Writes James Marriott in "The 36 books that changed my life/An obsession with words got the Times columnist through his eccentric childhood and his parents’ divorce. Now 33, he has written a book — in praise of reading, of course" (London Times).
I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list. I've read many of the books, and I was motivated to buy one of them on the spot — "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Another — "In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." — I would have bought if there had been an audiobook.
Marriott's new book is "The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," and I will buy that too when it comes out in October, assuming there's an audiobook. There are some things I know I need to walk to read.
If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.
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“I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list.”
Doesn’t work unless you subscribe. But I’ve got stacks of books from the old days and over 1000 unread on my iPad, so I’m good for a while.
WEIRDest People in the World is a great book. It answers the final question that Guns Germs and Steel fell down on--why Europe and not India or China. It also is (unintentionally!) a devastating takedown of the intellectual vapidity of "Indigenous ways of knowing" and why it's so important that we don't import third world attitudes into the first world.
As for the rest--my daughter and most of her friends are voracious readers. She has 2 full bookshelves, boxes of books on the floor of her bedroom, gets books from the library, and trades books with her friends.
Yes an era is passing and we may not have enough young minds who love books like many of our generation. I spend a lot of time pondering ways to encourage book reading, maybe through TikTok posts that create interest in the material quoted.
Huck Finn is in the public domain and can be republished in a number of ways and might be the most important novel of the 19th century. The most important line is Huck saying he stands with Jim, not the laws and society that would keep him a slave.
Progressives pretend at offense of that one word in the book but really the view of a world that largely hated slavery is one they deny when in reality it was the pro-slavery side that was always a small minority. They can’t handle the truth.
Just bought The Count of Monte Christo through your link, and there it sits, like a cinder block on my coffee table, will I finish it? Now I guess I’ll have to, but it will hardly fit in my hip pocket the way I always sported one as a teenager. You can’t blame kids though, we are the ones who invented the crack, I mean smartphones.
My younger children did the Second Lady's summer reading program for the second year in a row. I think you have to read 12 books. They really surpassed that, but we attend a Classical charter school so they don't have tech there. Neither have phones or ipads. We only have 1 TV and we have screen free Wednesdays.
It is possible to live in that kind of world still. My older kids don't get a phone until Christmas of 8th grade and even that use is limited.
@Jaq... you inspired me to write what will be the next post. Stay tuned!
The problem with Huck Finn is those last ten chapters, which some people defend as an allegory criticizing reconstruction, but as even Hemingway said when he resurrected HF by praising it as the source of all modern American novels, but it is hard to read.
I don’t remember this but Chat says that Papa said that the proper end was when Jim was stolen, but I think that it should have ended when they encountered Tom Sawyer, who knew that Jim had been freed, and withheld that in order to play a series of pranks on Jim and Huck, but maybe that was too happy and pat of an ending.
The parents have to model reading behavior for it to work. If I'm always on my phone and not reading a book, why would my kids think that reading is a valuable activity?
If you like "The WEIRDest People in the World" I'd recommend Niall Ferguson's "Civilization: The West and the Rest" containing his "6 Killer Apps":
Competition
Science
Property Rights/The Rule of Law
Medicine
Consumerism
Work Ethic
Good choice on Henrich. Remarkably anthropological devoid of the political propaganda around capitalism and a compelling writer- Gladwell with out the poor premise…
Now I guess I’ll have to, but [the book] will hardly fit in my hip pocket the way I always sported one as a teenager.
Yet, who is more interesting to read about as fictional child character in one of those books: A child who carries a book in his hip pocket, or one who carries a wooden Y-shaped slingshot poking out of a back pocket?
None of the intellectual horse shit would be possible without the Viking Renaissance.
Sailing
Swimming
Fishing
Navigation
Orienteering
Farming
Blacksmithing
Carpentry
Exploring
Fighting
**Competition
Science
Property Rights/The Rule of Law
Medicine
Consumerism
Work Ethic**
Doing Trump's Reading about theoretical ideology. Interestingly enough, I learned my work ethnic from illegal Mexican landscapers. Valhalla, I am coming...
