148. THINKING ABOUT WORLD BOOK DAY - How Reading Is More Than The The Fetishisation of Books
I write this post as an absolute hypocrite. But that’s OK. As the disclaimer at the top of the main page says “All views expressed on the blog are those of the author of each post, and are not a reflection of, or affiliated with, any institution to which they may belong. In some cases, being philosophical inquiries, they may not even be the views of the author, but rather a “devil’s advocate” position they are trying on for size and kicking about, ultimately to reject. Consider this place an intellectual gymnasium where we “work out” our thoughts”. My house is heaving with books, many of which have yet to be read. I’m one of those people who finds it incredibly difficult to pass by a book shop without making a purchase, and there are books on my “to read” list than span back years since I first picked them up and bought them. I love books. The actual physical thing. The tactility, the smell, the weight, the turning of a page, the dust jacket - all that object-worship stuff. I do. But (and here is where this week’s philosophical element comes in) I recognise that my aesthetic enjoyment of the actual object - the book - is one thing, but the importance of books is something quite different.
As a piece of design, the book is a classic. They fit in the hand, are portable, have a pleasing feel, yet contain magic: the tangible material form of non-tangible consciousness. Ideas. As a work of art, many books fit that bill also. Gorgeous special editions, wonderful cover art or illustrations inside, fonts that read well - all before we even consider the art of the writing they contain amongst their pages. But the same can be said of many amazing pieces of design or works of art. As well as books, my house has its fair share of ceramics. My wife is a ceramicist and respects the design of classic shapes - bowls, vases, mugs - as well as the specific interpretations of different potters who have taken those design classics and made them unique expressions of their art. We also have art on the walls - paintings, photographs, collages, prints. Things which look nice or evoke certain feelings. Clothes too - classics of design, the t-shirt, the trouser, the hoodie, the skirt - in colours and patterns that speak to us. Books definitely meet the criteria of aesthetically pleasing pieces of design or works of art in themselves as mere objects, and there is definitely an element of my own personal hoarding of books that is hoarding them only as objects. Things I like to look at, hold, smell, enjoy as an object. But when I tell people that I love books, or that I recommend a certain book to them, it is not their worth as an aesthetically pleasing object I am commending, it is their value as something to be read. It is the content of the book, not the object itself that, for me, gives books their value. Even the aesthetically pleasing editions - it doesn’t matter how nicely presented a bad book might be, as the old saying goes: you can’t polish a turd. Likewise, I have some fairly terrible looking books in my collection that I adore. The covers are uninspiring, the spines are broken and some parts of the pages or cover are torn. But the words inspire or transport and make none of those deficits matter. It is the content, not the object, which has value.
World Book Day was last week. I started the weekend before it discussing costumes with my sister that my niece could wear to nursery that week that were affordable to do. Then, as the week progressed, my social media feeds began to fill up with pictures of my friends’ children in a variety of book-based costumes. A lot of Gruffalos, Wallys, Harry Potters and Harry Potter-adjacent characters. Several dinosaurs. Tigers who came to tea. Funnybones skeletons. A Spiderman or two. One of the schools I work at borders a primary school and there, too, the playground was filled with costumed kids representing their favourite characters. A lot has been written over the years about how World Book Day seems to have descended into a literary-themed Halloween these days, more about the costumes than about the words, and I won’t rehash that old debate here. I think costumes are fun, and if you want to dress up as a beloved character from a book you read, all power to you.
However…
I do think the emphasis on dressing up, and shots on social media of people reading nice-looking books in cool-looking places, around which World Book Day seems to be based, speaks to the problem with a day aimed at celebrating books rather than a day celebrating reading. For years, despite my lifelong relationship with books (not only as a voracious reader but my mom was a writer and my father a librarian) I have never quite warmed to what should be my favourite day of the year: World Book Day. And I think this year I realised why: celebrating books is not the point of books - it is the content of books which we ought to value, the reading that we do. And this reading that is so valuable is not limited merely to books. The pleasure of reading, the value of reading, can be words on a website, a blog, a magazine, a pamphlet, a letter, a ‘zine… A celebrating of reading is a celebration of ideas, and World Book Day seems to have descended into, instead, a celebration of objects. A fetishisation of the book rather than an invitation to read.
