Real Books

By the 1980s, bread had become so white and gutless that a “back to basics” reaction set in and suddenly real bread, with traditional goodies and properly baked, appeared. Similarly with beer, which had become so chemical and tasteless that a real beer movement, emphasising the taste of hops and malt, arose. Both ventures proved commercially successful. A similar thing has been happening with books. The publishing industry is now dominated by hastily thrown-together confections masquerading between covers as books—celebrity autobiographies, anthologies on everything, media spinoffs, sporting feats, over-hyped novels, and the endless varieties of gender studies theory. These books are often incestuous, feeding off each other in their own comforting bubble, with no new input and little contact with the deeper aspects of reality, which is what books were originally designed to satisfy. They play up to a public distracted by media sensation, as Saul Bellow noted in his book of…