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Do We Really Need More Books!
There’s a scene in the 2012 British dark comedy Sightseers in which Ian boasts to the hapless protagonist Chris that he’s on his third novel.
Chris — still scribbling his first — then proceeds to bludgeon Ian to death with a rock.
I don’t know what he was thinking — he probably just hated him. But maybe he realized that one less author meant one less book. (Or three).
Some nerd at Google calculated there are 130 million published books in the world — excluding self-published ones.
That’s a lot of books.
It takes me roughly a week to read a book. Meaning it would take me 2.5 million years to finish all those ever published.
I’m 47 now so let’s say I make it to 80. That leaves me 33 years to read 130 million books.
In short, I don’t have the time. And neither do you.
So why do people keep writing them?
I was halfway through Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake yesterday when this thought hit me.
Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels in his life, and I’ve read five of them (including Slaughterhouse-5). I enjoy Vonnegut and I want to read more. I also want to read more Delillo, Auster, Self. Melville, Zola, Camus.
I could go on.
And yet people (like me) are still churning out books by the barrow load, as though they are still a novelty.
My only novel is a tale about a lonely French village overrun by British tourists due to a faulty satnav.
I love that little book, and really enjoyed writing it. I’ve even adapted it into a film, and have sent the script to the BBC (still waiting).
But if I hadn’t written it, so what? Would anyone care? Of course not. Parts of it are worth a giggle, but it won't change your life. And certainly won’t change the mind of Vladimir Putin, or the views of the morons in the US Supreme Court.
So why bother?
Surely, there’s enough fiction to keep us going. Every possible genre must have been explored by now. Every quirk and twist that makes a book an enjoyable read, dissected and analysed a million times by scholars and professors in dusty rooms.
