Why reading matters now more than ever
For me, finding time to read for pleasure has felt more important than ever this year. The pandemic, the state of the economy and election campaigns here and in the US have barraged our senses and absorbed our attention in 2020.
It has been hard not to feel overloaded with information and overwhelmed by news, most of it bad.
Good books can transport us to other places and other times, freeing our minds of Covid-19 and Donald Trump. They can allow us to escape the daily grind of lockdowns, levels and workplace pivots; and the mindless tweets of an American President out of touch with reality.
I have no doubt that bookshops and libraries will soon be awash with books about the pandemic – non-fiction works unpicking its causes and effects; novels with plots or settings on the annus horribilis that 2020 represents; collections of Covid19-themed poetry. I am sure writers across the globe will produce work that is good, bad and indifferent; that illuminates, that explains, that trivialises; that mythologises what the world has gone through in 2020.
I am not so sure how strong an appetite I will have for reading about Covid-19 even after we have it under control, but I am sure I will be spoiled for choice.
In the meantime, my focus has been on books that allow us to make sense of the pre-Covid-19 world, the world we lived in before February; and on books that transport us to other places and times.
Reading highlights for me this year have been Becky Manawatu’s Aue¯ ’’, a powerful depiction of poverty, violence and resilience in contemporary (but preCovid) Aotearoa; Professor Philippe Sands’ The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive, an unsettling but page-turning expose of Vatican complicity in the escape of war criminals; Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a clever, deservedly Booker-winning, story inter-weaving the lives of 12 characters in the UK (mostly black women) – story-telling at its best; Australian Christos Tsiolkas’ Damascus, an absorbing fictionalisation of the life of the apostle Paul; Chris McDowall and Tim Denee’s We are here: An atlas of Aotearoa, a mine of information and a book to dip into regularly; and most recently Ben Brown’s If nobody listens then no one will know, insights gained from a writing workshop he ran at an Oranga Tamariki youth justice facility, which was delivered as Read NZ Te Pou Muramura’s panui a-tau (annual lecture).
Several of these writers were featured in the Auckland Writers Festival’s Winter Series. Manawatu, Sands and Evaristo were just three of the 36 Kiwi and overseas writers interviewed by Paula Morris in the online programme that ran from May to July. Delivered live every Sunday morning, the content and timing of the series were a perfect antidote to the frustrations of elevated Covid-19 levels.
These novels and works of nonfiction, and the Winter Series itself, left me with the feeling that the writing of books is flourishing and that writers, whether in New Zealand or overseas, will continue to entertain us, challenge our thinking and subvert some of our preconceived notions about the world.
It is over to us all, as a community of readers, to continue to support writers by buying and borrowing books. All going well, writers’ festivals will be back face to face around the country in 2021 – and we should be out in force to support them – because we can.
Self-indulgence in a time of crisis be damned. Reading for pleasure has never been more rewarding. It also proves to us that there is more to our world than a pandemic and contemporary, often mindless, politics.
The Ma¯ta¯tuhi Foundation webinar series for emerging writers was launched this year in association with the $5000 Sunday Star-Times short story awards.