When I was in high school.one summer I went to the library and checked out every single novel written by Hemingway and read them. Back when videotapes were still a thing , I went down to the local Blockbuster and rented every single Woody Allen movie and later every single movie by Kirusawa. Im glad i did all that bc i ddn't have the free time for this sort of thing later on in my life. The life of the mind is a really important thing.
Wondering about book sales, I asked Gemini and Claude to give me a list of book sales, in units, by year since 1980. Both told me it was difficult to impossible since the way sales are measured has changed several times over the years. Claude gave me a very detaild answer that left me more confused than before but seems to agree more or less with Gemini.
2014 635
2019 693
2020 750
2021 839
2022 N/A
2023 N/A
2024 782
2025 762
My wonderment was about whether people really are reading less than before. Book sales are not the same as reading but the trend should be similar.
Looks pretty healthy to me. Seems like a lot of people still reading books.
The Gemini list above only includes print books, not electronic. I've bought hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, especially if Kindle Unlimited are included since 2014. I don't think I have bought a single print book.
Then there is the problem of audio books. Not included in the numbers. Should they count? I think yes but a lot of people would disagree.
And textbooks are not included.
John Henry
JH are there zeros missing from your sales figures? I mean Gavin Newsome’s campaign alone bought over 100,000 copies of his memoir this year.
Currently reading George Kennan's bio of EH Harriman. I knew Harriman was involved with the Union Pacific Railroad but pretty much nothing else.
So far I have learned that he founded the Boys Club of NYC in the 1860s which became Boys and Girls Clubs of USA
Brought the UP out of bankruptcy in 1898 and basically rebuilt the whole thing.
About 20% in right now. Fascinating book and George Kennan is a terrific writer.
Something of a hagiography as he states in the intro but still pretty good.
Been meaning to read the Count of Monte Cristo for 50-60 years now. Ann and Jaq got me off the dime and I just downloaded it. Unlike Jaq, it does fit in my pocket. Along with perhaps 100 other books including the complete works of Anthony Trollope and Joseph Conrad.
Downloading does not equate with reading. But at least I will feel guilty about having it and not reading it.
John Henry
Mike, yeah, sorry. Should be millions of books.
John Henry
Or is your list TITLES and not UNITS sold?
Thanks. The little woman and I buy 1 or 2 hardcover books a month usually.
One of the things I love about Kindle is that out of copyright books are available cheap. The Kennan bio was, I think, $1.99. The Conrad and Trollope sets were each a buck or two.
Count of Monte Cristo is 99 cents. There may be a cheaper version if I search. I've just downloaded the free sample so far.
John Henry
Mike, physical books sold, not titles.
John Henry
Those are great things too Howard. "Both/and" not "either/or", especially fighting. Im scheduled to take Karl Rehn's force-on-force this October. Been waiting 2 years to get on it.
When I was a kid I devoured science fiction. That was most of my book reading. I think I read Two Years Before the Mast while still a teenager and enjoyed, but hardly any of the typical "childrens books" of the time (e.g., Treasure Island, Huck Finn). Then after college I went through a Literature and Poetry phase -- some modern (Philip Roth, Jay McInerney), but mostly old -- from which I have yet to emerge.
The iPad changed my world, so to speak, although I'm not sure how much for better or worse. Used to be, I'd get a book from generally the used book store, where one could find most classic literature, and I'd read it, but it on the shelf, and maybe read it again later on. Electronic books, especially the free ones (i.e., out of copyright) got me downloading all sorts of things I'd wanted to read or thought I should read. But. . . . .I admit most of them just sit there. I'll read some, but then decide to read something else, and it's easy: click Close, click Open, read New Thing. My reading has been far more scattershot. Lately I've been contemplating going back to physical books, not because of any nostalgia for "feeling an actual physical book" that so many lit-dorks moan on and on about, but because it maybe kind of creates an obligation in my head. If that makes sense.
I carried a Wrist Rocket, Wince, but that was more in my pre-teen years.
I don’t understand why people still buy print books. They don’t even light up when you open them, for God’s sake.
