Of course you have, and if the real estate photos of the interiors of "your dream home" are any guide then being bookless is a great selling point. Oh, there might be a couple of coffee table books, usually featuring glossy pictures of weird modern architecture or an All Black biography someone forgot to chuck out after Father’s Day.
Any domestic interior shown with bookshelves is usually part of a feature on some eccentric old character.
"Oh, he must have his books", simpers the indulgent wife rather in the manner of those who suffer Dad building a shed the size of a rugby field to house his collection of tractors.
"He thinks more of those tractors than me", mutters an aggrieved spouse who is actually quite proud of the old man being the neighbourhood oddball.
A person’s bookshelf will tell you more about them than a three-hour session with their shrink, so we must assume a bookless home is owned by a mentally empty type.
More worrying is the suggestion that the reader is dead. Are there no longer book-a-day addicts like myself?
As a student I "did" Anthony Trollope and liked his stuff. Having digested enough of the set text to get at least a B-, I picked up most of his books during the years which followed.
Reread some of them and was reluctant to part with them when the great clear-out came a few years ago. (The new house just didn’t have an entire room available to store books!)
Would a modern student of English become such a tragic? Not according to a university tutor in arts subjects, including writing, who told me recently, "some young people are actually more interested in writing a book than in reading one". I imagine their writing will appear on some website or blog but never reach a publisher of actual books.
Almost 20 years ago an Australian academic, Sherman Young, wrote a book called, with a nice bit of whimsy, The Book Is Dead (the subtitle was Long Live the Book). Young made the point that more books than ever are appearing but made something of the loss of the magic of hard copy as e-books began their rise.
That books are alive and well is confirmed by the dozens of books which arrive at this newspaper for review each month. Many recent books, as Young points out, are a marketing exercise — produced quickly to meet a fleeting demand and, hopefully, make bob for writer and publisher.
A "no holds barred" biography of Christopher Luxon is probably not far away and it fits the bill perfectly.
An exception is the flood of local history books, which just keep coming. They sell well and their second-hand value often becomes their original price many times over.
I’ve just spent much of the weekly pension on a 700-page history of the farming area in which my Irish forebears settled in South Canterbury. The book is a 20-year labour of love and even if among the 700 pages I find the embarrassing story of the black sheep of the family, "Dirty Dan" Sullivan, I’ll read and reread the book with great pleasure
But while there are plenty of new books around, the problem is how many people are actually reading them and the sad fact is we are reading less in spite of the wealth of writing available.
Last week a survey revealed that half the adults in the UK do not regularly read for pleasure. Perhaps they read for pain and gorge themselves on the stuff found in magazines in the "beauty and wellbeing pages", where articles like "Are Your Lobes Letting You Down" proliferate.
Only a third of the 16 to 24-year-old age group admitted they were regular readers and almost half of the bright young things called themselves "lapsed readers", complaining that they "do not feel represented in reading materials".
That’s extraordinary. Should a 16-year-old restrict themselves to reading about 16-year-olds and whatever it is that 16-year-olds do? Hardly opening a window to the wider world.
I was about 20 when I got into Trollope’s Victoriana but felt no deprivation when I discovered that 20-year-olds were a rarity in his work apart from the odd attractive young maiden and, of course, I’ve never had much in common with attractive young maidens. Apart from a sense of rejection. Mine when they turned me down as a young man and theirs when someone they fancied turned them down.
But wait. All is not lost. Next week a man is coming all the way from Auckland to run a creative writing workshop in Queenstown for secondary school students from Central Otago.
Our young people will emerge as writers, but I worry that they may not actually write well. The workshop is called "Learn to Write Good".
— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
