London - Every so often since I turned 18, now 43 years ago, I’ve set myself the challenge of reading Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu — In Search Of Lost Time, or Remembrance Of Things Past, call it what you will.
On leaving school, I bought the first volume (of seven) in the original French. Then, when I realised I was not quite as fluent as my cocky teenage self fancied, I lowered my sights and borrowed it a couple of times from the library in an English translation. But I never got further than the first five or six pages, before having to return it to avoid a fine.
The years passed, the book still unread, until the turn of the Millennium, when every newspaper feature on the greatest literary works of the past 1 000 years put Marcel’s masterpiece at or near the top.
I resolved I could put it off no longer, or else never hold my head up in educated company for the rest of my days.
So I went out and bought a paperback edition of that first volume — Du Cote de chez Swann, Swann’s Way or The Way By Swann’s, call it what you will — read the first five or six pages, got stuck, mislaid the book and never found it again.
Today, I have it on my Amazon Kindle, where it has been installed for a good 18 months. As users of these miraculous devices will know, they automatically open each book at the page where we stopped reading. I’ve just checked, and mine tells me that I’m still wading through the first one percent of Swann’s Way, with ten hours, 37 minutes’ reading time to go.
Make that ten years, and I may be in with a chance — or give me a century or two and I may get round to all seven volumes.
Abandon
It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I saw this week’s revelation from Kobo, the Canadian makers of an e-reader, that gigantic numbers of people give up reading long before the end of a book.
A part of me found it comforting to know that I’m very far from the only one. Indeed, where most books are concerned — even best-selling blockbusters acclaimed by the critics as unputdownable page-turners —substantial majorities encounter no difficulty in putting them down before the end, never to be picked up again.
But then another part of me shuddered at the thought that here was yet another thing those high-tech, tax-dodging, multinational companies know about us.
Yes, of course I realised that Google and co. know all about my internet-surfing habits, my inside-leg measurements, the sort of music and food I like, the brand of my vacuum cleaner, the bank where I keep my account, the size of my feet, etc, etc.
But while I knew Amazon had comprehensive knowledge of our taste in reading, it never occurred to me that e-reader firms also know precisely how much headway we make with each book we download.
Imagine the embarrassment at a cocktail party if an Amazon executive happened to overhear us making exaggerated claims about our knowledge of an author’s work. “So, Mr Utley, you suggest you’re something of an authority on James Joyce. Will you explain to these good people, then, how it is that you’ve never got further than page seven of Ulysses or page three of Finnegans Wake?”
But what surprised me most about Kobo’s findings was the sort of books people abandon after going to the expense of downloading them. I can well understand why readers give up on Proust or Joyce after ten minutes or so. But what about a rattling good yarn such as The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, the Pulitzer Prize-winner being adapted for a film?
All right, the plot may be pretty implausible (it’s about a teenager who makes off with a 17th-century Dutch masterpiece after his mother is killed in a terrorist explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). But I thought it rivetting from the very start, all 784 pages of it.
Though I longed to know the denouement, it was one of those books I found myself reading more slowly towards the end, just to prolong the pleasure.
Yet, according to Kobo, only 44.4 percent of the hundreds of thousands who started reading it stuck with it, while the other 55.6 percent were simply not gripped enough to care.
Commitment
Even fewer could be bothered to finish Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave, with 71.7 percent failing to make it to the last of its 304 pages. Having heard friends’ less-than-flattering opinions — both of the book and the film — I suspect there are good reasons for this. But since I haven’t even started it (as Amazon knows), I’m in no position to say.
Nor have I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which only 46 percent managed to finish, while an only slightly more impressive 52 percent made it through the bondage and spanking of Fifty Shades Of Grey, which I don’t think I’ll bother with, either.
What these figures don’t tell us — though I wish they did — is exactly how much progress readers make with a book before they decide it’s not for them. My experience is that it may take me a while to get started, but once I’m past the first 20 pages or so, I tend to press on to the last.
Even when I’m not particularly enjoying the book, I feel I’ve made the commitment, and should see it through. Les Miserables springs to mind. I know millions think it’s wonderful. I thought it a crashing bore. But I stuck with it, grimly, to the end, feeling something of the satisfaction of a marathon runner, breasting the finishing tape after hours of pain.
Mind you, a journalist of all people shouldn’t really be surprised so few read a book to the end. Indeed, the first thing we’re taught in my trade is that we should cram all the interesting stuff into the first couple of paragraphs (a rule I disobey every week — never more blatantly than today), since hardly anyone reads further.
As I’ve discovered, a fair number don’t even get that far. In the early days of online journalism, I used to feel hurt when readers attached viciously unfair comments to the bottom of my columns, accusing me of failing to make an obvious point when I’ve made it repeatedly, or of saying things that I haven’t.
Baffled
Then it dawned on me. Often they haven’t actually read a word of my article before leaping to their keyboards to attack me. They’ve got no further than the headline, which can’t always capture the fine details of an argument.
For example, a few weeks ago, I wrote a column about disability and the minimum wage, in which I said that my brilliant late father had accepted with ‘serene resignation’ the financial drawbacks of his blindness, which included the fact he had to pay a secretary out of his own pocket.
Since the words ‘serene resignation’ are hard to fit in huge type, the headline said simply that my father “happily earned less than his colleagues”. Not quite what I was saying, but as an invitation to read what followed I reckoned it was near enough.
Instantly, the Twitterati went for my throat, while the great David Blunkett told the Independent on Sunday he was “very sad” that Tom Utley had “diminished his father’s memory in this way”.
Knowing the former Home Secretary to be a fair-minded man, I was baffled he could put such an interpretation on my piece, in which I had lavished just praise on my father.
Sure enough, it turned out that the newspaper’s reporter had read him only the headline. To his enormous credit, Mr Blunkett wrote me a note of handsome apology after he’d read the whole thing.
Just one thought: doesn’t it sometimes seem that the Prime Minister himself seldom gets beyond the headline to see what his ministers have actually said, before he instructs them to issue grovelling apologies for making entirely reasonable comments?
But enough carping. This is the season of goodwill. And since this will be my last column until January 2, I wish a very happy Christmas to any reader who has managed to stay with me to this final full stop. - Daily Mail