Speaking of anthropology, going a little further back in time, I’ve recently been reading “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art”. Seems the Neanderthals had art and culture quite comparable to H. sapiens of the time. They’d been living in Europe and Asia for 400,000 years before humans showed up about 47,000 years ago. 7000 years later they were gone, but not before significantly interbreeding with humans, so most of us have around 2% Neanderthal genes. (Interestingly, it was usually the father who was Neanderthal, because girls are like that.) What happened? The most likely hypothesis is that a long-forgotten human genius had invented the bow and arrow. Those are surprisingly hard to make, and neanderthalensis didn’t manage to learn the trick before sapiens wiped them out.
One summer my brother and I read hundreds of books from a subscription library (on cart) for monthly membership few rupees.
Westerns, and Harlequin types, mystery, others.
Is Clan of the Cave Bear interracial?
I heavily rely on the Internet Archive (archive.org and gutenberg.org) for rare but free-to-read books I could never find or afford. But the downside to print books is interestingly outlined in “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” by Leonard Shlain.
"I don’t understand why people still buy print books."
Because they are superior.
When I was a kid, over the summer I lived at the library in the elementary school one block down the street from home. It was open (restricted hours, I'm sure) during the summer. During the school year, I had to do assigned homework, but the summer was mine. I reveled in it.
Stevie,
Internet Archive and Gutenberg are great but I don't like the way they format for Kindle.
But, you can send a file to your Kindle email with Convert in the subject and it shows up in your library perfectly formatted.
I was recently sent a book in DOCX format which I find dreadful to read on kindle. I found that MS now has a send to Kindle app that sent the file to my Kindle and formatted it perfectly.
Allows settng of fonts, sizes, spacing and so on.
John Henry
"Books that Changed My Life," is a difficult lift. I wonder if all 36 books he lists really changed his life? I was a voracious reader as a child, mostly to escape an unhappy childhood. I discovered early that if I sat quietly with a book in front of me, the adults would leave me alone. The books also provided me with an escape in the imagination. I could go anywhere in books, especially to happier places. That's probably why I tended toward romances as I grew older.
But what books changed my life? I'm going to have to ponder that. Off the top of my head, I can think of one book, but I had to read it twice and I read it in middle age. That's The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux. Pope Benedict XVI's writings changed my life, but it was his encyclical Deus Caritas Est and his homilies and essays, not one of his books. I'll have to think a little harder to come up with a secular book. The Death of Ivan Ilyich impressed on me the importance of living a good life in order to have a good death, but I think that's a short story, not a book.
"I don’t understand why people still buy print books."
“Because they are superior”
…the people or the books?
When I was in elementary school, there was a program where if you memorized the Dewey Decimal System and jumped through a few other hoops you could get an adult library card. I don’t know if “God’s Little Acre” changed my life, but it did make an impression.
I had a job shelving books for the public library (a branch in the Madison system). Had a hard time getting my work done; I kept skimming them before placing them on the shelf. Then I drove the delivery truck for the library, moving books around between branches (couldn't read on that one).
E-books do have one advantage; physical books are heavy. I was in good shape when I had that delivery job.
"…the people or the books?"
Well…
@ Jaq...I still have a couple of wrist rockets. I use them to shoot dried garbanzo beans at the deer in my garden and orchard. They hurt and sting but don't really harm the deer. The ammo decays into the dirt. Hit them in the rump and they are startled and run away. (evil grin)
I'm skeptical of digital books for several reasons.
First:They can often be altered or censored or just disappear from your devices. In some cases you aren't actually buying the e-book ...just licensing it.
Second: when the digital platforms change (as they have many times in my lifetime) you either have to buy a new device, upload updates, or find out that YOUR medium is just obsolete.
A tangible book can't be remotely altered, doesn't require equipment, electricity or batteries..... and is still available even if every digital device on earth were to disappear.
My parents were not big readers, but they both had bookish siblings (sisters both) who encouraged reading. As for sitting quietly and being ignored, other adults in the family were just as likely to mock--"Always got your nose in a book, don't you?--as encourage. I was too diffident to snark back with "Maybe you should try it."
When I visited Germany with Oma and my aunt Louise the reader I had a small stock of paperbacks and comic books (Sgt Rick, Ghost Tank, Johnny Cloud) packed. I started and finished Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" on the flight over. and after a week I was desperate for more books.
We went to an English-language bookstore in Vienna or Munich where a clerk suggested some Biggles. I was hooked,
and still read about aviation history. (My father had been a pilot in the war and I thought I would be one also, but that was not to be.)
