It is Sunday morning and, for a brief moment, nobody needs me to do anything. This is my sacred reading time, a small window of peace and quiet at the end of a frantic week when it is just me, good coffee and a good book. I usually love this time, but today something is wrong. I can’t concentrate. I read a page only to realise I haven’t read it at all. My mind wanders and roams far away from the world printed on the pages in front of me. It isn’t the writer, or the book. It is definitely me, and yet it’s so unlike me because I love reading. I’m a writer, for goodness sake. Reading is part of the job description. In the first two weeks of 2017 I read three books and adored them all. So what’s changed in the past week?
You know what’s changed.
The world.
Literally, in a week.
Every day, I obsess about the news. I wake up each morning anxious to know what happened overnight, even though part of me doesn’t want to know at all. I hardly dare look, and yet I have to because I want to stay informed. What I see frightens and bewilders and saddens me in a way nothing has for a very long time and I can’t concentrate on anything, not even a good book.
With so much happening so quickly, the normal, everyday things seem suddenly trivial. Even if I manage to step away from the news and do something else, I question myself. Is it okay to look at GIFs of kittens at a time like this? Should I tweet about Ruth Negga making an Irish coffee, or is that too flippant? I’ve seen people criticise writers for promoting their books on social media “at a time like this”. If I tweet about my book or kittens or Ruth Negga, does that somehow make me not care? If I read a book for the next hour, might I miss out on some new global catastrophe? While I’m immersed in a fictional world, what terror might I find in the real one when I put the book down? This is why I can’t relax, can’t concentrate, can’t read, and yet reading is arguably one of the most important things we can do right now.
It is heartening – and no great surprise – to see George Orwell’s 1984 topping the bestseller lists. Quite frankly, it restores my faith in humanity. If reading 1984 helps us feel more informed, better prepared, a little less naïve about the possibilities of that particular piece of fiction becoming horribly true, then let’s get reading. In these alarming times of “alternative facts” and “fake news”, we must remain hungry for books and words – for fiction. We must read as much as we can, because while books can’t stop what is happening, they can help us make some sense of it. Maybe, just maybe, if “certain people” made time to read more books (or any at all), some, or all, of this political mess wouldn’t be happening in the first place.
Books have the ability to make us laugh and cry. They educate and enchant us, scare and soothe us. They open our minds and our hearts to other worlds and other lives. They let us step into the past and take us into fantastical futures. They give us alternative perspectives, new words, new ways of looking at life. They let us walk in someone else’s shoes for a while and, while doing all that, books let us escape from the things we find most difficult in our lives so that when we emerge from beneath the duvet and realise the coffee’s gone cold because the last three chapters were so good, we are ready to cope with the real world once again.
At a time of such seismic change, perhaps books are the one familiar constant we can all turn to. Shakespeare said, “if music be the food of love, play on”. I say, if reading is the food of an enquiring mind, then let’s build up an appetite and devour as much brilliant fiction as we can. Or, to put it another way, keep calm and read more books.
The Girl from the Savoy by Hazel Gaynor is out in paperback. The Cottingley Secret is published later this year