Consider the costumes. As I said, I love a good costume and don’t want to be a “costume killjoy”, but costumes in this context do raise questions about the role of the imagination in reading. One of the principle joys of reading is the role played by our imagination. My version of a particular character may wildly differ from yours. The author might provide clues, but how my brain reads and interprets the clues may be incredibly different from how yours does. But we want a costume to be recognisable for it to work, so usually we defer to the cover illustration or pictures from the book - maybe even the film or television adaptation. The costume becomes a manifestation of the commercial product of the book rather than a representation of my relationship, as a reader, to the character it contains.
World Book Day also seems to lean heavily - certainly within schools and in the context of children - on fiction, rather than one of reading’s most powerful genres - non-fiction - and its explicit value as a bringer of ideas. Fiction, of course, is rich with ideas too, but non-fiction wears its function on its sleeve: a book to share insight into some aspect of our actual reality. Fiction does the same, but requires some unpacking. On World Book Day we tend not to do that unpacking because it is easier to focus on objectifying the product - the book - rather than the ideas within. No-one likes the kid who comes to school dressed as Brexit, police brutality, or one of Frantz Fanon’s post-colonial subjects wearing the double-consciousness of black skin in white masks.
Instead of asking what we are reading on World Book Day, we ought to raise the level of questioning: what are we reading and how is it changing us? What is it making us think? What questions are the book raising? Even if the answer is, to all these questions, not a lot (I am unchanged, not thinking about anything, and asking no questions), to ask them makes us perhaps realise that some books are like junk food while others are more nutritious. Junk food can be a great treat, and can bring a great deal of enjoyment, but a good diet needs something more than junk food, and often a diet of only junk food can point to some underlying issues: economic inequalities that put up barriers to eating healthily, a depression or other mental health issue that is seeking comfort food as a cry for help. If my reading is pure escapism, all the time, what am I escaping from? And if my reading only reconfirms what I already think and believe, if it leaves me unchanged and not asking any questions, am I reading widely enough? Could there, perhaps, be other voices out there which would enrich my life if only I let them in?
I have been a voracious reader my entire life, but it took my wife asking me a question a year into our marriage to make me take a long hard look at my reading habits: “how many female authors have you read?” Not how many do I read, in a year say, but how many ever? And the number was ridiculously low - could be counted on two hands low! Since then, I have actively changed that habit, instilled as a male child growing up in a patriarchal culture and left unquestioned until then, and my worldview has legitimately been altered as a result.
Her next question, a few months later, was equally impactful: “do you ever read anything not set in the UK or America?”
Every time I expanded my diet of reading - my diet of ideas - I learned new things, whether in fiction or non-fiction. I did not discard all that I had learnt and felt reading authors in whom I saw myself reflected - male, white, Jewish, western, heterosexual - but I saw the myopia in only ever hearing similar perspectives to my own and expanded the view of the world I was getting. Furthermore, I saw those limits I had placed on my mind without ever choosing to do so. I had never set out to read primarily white, Western, male authors, but I had never thought to analyse my reading habits and actively disrupt them before. Doing so alerted me to a world much wider than the little box in which I was living before.