I read Martin Caidin, Arch Whitehouse, Ernest Gann, and others.
I will admit that two books *actually* changed my life, and are a very strange duo: "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan (sci fi) and. . . .okay, here goes. . . ."The Thorn Birds" by Colleen McCullough. (fiction-wise; there are a couple of non-fiction ones that were very influential as well)
The former is heavily science-based and got me very excited about actually doing science and learning how to program computers, etc. I still read it every couple of years to this day. The latter. . . .I dunno, it clued me in to a lot of stuff I'd never really experienced or understood before.
The problem with public domain translations of TCoMC, is that they have been expurgated; if you can read French, not a problem, but in the years that are now available, well the spicy parts didn’t make it.
I do remember looking forward to the next Readers Digest Condensed Book in the mail, boy was I mad when I found out that my sister just donated them.
Some of you Kindlers might enjoy Martin van Creveld's two quick reads about the great tyrants: "Hitler in Hell" and "I, Stalin", written as if by them in the form of apologias and justifications.
In HS and early college I went through the SciFi trinity of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke (not every one of their works, but a lot of them).
And of course, LOTR.
“A tangible book can't be remotely altered, doesn't require equipment, electricity or batteries..... and is still available even if every digital device on earth were to disappear.”
Until the Fahrenheit 451 guys show up.
“In HS and early college I went through the SciFi trinity of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke (not every one of their works, but a lot of them).
And of course, LOTR.”
Me too. Except I wouldn’t be caught dead reading LOTR.
When I was in high school, we had algebra class in a badly lit classroom. I sat at the back and there there were revolving racks of old paperbacks in the back of the room. I was constantly "borrowing" those books to take home and read. That's where I was first exposed to Ray Bradbury. years later, I met him and told him that story and he smiled.
I was able to access the article and list via an X account, Jamie Suskind
, who gives this link:
James Marriott: The 36 books that changed my life
He is using a "share token," which seems to allow access to nonsubscribers. Hope it works, apologies if it doesn't.
No LOTR? That's cool--de gustibus and so on. Few of the hard-science guys I drank coffee with on campus had read it or seen the movies. (I liked Bored of the Rings too.)
H G Wells, of course. And Ballard, Blish, Disch, Silverberg, and Zelazny. Some others, now forgotten.
I won't say Catch-22 changed my life, but it altered my attitude. I read it over a weekend in 12th grade.
My school libraries were pretty good, but the Memphis Public Library's Poplar-White Station Branch--a short bike ride away--was well stocked with military history, and the main library was and is outstanding in that regard.
The UM library is also pretty good in my interests.
One of the few advantages of a disadvantaged childhood is getting lost in a book. I suppose there are some bright kids from happy families who read a lot, but it you if you really want to hide from life, there's no better motivator than a rotten childhood and no better refuge than a good book.
No LOTR for me either. When I went into graduate school in the latter '80s I learned that there seems to have been a substantial crossover between hard core computer nerds and LOTR readers -- because lots of them had usernames of characters and designed text-based games using a lot of the characters and creatures from LOTR.
Many of the ones I knew went off and got filthy rich in the tech boom of the '90s. I ended up with a PhD and a series of research-oriented jobs. Blew it by not reading LOTR, I guess. *heavy sigh*
In my experience FWIW there was a strong overlap (among Boomers) between interests in SciFi and MilHist.
“ (I liked Bored of the Rings too.)”
Bored of the Rings is excellent. You get all you need to know about LOTR and have fun doing it. Go Frito and Dildo!
The "share token" gave me the article, but not the list. My usual workaround didn't even give me that.
The decline of reading is mostly about "literary fiction," and the people talking about it are mostly novelists who had aspirations to write serious literary fiction. Nonfiction and genre fiction are both doing pretty well.
Jean Baudrillard had the idea of "transart." Art is everywhere, but also nowhere, in that it doesn't matter anymore. "Literary" writers are highly trained and skillful at forming sentences, but they don't have anything to write about, at least not in the genre of the novel.
It was strange to read Marriott's memories of growing up when he still looks like a child in the photograph in the article. I assumed the picture was AI-generated but it looks like they credit the photographer and clothier.
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