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Does reading a book make us happier?
Public libraries face an uncertain future but the value of reading is irreplaceable, says Joan Bakewell in her A Point of View column.
I was returning a library book last week. It had been important in some research I was doing so I sought to renew it. "No, I'm afraid it's in demand by someone else," came the reply.
A book first published in 1964 was still needed. I'm not surprised. Many books last a lifetime and go on being read. Then, on the library counter, I noticed printouts from our local newspaper. The headline was a question - Libraries slashed? - it asked.
I recall a Latin grammar construction defined as "expecting the answer 'yes'". I felt this applied to the headline. We in the London borough where I live know there will be massive council cuts. In London as a whole there are fears that 130 libraries could go.
And things are bad across the country. Buckinghamshire is said to be considering closing among others the Great Missenden library, inspiration for Roald Dahl's Matilda, who read library books. He would be appalled.
Another book event. Last week I helped celebrate the publication of probably the definitive account of the life and art of the painter LS Lowry, by Dr Tom Rosenthal. It was held in the gorgeous setting of Christies sales rooms, where a fine array of Lowry's work graced the walls.
A Point of View's latest writer
I'm rather in awe of Point of View as it was once held by Alistair Cooke. It has a halo of significance. He was such an exemplar of the broadcast essay.
I'm interested in the way people use words and the way people talk about… having betrayed or broken promises and the nature of compromise.
In four decades (of journalism) I've been in touch with a great diversity of what people think and how they express themselves. I haven't spent a lifetime in studios and offices - I've been out there.
The Heart of the Matter tackled moral issues about current affairs. It tried to get people not to be of the left or of the right, but to think for themselves.
Later in the week some 20 of his paintings sold there for nearly £5.2m. There was an irony in seeing Lowry's bleak depictions of the Lancashire poor going for such high prices. Here they were, the huddled masses, hurrying from the factory, to the football match, crowding round a street accident, or spending their unsmiling leisure still fully clad on Lancashire's beaches.
Lowry's work divides people There are those who admire his bleak vision of the world he knew in the 30s and 40s, and those who demean it as nothing more than a host of matchstick men. I am of the former persuasion.
My reason is more than aesthetic, I have a local connection. My own great aunt lived in Salford at Crescent View, just such a row of terrace houses as Lowry painted. I knew the feel of Salford's streets, its little picket fences, and I loved the smell of Nana's stuffy kitchen, full of cooking and drying clothes.
The meaning of books came to me from just such a background. From the age of seven my father attended what was then called Chetham's Hospital in Manchester, a charity school for 40 poor boys founded in the 17th Century as the legacy of Humphrey Chetham. He was a wily old wool merchant whose motto "Quod tuum tene" - hold on to what is yours - just about sums up the industrial revolution that was to engulf the city and make it rich and make it poor.
But Chetham was a philanthropist and left provision not only for a school, but for a library within the same building. That library survives in its original glory - theology, law, local records, leather bound, beautifully preserved. Its Jacobean setting is one of the unsung treasures of Manchester, part of what is now the illustrious Chethams Music School.
“Start Quote
End QuoteIn our culture the library stands as tall and as significant as a parish church or the finest cathedral”
The schoolboys in my father's day didn't read such books of course, they had their noses into Rider Haggard and Harrison Ainsworth. But my father - and his brothers - held the library in awe, acknowledging as everyone then did that learning and scholarship are among man's highest pursuits.
In the poverty that was then Salford, libraries were cherished. They were seen as the resource for the poor, where they could learn and begin to understand about the world beyond those Lowry streets.
The book I was returning to my local library is subtitled A Study in Protest. It is in fact an account by Christopher Driver of the rise of the anti-nuclear bomb campaigns of the late 50s and early 60s. Then as now, unruly groups grabbed the headlines. They always do.
But the book tells of concerted and sustained action to bring pressure on world powers to abandon nuclear weapons. We know they failed, but along the way they influenced public and world opinion to an extent that perhaps contributed to the test-ban treaties that were to be signed in the 1960s, in the years after the Cuba crisis.
The young have again been out on the streets in their thousands and students are meeting and plotting more protests even now. Will those of us who love libraries be able to make our voices heard? It would be hard to combat allegations of middle-class elitism, and indeed there is a case to answer. If the pressure on finances is so great, at least as far as the coalition believe, then the availability of free books for all will need its defenders.
Reading is a pleasure enjoyed on the move
My defence should not be seen as the attempt merely to rescue a small building in a particular borough, or any other particular places threatened with closure. Rather it is a rallying call for the concept of free libraries. In our culture the library stands as tall and as significant as a parish church or the finest cathedral. It goes back to the times when ideas first began to circulate in the known world. I worry where wisdom will come from.
I am a major consumer of information on the internet. I know that academics and students access information there more quickly and more specifically than they can faced with a shelf load of books. But it's not that relationship I'm concerned about.
I offer you two scenarios. I am on a train going north, the scenery beyond York is glorious and in the slanting light of a winter afternoon has a magical quality not to miss. So I put down the paperback to enjoy it, then I resume my read. Again, on holiday, deck chair beside a blue swimming pool, a landscape of rolling hills and green pastures unfolds before me. I set aside the paperback to enjoy the view, and then return to the pages.
