How the Kindle lost its spark | The Spectator - 0 views
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The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen.
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books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent.
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I was at that age of being over-attuned to the books-you-had-to-have-read-in-life, and where to start? Whichever you chose, you always wished you were reading another. It was a bit like being a serial monogamist at an orgy – with devastatingly attractive if sometimes impenetrable sexual partners – and the very thing that should have brought you peace and enjoyment only agitated instead
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I didn’t know either that there was no book you had to have read. An elderly writer, Peter Vansittart, told me one of the unexpected pleasures of old age was realising you’d survived without reading Don Quixote or Moby Dick.
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I didn’t know Winston Churchill’s maxim, about familiarising yourself with the books you owned but would probably never read – opening them at odd places, flipping through them, effectively (in my terms) defusing them
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‘After all,’ he said in his donnish voice, ‘There are plenty of books you don’t need to read at all. Take Kafka – culture’s already digested him for you: you know very well what the term “Kafkaesque” means.’ Attempting The Trial, years later, I wish I’d listened to him. ‘Kafkaesque’, I found, was much more fun than Kafka.
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There were about two or three hundred books that I needed to own, own as objects and a kind of autobiography: the books that had influenced my life or summed up a phase of it. Orwell, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin’s poems, Kenneth Tynan’s theatre writings, Martha Gellhorn’s war-reporting, Colin Thubron’s books on Russia, and so on. As I’ve narrowed my collection down to one large book-case finally I can see these titles clearly again. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich (whose biography I’ve kept) said when it came to literature you should know less but know it back to front. Shostakovich, I think, was right.
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I found a site called archive.org, a free online library with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of scanned, unalterable titles. Only once or twice have I failed to find a book (usually a newly published one) that I wanted