The Reading Hierarchy

I was inspired to write the article because of the photo on the front cover. Our Deputy Head took it during a Year 2 and 3 library session. What a joy to see, students engaging and enjoying books. The class teacher had just been to see me earlier about the chances of procuring further titles in their favourite series. I took to the internet and, two weeks later, they were delighted to find those titles on the shelf awaiting them. 

I knew how they felt. Anyone taking the time to read this article has been struck by that frisson of excitement palpably delivered by an author or a series and the itching of the impatient wait for their next work to hit the shelves in order for it to be quickly consumed. 

When I was in Year 6, my Dad suggested I read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and, since at this stage there were more than 20 in the series, it was what I dieted on for the next couple of years. At the culmination of each, I'd catalogue it by redesigning the front cover and writing a book review on the reverse. It's what great art should do - inspire you to produce, give you cause to act. It was something we’d always done as a family, read, before bed, on holiday - if you can read, there’s no chance of you ever becoming bored.

There was a time when I was travelling round Central America and I stopped into a bank to exchange US dollars in Honduras. I was 2 hours from the nearest cash machine and the bank was a small hut with a machine gun glad security guard at the entrance. Inside was a shelf with giant A3 ledgers - everything was still done by hand (this was 2007), there were no digital numbers stating the exchange rate - it was taken from that day's paper. The man in front of me was a local. He couldn't read. He couldn't write either, after having had someone read the small print, he signed with an X. I couldn't believe it. I had spent the past few months in Spanish speaking countries, trying to decipher everything, understanding through context and a growing vocabulary. How could someone in the 21st century not understand how to read? How much of the world was he missing out on? I'm not saying that being a world class reader of high end literature is the end goal or that by finishing Proust's In Search of Lost Time you've somehow made it in life, but not to be able to read the paper, the bullet points of your contract, surely this is as much of a requisite in modern life as food, drink and a good night's sleep?

Of course, I moved on, as I was given new suggestions by my parents - Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman, before progressing through onto the classics during GCSE study and into university. You talk to people, Amazon gives you recommendations - if you like Satre, have you tried Camus? I've picked up novels because they've been the only ones available on a hostel shelf in the middle of Myanmar or plucked them from a stand because (in spite of all you're ever told) the cover stood out, the title perhaps. There are books you read because you've heard so much about them you can't ignore them (Catch 22, The Catcher in the Rye), ones you stumble upon due to a review (Roberto Bolano's 2666). I remember the first time I saw a copy of Jose Saramago's The Double and stood there shaking my head and scoffing that he had the audacity to award it the same title as the great Dostevsky, but then at some stage I found myself reading it and from there I went on to his novel Blindness and after that I no longer had any qualms about what he wanted to call his works.

The other month I found myself reading an article in an educational magazine, where the author was deriding a minister for claiming that there was a hierarchy in literature and that what counted was having students reading. At parent evenings, when speaking to parents who have reluctant readers in primary, I find myself taking a similar line - comics, graphic novels, a series, football biographies - what is going to reel them in? What will have them realise the importance of reading and the many gains that can be made from becoming a better reader? Yet, really, my end goal is to have them climbing the ladder, to be able to access great works, because that minister is right, just like with football teams, clothing brands and colas, there is an elite and there is a reason why they are at the apex.

Now we have iGCSE students in school, it's given me great pleasure during English language lessons to introduce them to excerpts from books I've taken inspiration from myself - Cormac McCarthy, Hemmingway, DeLilo, Marquez (I remember finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude and being told that it wasn't the best book published in that year, I read Master and Margarita, but I couldn't disagree more. One Hundred Years... is a masterpiece, it's a pocket symphony in the same way as Good Vibrations. How Marquez squeezes in so much, over what surmounts to an average size novel, still amazes me. A friend assured me it wasn't his pinnacle and I needed to try Love in the Time of Cholera. Each to their own, I guess.) These works allow the class to see just what can be achieved with the written word. These are books that over the last twenty years I've bought for people, thrown into their hands, pleaded for them to read next, because it will enlighten them, expand their minds, help them discover new ways of thinking and ponder life itself. 

We shouldn't say no to a fast food burger - when you're in the airport and the only availability is mass paperback thrillers or at a shack hostel that only has beat up hand-me-downs not precious enough to be brought back home - they can suffice. Yet if we want to grow big and strong, to learn and come away feeling, not just satisfied, but fulfilled, we need to work up to the very best pieces of literature that will constantly challenge and hustle into our ever changing top ten.

1. Libra - Don DeLilo

2. Rabbit is Rich - John Updike

3. The Watchmen - Alan Moore

4. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

5. 2666 - Roberto Bolano

6. American Psycho - Bret Easton-Ellis

7. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky 

8. The Great American Novel - Philip Roth

9. One Hundred Year of Solitude - Garcia Marquez

10. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy