the joys of reading continue to gush forth, including Alberto Manguel's recondite A History Of Reading (HarperCollins, (pounds) 25), John Baxter's personal odyssey in the print jungle, A Pound Of Paper: Confessions Of A Book Addict (Doubleday, (pounds) 15) and Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built: A Memoir Of Childhood And Reading (Faber, (pounds) 12.99). As each of these books illustrates, reading is an addiction that cannot be stilled with a sojourn at the Priory.

"We read to understand," writes Manguel, "or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function ... I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading. Reading - I discovered - comes before writing. A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading."

In Why Bother, Franzen makes a valiant attempt to discover why we read. Why are some of us, for instance, happy to read pap, while others prefer more nourishing fare? In the course of his quest, Franzen encountered Shirley Brice Heath, "a linguistic anthropologist" at Stanford University, who rode public transport and lurked in airports and visited bookshops and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people buying or reading "substantive works of fiction", she asked for a few minutes of their time in order to find why they read what they do.

To Franzen, Heath's conclusions were earthshattering, effectively demolishing the myth that there is such a thing as a "general audience".

For someone to sustain an interest in literature, said Heath, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. But having a parent who reads is not enough to produce a lifelong dedicated reader, apparently. Young readers also need to share their interest with someone.

"A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," said Heath. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.

"Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read'."

Heath, however, identified another kind of reader, "the social isolate" - the child who from a very early age senses he is different from everyone around him. "What happens," Heath explained, "is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with people around you - because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

This is not an area many people feel comfortable talking about - who wants to admit that he is a nerd? According to Heath, readers in this category are more likely to become writers than readers in the former. Looking Franzen in the eye, she said: "You are a socially- isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

One can understand why such an encounter might spook someone, especially if he aspires to be a writer. It is more, perhaps, than you would rather know about yourself. How did I become addicted to reading? Who was my pusher? What is my drug of choice? Is there any drug I wouldn't sample? Am I hooked for life? Is there anything I won't do to fuel my addiction?

In our house, there were a handful of books, mainly given as prizes for perfect attendance at Sunday School. I myself had a couple, Agatha Christie's No Orchids For Miss Blandish and Miracle On The River Kwai by Ernest Gordon.

The first book I actually bought was Joy Adamson's Born Free, the two and sixpence paperback edition which I acquired between monsoons on a caravanning holiday in North Berwick. With the rain drumming on the roof, I was transported to the African bush. It was a real place but to me it could have been on the moon.

Like Francis Spufford, I didn't just want to see in books what I saw in the world around me; I wanted to see things I never saw in my life.

When you're young you read compulsively, voraciously, geekishly. After Born Free I read its sequels: Living Free and Forever Free. I knew Elsa and her cubs better than my own brother and sister.

Somehow from there I made a leap and for several weeks I lived happily in an English boarding school with Jennings. Why him and not, say, Richmal Crompton's William, I don't know. Why is it that people can be divided between those who prefer Cliff to Elvis, The Beatles to the Stones, Muhammad Ali to Joe Frazier?

It has often seemed to me that I have been steered by an invisible hand in a certain direction. With books, it was as if I knew before I opened them whether I would like them. There was something, someone, in the ether tugging at my sleeve, determining what I would read next, an influence so subtle yet so potent that it was irresistible.

The single most influential factor in my life was discovering the public library. Recently, the bicycle was named in a Radio 4 poll as the greatest invention ever. Utter nonsense! It was, of course, the public library, which offered freely to everyone unfettered access to knowledge.

These days the public library has lost a lot of its lustre, largely because politicians both locally and nationally are indifferent to it. They may acknowledge patronisingly that it is "a good thing" but they seem not to understand what a transforming effect a library can have. Asked by Jonathan Miller where he had studied English literature, Jimmy Reid told him "Govan Library".

For Reid, as for me, the library was not a luxury but indispensable. Between 10 and 18, I spent more hours in it than anywhere else. With no-one to guide me, I read indiscriminately, starting in the fiction section at A and working alphabetic-ally towards Z. I would recommend everyone to do the same.

Often, I got hooked on authors. I spent more time with Erle Stanley Gardner than was probably healthy; because of his Perry Mason I have a higher regard for lawyers than can be justified. I read huge swathes of Balzac, as obsessed with him as his characters were obsessed with women or making money.

Thomas Hardy led me to that "vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath"; Raymond Chandler introduced me to Moose Malloy who purred softly "like four tigers after dinner"; Robert Louis Stevenson made heathery highland hills sing.

In my innocent pursuit of pleasure, I was not aware then that there is a hierarchy among books, that some books are deemed "good for you" while others are said to improve the mind. In The Pleasures Of Reading, a now out-of-print collection of essays edited by Lady Antonia Fraser about what people read, one of the themes is that parents ought not to worry if their children read "rubbish".

"What children read," writes Lady Antonia, "is less important than the fact that they do the reading in the first place. The stirring of the imagination is the important thing." But that is not to deny that there is snobbery in reading as there is in drinking wine or dining in restaurants or listening to music.

The older one gets, the further away falls those delicious days when books were just books, to be consumed like a box of choc- olates. Young readers don't distinguish between good and bad books. There are just books; heaps of them. The sight of a library stock full of books is one of the temptations of the world. Despite the assault of other media, books have retained their mystical aura. They demand time, attention, thought, engagement. They do not yield their fruits easily. When I read about celebrities such as Jamie Oliver who say they're too busy to read books, I experience a drizzle of irritation falling over me. Among the people polled for our books of the year feature overleaf was a rock musician who declined to take part because he was still reading the only book he'd opened this year. The sooner he calls his therapist the better.

The more one reads the more one wants to read. The more one needs to read. There is never enough time for reading. Nor will there ever be. Last year in Britain alone there were almost 120,000 books published. Like Manguel, I would miss reading more than writing. In a bookshop or library or my own home, I sometimes feel I should read everything before adding to the cumulation. Moreover, as a reader you can't fail. Reading is never unsuccessful, however bad the book.

It is, as Francis Spufford says, culturally sanctioned. "Books get cited over and over as the virtuous term of a contrast whose wicked other half is Nintendo, or MTV, or the web ... The medium I'm wrapped in scores me a cultural point. I don't watch daytime soaps, I'm bookish: I have the dignity of high culture."

To admit as much is to invite accusations of elitism. But Spufford is as attracted to the pot-boiler as he is to Daniel Deronda or Dr Zhivago. All true readers are. There is a book for every occasion, every situation, every mood, every IQ. No-one in their right mind would want only to read Harry Potter or Proust or Oor Wullie. Each offers it own consolations. Each is entertaining on its own terms. The best books are those in which we lose ourselves completely.

Talking to Shirley Brice Heath, Jonathan Franzen remembered with joy the moment in high school when he found to two friends with whom he could talk about Tolkien. "I was also considering that for me, today," he writes, "there is nothing sexier than a reader." But if books and reading are to remain sexy, the last thing one wants is for that to become common knowledge. Keep the secret to yourselves.

Copyright 2002 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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