Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." There's a lot of time invested in reading a book, and the longer the book the longer the time it takes. Which argues a need for judicious selection, and good reasons for reading long books – of which more later.
We used to visit a small bookshop on the south Deeside Road. It was a wee room of a wee cottage which was part of the Camphill Community. Compared to the urban sprawl that was the interior of the book megastores on Union Street, the Camphill Bookshop was rural, quaint, small, quirky and I doubt I ever went in without finding something different, interesting, worth reading.
The contrast between a bookshop with a stock of around 3,000 books, and a megastore with hundreds of thousands can be measured in serveral ways. Bestsellers piled feet high, promoted titles on tables at eye level, 3 for 2 offers laid across your path as you walk in. The attempt to be a comprehensive book supermarket, means aisles of travel literature from Tiree to Thailand and body mind and spirt stuff where these two extremes have their equivalent in the geography of new age esoterica; the ephemeral bestsellers get front of shop priority and classics require to be looked for, walls of crime and sci-fi, more walls of IT manuals and self-help handbooks – I find the places exhausting, frustrating, and finding the book I want is like looking for a known face in an overpopulated foreign city without a streetmap and only a tourist level vocabulary
Then there's the Camphill Bookshop. No big franchise money there to reduce prices, promote bestsellers, demand huge discounts from publishers. A judicious selection of books (remember the phrase used earlier), loosely defined as 'good books'. By which the proprietor meant books that enrich the mind, enlighten curiosity about human life and achievement, touch those places of ethical and theological importance that illumine and deepen human experience. I never bought there a book I didn't read, and they didn't have many brieze-block volumes.
Which brings me back to long books. Consider. This summer two books on Paul will be published with a combined page total of 2,723 pages (1347 plus 1376). The first is by J D G Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, the second volume of his "Christianity in the Making" three volume project.
The second, The Deliverance of God. An Apocalyptic Reading of Jusrification in Paul, is by Douglas Campbell. This is a massive restatement of Pauline soteriology in the light of current controversy and development in New Testament history and theology in which the main protagonists are people like Dunn, N T Wright, Francis Watson. Years ago, after reading The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, I formed the habit of reading James Dunn's books when they come out, as key indicators of the best NT scholarship. N T Wright's bigger books likewise. Over the years their books have kept getting bigger! And in addition to the two books mentioned above, the next major work from N T Wright in his six volume "New Testament and the People of God" series, will also be on Paul. If it's the same size as his first three it will be a modest 700 pages, half the size of those other two noted above!
Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." So – an experiement in judicious selection – how long before I begin to be bothered………..hmmmm.
Leave a Reply