Zuckerberg should realise that reading is not a duty
Facebook boss may be missing out on the pleasure found in books, writes James Walton
‘BOOKS,” according to the chick-lit author and former MP Louise Mensch, “were what we used to do before the internet.”
Now, though, it seems that these ancient artefacts may be making a comeback. No less a figure than Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, has declared 2015 “A Year of Books” and is inviting his website’s users to join him in his new year’s resolution of reading and discussing one a fortnight.
His first choice is Moisés Naím’s The End of Power, which explores the growing power of “antipolitical” movements such as the Tea Party and the UK Independence Party — thanks, as luck would have it, to their use of Facebook. Zuckerberg launched the project by announcing, with what sounds almost like surprise, that books are “intellectually fulfilling” and “allow you to fully explore a topic . . . in a deeper way than most media today”.
Even the most settled digital native must half-suspect that a quick skim online is less likely to bring real enlightenment than reading a proper study by a genuine expert. You might also be tempted to imagine a world in which there’d been 700 years of the internet, before, in the ’90s, somebody invented books.
It would surely seem a miracle that, instead of trawling through acres of semi-reliable information, you could have a guaranteed, portable and inexpensive source of knowledge from someone who knows both how to write and what they’re talking about.
But it appears that in his shock discovery of books’ potential, Zuckerberg is not alone. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal praised a new campaign for “slow reading”, whose members meet once a week in a café, turn off their phones for a whole hour and read in silence. Such quiet reading, the headline declared, can “benefit your brain”.
Although bibliophiles might want to pounce on anything that smacks of good news, I can’t help wondering whether using books purely as a means of selfimprovement — with elements of self-congratulation thrown in — misses the point of reading.
Last year, British writer Nick Hornby stirred up controversy by suggesting that people should read books for enjoyment, and so not bother finishing the ones they don’t enjoy. “Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty, we’re re- inforcing the notion that reading is something you should do, but telly [or, presumably, surfing the internet] is something you want to do,” he said.
The insistence on a book a fortnight may not be terribly punishing, but it does seem to come from the same slightly teeth-gritted impulse as a booze-free January.
More importantly, though, Zuckerberg’s choice of The End of Power suggests that he’s fallen for a notion now so prevalent that it’s easy to forget how philistine it is: the idea that the books you read should be relevant to your life. One of the central reasons for reading is to experience lives other than your own — either in nonfiction or, perhaps especially, in novels.
Only through fiction do we get the welcome and even vital sense of what it’s like to be somebody else. As American writer John Updike put it: “What is important, if not the human individual? And where can individuality be better confronted, appraised and enjoyed than in fiction’s shapely lies?”
So, in the unlikely event that Zuckerberg would like some tips from me, let me suggest that he moves on to novels next — ideally ones that bear no relationship to his life or those of other Facebook users. Anything from Dostoyevsky to Raymond Chandler should do the trick. Or, if he wants to stick to nonfiction, he could recommend the forthcoming and crunchingly polemical book by CNN reporter Andrew Keen. Its title? The Internet is Not the Answer.