I had a discussion with someone this week about the teaching of Of Mice and Men in schools. They were lamenting the “cowardice” of refusing to teach the book “because it includes ‘the N-word’”. I tried to point out that it was more than the inclusion of the N-word in the book that made it a questionable text to teach in 2023. That the entire representation of race in the book was coming from the perspective of the dominant white culture at the time, and written by a white man, and that this context made the inclusion of the word different than if it were a depression-era black writer writing about the time and using the same word. The person laughed back that “because of the racism of the time there aren’t any books written by black authors, at least published ones, that could replace it”. To which I chose not to, for example, suggest Harlem Renaissance writers such as George Schulyer, Zora Hurston, or Langston Hughes, but pointed out that this was exactly what made it so questionable. Any book could be taught, set in any era of time, why choose to pick a text and era that centred the discussion of race only from the perspective of the potential oppressor? Why is is considered “brave” to choose to still teach a book with the N-word in it, but not “brave” to choose a book with a radically different perspective on the use of the N-word in it? Currently, for example, I am reading Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, novel The Nickel Boys. Although written in 2019, not the 1930s, Whitehead’s book uses the N-word plentifully, but it reads much differently coming from a black author, writing about a racist reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, than it does in Of Mice and Men, from a white author reflecting the casual racism in Depression-era California as a backdrop to his central story of migrant workers, Lenny and George. Suggesting there might be better books to teach our young people literature with than Of Mice and Men in the classroom is not about fearing exposing kids to the N-word, but about making a decision on how important it is to reinforce the racist use of that word within the classroom, or how important it is to better contextualise and challenge it. The word can still be included and used in great literature - and is - but how we think about its use within a text changes when written by someone different, using it for a different purpose. Of Mice and Men can still be on any school’s recommended reading list, but ought it be the central text studied by all collectively in the classroom? Certainly there seems something wilfully stagnant and stale about the same book I was taught when I was at school - the same book the person I was arguing with about this was taught too, despite being older even than me - being the same text taught still, to the very same year groups, all these decades later. By fetishising that book, it feels like we have perhaps forgotten that literature evolves and continues to develop and that brilliant writers have emerged since Steinbeck who could replace him in the classroom and provide just as good, if not better, an education. Not erase him. But just as teaching Steinbeck forces you to put all the other, not-Steinbeck, authors on wider reading lists to be consumed outside the classroom, teaching Whitehead, or anyone else instead, places the spotlight somewhere different while still allowing others to be endorsed as something good to be read out of lessons. The world of literature is larger than that one book and any selected book for study leaves voices out in the cold. The question for educators to ask is: am I repeatedly leaving the same voices out in the cold and prioritising the same sorts of voices every time? Am I teaching texts that will have the potential to make my students change, think, and ask questions, or just books that reinforce the worldview they already have?
If the discussion I had with my friend about Of Mice and Men were had in the classroom, then as a text, Steinbeck’s book would, perhaps, have the potential to do all of those things (though astute students might then ask the logical question: so why are we choosing to study this text?) but the problem is that not all teachers have, themselves, the ability to address such controversies from a place of expertise. Many lack the expanded worldview and subject knowledge to be able to address it meaningfully. Can they speak knowledgeably about structural racism, epistemic injustice, the creation of the canon, and the exclusion of voices to address the issues raised or where they, themselves, taught about literature by people who hadn’t thought about those issues, in a curriculum riddled with blindspots?
As I have said before about teaching more diverse and inclusive philosophy in schools, the greatest barrier to diversifying and decolonising our school curriculums is teacher subject knowledge, as most of us teachers have subject knowledge which reproduces only the limited subject knowledge of our own teachers unless we have taken it upon ourselves to actively go beyond the curriculum of our training. The cycle needs to be broken, and that means already over-worked teachers somehow finding the time to reeducate themselves about their own subject with the context of an education system that has not incentivised to making such changes. It is easier to teach Of Mice and Men for the thirtieth year in a row (or Locke, Hume and Kant) than to create a new course from scratch.
World Book Day could help with this, of course, if the emphasis each year was on what we are reading rather than on the objectified book in which the reading is contained. What we are reading now and how reading changes us, makes us think and ask questions. World Reading Day instead of World Book Day. Books - words - ideas - can be dangerous as well as entertaining. The best ones are both. Entertaining little mind-bombs that blow up your sense of how the world ought to be and remind you that other worlds are possible. Celebrating the transformative power of reading, the radicalism of the written word, the subversive and world-shaking impact of certain words published in a certain order by a particular author, whether in a book or in any other written medium, and promoting national conversations about the ideas books (and other texts) have put into our heads (for good and for bad) would be a day worth observing, even a day worth dressing up in a costume for. In its current form, however, I fear World Book Day fetishises books as objects, while being too timid to probe where books’ real value lies: not in their design, but in their content.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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