No doubt that’ll be lovely to cosy up to in front of the fire. I’m writing a book about atheism and have ordered a text of the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, which was a debate between a rabbi and a friar organised by King James of Aragon about who’s right: Jews or Christians? Only one way to find out: The Inquisition, as it turns out. I very much liked The Circle, which I thought was ahead of the game about what the internet is doing to us, so I’m keen to read the sequel, if my eyes allow me.
I do have, in actual book form, waiting for me The Every by Dave Eggers. I imagine I wouldn’t like the Whizzer and Chips Annual quite as much as I did back then. It has passages of intense beauty, and also – in a way she never quite managed elsewhere – the most satisfying and elegant structure of all great books. I can hear all of Eliot’s yearning and pain and nuance about time and tide and marriage and compromise and the pressure of the social order. Now, in my late 50s, I think – unoriginally – it is indeed the greatest novel written in English. And to do that he’s prepared to go sentence after sentence refining complexities of mood and thought and expression. Now it’s clear to me that James was inventing psychological modernity in the novel. I read a fair amount of James, particularly when I was doing a PhD in Victorian literature and sexuality, but although I found him interesting, I also found him soulless and convoluted. I’m presently reading, or rather listening to, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. It converted me to the idea that, as Updike puts it, the job of art is to give the mundane its beautiful due – that if you are a good enough writer, your prose can make everything, even the most microscopic and ordinary things in life, rich and strange.
Again when I was 18, I read it without realising it was part of a sequence of books, Rabbit Is Rich. In the book, this is primarily about art(particularly how images of women in art are utterly encoded with the male gaze) but I took from it an understanding that nearly everything we create, indeed think, has an underlying unconscious ideological component. It introduced me to the idea that what we assume to be natural is often ideological. I imagine if I returned to these books now they’d be a hive of racism, classism and body fascism, so I won’t. I became a fan and joined a Frank Richards appreciation society, The Old Boys’ Book Club, where I was 11 and everyone else was 80. And from the perspective of Dollis Hill in 1973, the crumpet-toasting adventures at Greyfriars School felt exciting. This is again to do with my mum being a collector, as they were written in the 1920s and 30s, and so out of date, even in the 70s, but she foisted them on me. Reading for myself began with comics, mainly the Beano, Whizzer and Chips, and in our house, The Broons and Oor Wullie, not because we’re Scottish but because my mum collected kids’ books and annuals from everywhere. If you enjoyed Ways of Seeing, you might like Susan Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.My mum reading me Ladybird books, in Dollis Hill, north-west London, in 1971.
he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings. John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. 'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.' Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics.