THERE’S more to life than books, you know, but right at this moment maybe not much more (as Morrissey didn’t quite sing way back when). In amongst all the fear and boredom and constant anxiety that is now our daily round, the news that book sales have surged in recent days was the tiniest of fillips this week.
Waterstones has announced that its online sales have soared by 400 per cent since it closed shops on Monday (which should have happened sooner but let that lie).
And, the bookstore chain says, there has been a “significant uplift” in sales of the classics as part of that surge. Readers have been picking up copies of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (fittingly enough), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, for example. Dystopian fiction, school textbooks, and novels that come with a hefty page count have also been doing well, the new Hilary Mantel among them.
By contrast, sales of non-fiction have seen a drop of 13 per cent. You can have too much reality sometimes, I guess.
For those of us who had come to terms with the fact that we’ll probably never get around to reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Joyce’s Ulysses, maybe this is time for a rethink. Stephen King has already announced on Twitter that he has picked up the latter. Finnegans Wake, next then Stephen?
All of this is surely a reflection of our changing perception of time in the current crisis, the way in which it suddenly feels like time is stretching out, expanding as our own daily lives contract. How do we fill the empty hours stuck in the house to ensure we don’t lapse into despair?
As someone who can waste hours just looking at pictures of other people’s bookshelves on Twitter (so addictive), part of me feels this is possibly the moment to step up my reading game, to finally get to grips with some of the books that have been loitering around the house for 20, even 30 years without ever being opened. I keep thinking to myself, “Oh, I must read that someday.” Maybe today is that day.
That said, it would be wrong if we start to think this is a competition, that we must take this opportunity to “improve” ourselves by reading only the classics. There’s nothing wrong with escaping into the books of Enid Blyton or Lee Child if that’s the thing that gives you comfort. The world is hard enough right now without us being hard on ourselves.
Me, I’m thinking I might give War and Peace a miss, but there’s a whole shelf of Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts cartoon strips that I could finally get to grips with. There are worse ways to spend this crisis.
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