59 books in 5 months!

I just had to share the very fine musings of the excellent Caitlin Moran, writing in the Times Magazine the other week about the process of reading.

She was rather exercised by having agreed to become a judge on the Baileys Prize, realising that this would entail reading 59 books in 5 months, whilst still holding onto the day job (Columnist of the Year at The Times), AND being a wife and mother. After three months, she felt physically sick with literature, having gorged herself on this smorgasbord of novels. She was reminded of what she always knew as a young reader, and I shall quote it in full, because its just such a brilliant description of what reading is:

"Because what judging a literary prize did was remind me of what I knew when I was 11, and was wiser, and forgot as I got older and stupider: that reading is not a passive act. That it's amusing that "bookworms" are thought of as weak, bespectacled and pale - withdrawn from the world, easy to beat in a fight.

For a reader is not a simple consumer - as you are listening to a record or watching a movie.  A reader is something far more noble, dangerous and exhilarating - a co-artist.

Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive.  A writer is essentially typing blank pages - shouting out spells in the dark - until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else's.

Consider me, now. If I type "dragon" - casually, just six letters, no effort for me - suddenly, a dragon appears in your mind. You have to make it. Your brain fires up - perhaps your heartbeat will speed a little, depending on if you have had previous unhappy experiences with dragons.  Perhaps you will have given her golden claws - or maybe you have a fondness for tight, black shiny scales instead. But however closely I have described her, she will still be your dragon - in your head, a result of your million tiny acts of birth.  And no one else will ever see her.

And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. That old lady on the bus with her Orwell; the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell; the teenager roaring through Capote - they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire.  Their hearts are flooding.  With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss - you are the mathematical calculations that plot the trajectory of the blazing, crashing Zeppelin. You - pale, punchable reader - are terraforming whole worlds in your head. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia or Jamaica Inn or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them - hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until transfused with your time and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as " just being a bit of a bookworm."

So this is what I remembered, as I judged a literary prize, this Summer. Being a reader.  The unseen, life-changing duet you sing with anyone who's ever written a book."

See, I told you it was good!