I am a bit weird, although I do my level best to keep this under wraps.
When I’m waiting on the platform, I pull out my mobile and start scrolling and when the train arrives, I step on, still scrolling, and keep at it right up to my home station.
But in secret I read books. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.
You know, the paper thingos with pages, roughly the size of a mini iPad, that are printed on both sides and you turn them from right to left. You can’t enlarge the font or Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V or even Ctrl+F.
But I get a buzz as my fingers ripple those pages.
Old books: they’re the best. They’re tactile. You can smell the foxing; you can feel the indents of letterpress in the thick, rough paper. The oily smudges at the edges of the pages are a tribute to weirdos of past decades.
From time to time I have seen other weirdos on the train reading books. I feel like tapping them on the shoulder and saying, “Wow, you do that too? Don’t you feel weird? How do you get away with it?”
Buying these paper thingos is one of my guilty pleasures.
Someone recently gave me a $300 voucher at Dymocks, which is a store that sells books.
Yes, they still exist and the only thing you can buy in a bookstore is books. You can’t buy useful things like shirts, or brussel sprouts, or AAA batteries or mobile phone covers. Only new books.
So I splurged. Only for myself. Now I know what the first circle of Heaven is like.
Reading books is becoming a niche sport, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us.
On any given day, 47 per cent of baby boomers read newspapers, books, magazines, or ebooks. For Gen Z, that’s 11 per cent.
In the United States, it’s much the same story.
According to one study, “42 per cent of college graduates never read a book after completing their studies. Among children, the frequency of reading for fun has dropped dramatically, particularly with only 14 per cent of 13-year-olds reading for pleasure nearly every day.”
Reading books simply cannot compete with the rush of scrolling through TikTok, YouTube videos, and Instagram, observers lament.
The distinguished Harvard historian Niall Ferguson recently predicted that we are headed for a new Dark Ages.
“Books are the principal way a civilised person learns about the distinction between noble and ignoble conduct,” he wrote.
“This means that the next generation will have a significantly larger proportion of outright barbarians than any in the past century.”
Perhaps there lies ahead of us the dystopian world of Ray Bradbury’s classic sci fi novel, Fahrenheit 451, where possessing books is a crime.
But, I am happy to report, there is room for hope. Radio National, for instance, is running a series on the top 100 books of the century.
And I witnessed the fightback a couple of weekends ago when I went to a monster book fair at Oakhill College in Castle Hill, sponsored by Lifeline, the suicide prevention charity.
I felt like … I’m not sure what I felt like. It was sensory overload. A butterfly in a sun-drenched meadow of wildflowers… A magpie carolling on a spring day… No, a pig in mud, that’s what I felt like.
Tens of thousands of books in Oakhill’s vast Benildus Hall. Books on everything under the sun roughly sorted into categories on huge trestle tables. Beneath the tables more books in their thousands. And dozens, scores, hundreds of people panning for gold.
I headed straight for “literature.”
Can there be too much happiness?
All the novels were priced between $4 and $6. Even the Nobel Prize winners, the Booker Prize winners, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award winners.
It is amazing how quickly “critically acclaimed” novels, even the “extremely funny” and “outstanding” novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, end up here.
More acclaimed than read, it seems. It reminded me of Clive James, the Australian critic and poet, and his hilarious poem, “The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I rejoice.”
And sure enough, I found a critically acclaimed book by Clive James himself in one of the trays.
Shakespeare occupied a small corner of a large table reserved for “classics” – insignificant compared to the acreage reserved for Star Wars novels which are not acclaimed but are avidly read.
I settled for around a dozen PG Wodehouse novels, a few of Patrick O’Brian’s nautical sagas, and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won a Nobel Prize but is readable nonetheless.
But I mustn’t be sniffy.
People were buying books in barrowloads – children, teenagers, young adults, young mums with prams crammed with books and babies, baby boomers with knapsacks.
Some people still love books; some people still read books. Fahrenheit 451 is not around the corner. I’m not so weird after all. Blessings on Oakhill College!