I live with the tensions between the world out there I want to see and even contemplate, and the inner world to which the book gives me access. It is the inner rewards of reading a book in a private and concentrated way that lead you into realms of your own imagination and thought that no other process offers. Something happens between the words and the brain that is unique to the moment and to your own sensibilities.
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- A Point of View, with Joan Bakewell, is on Fridays on Radio 4 at 2050 GMT and repeated Sundays, 0850 GMT
It is why, at such moments, it is so awful to be interrupted - and why I am frequently late at meetings because I find it hard to tear myself away. Any society that doesn't value the richness of this encounter with ideas and the imagination will impoverish its citizens.
Of course, there are loads of books around. You can pick up a paperback for a few pounds that will last many years (my shelves are full of ageing paperbacks whose yellowing pages crack when I open them - only hardbacks last forever). Publishers think books are worth publishing, supermarkets think they are worth stacking on their shelves. But these are market transactions. The free public library service is the only way for everyone to have access for free to objects that carry the world's wisdom.
Soon we will all be asked to tell the state what makes us happy, what increases our well-being. No doubt someone will come up with measurements of stress and depression. We might be asked about our sense of neighbourliness or degrees of family closeness. Whether we are hungry or cold or neglected.
There are clearly data about social conditions that are worth collecting, but happiness is a dangerous word. It embraces all the subjectivity of our emotions and inner serenity. It is a reflection of our character, the degree we are wracked by ambition or resentment, by envy or greed. It embraces what might be called spiritual well-being, the sort that might be underpinned by a happy marriage, a satisfying career, deep religious conviction.
Already television vox pops have asked people in the street what makes them happy and had replies that range from their children's laughter, to the music of Beethoven.
I think there might be many who consider one kind of happiness to be a deep armchair, a warm fire and a favourite book.
I can only agree with the article; nothing can match the pleasure of the printed page, either as a means of learning or simply for transporting oneself into another world. A library serves as the portal to that magical world and what's more, is a social meeting place. Any good book is, for me, of far greater value than an electronic book could ever be. Furthermore, when I've read it, I can give it to someone else to enjoy; a further pleasure.
I like my mother and my eldest sister all use our local library, minimum once a week and not just for books. My mother taught herself how to use the internet at our library and not having a computer at home regularly uses the services on offer. Recently I was unemployed through redundancy, and the services on offer at the library helped tremendously, daily papers for research, photocopying services etc. etc. the list is endless. I encourage my daughter to use and like the library also, just as my Mother did when I was a child. Happiness can be described in many ways, loosing yourself in a good book is one way.
If knowledge is important enough it will survive regardless. The internet is our modern library and has, in large, taken the place of libraries. To suggest that the many libraries we have are worth paying for because a popular dead author would have been appalled is simply an appeal to our emotions rather than our heads. Are our many libraries value for money? They used to be, but not anymore.
The market downturn meant that spending £7-£15 on a book was not something I would like to do. Neither was going on holiday or many other forms of relaxation, entertainment or education. I found the public library extremely important in my life in the last few years. Just a shame they are not open on Sundays. There must be a lot of other people who find the library as important, whether they are unemployed or retired.
I totally agree that we need to protect libraries. Matilda is one of my favourite books because I identify with the title character, as she discovers a whole new world through reading. Books and knowledge should not only be available to those that can afford to buy books.
The advantage of a library is the range of books it makes available. Supermarkets only stock bestsellers, largely celebrity biographies and misery lit last I looked. A lot of the books I like are the ones that won't be heavily discounted. And on the everlasting nature of hardbacks - sadly most of them are no longer stitched, but are glued the same as paperbacks, and I'm sure this will reduce their lifespan.
I support Joan Bakewell's point of view completely on this. Reading is a pleasure and a hugely important part of my life, and something to be encouraged in everyone's. A book can take you out of this world and into a different one, any day of your life, and wherever you happen to be. Who would want to miss that opportunity?
Is happiness really the point? Surely we read to see things from other people's perspectives, to learn about ourselves and other people, not necessarily to experience 'the feel good factor'?
After spending so many of my days sitting in front of a lit computer screen I absolutely adore the opportunity to sit down with a book of my own choice, turn the paper pages and be drawn into a world that is so different from my normal life. No e-reader for me, the library is such a treasure and more people should swap brain-numbing television and certain newspapers and give themselves a challenge. Push their minds and find out what their interests are instead of floating along. Libraries are arenas in which this can occur.
Libraries look after people's minds. Literacy levels are very low in the UK. Often people use libraries when they need them - when they are poor, when they need to learn, when they are visually impaired, when they are house bound, when they have children, when they need comfort or support. We need to allow people to look after themselves and better themselves, those are keys to better society. We need the librarians to get people using them and ensure they work as they should. Computers cannot replace the books, the people, the libraries- although computers and internet can play a part in libraries they are just part of the picture - it is crazy and irresponsible to ignore the value they hold to people and society in physical form, and in real terms of the economics for the country libraries are ludicrously cheap to achieve something so important.
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