On a day late in December of 2007, I shipped all of my books across the Atlantic. The day previous had been spent considering each book, determining if it was necessary to my journey, if it was worth the effort and expense required to send it all the way to England – in retrospect a stupid thing to consider. Of course each book was necessary, worth the effort and expense; and so most of them were boxed up, and those that I left unceremoniously in a paper bag outside my apartment with a note that said “please take” I regret leaving.

So when I read Alexander Chee‘s excellent essay on the e-reader, “I, Reader,” when I read that he has filled his partner’s New York City apartment with 22 boxes of books, I felt very sympathetic to the idea that “collectively, they’re the autobiography of my reading life.”

I have a history with all of the books I shipped, and with all of the books I have subsequently obtained. I know how and where I acquired each of them, even though, if you could poll the books, who would give honest answers, you would discover I haven’t actually read each of them (often I will say I’ve “read” a book when what I mean is I’ve skimmed a few arbitrary paragraphs and think I know more or less what it’s about because I read a review somewhere). I like knowing that each book has a story beyond what’s contained between two covers.

I live with someone who understands my compulsion, who is also an accidental collector of books. Not rare or even very special books, mind, but paperbacks, mostly. For reading, not for display. Though neither of us could possibly have time to read so many books, as we’re nearly always busy acquiring more. And inevitably there are now so many of them that there is no space in the house for anything but books to be on display, apart from a little wooden rocking horse that does not belong to us but which we feel we can’t remove from its shelf without changing the whole feeling of the house. So we have run out of shelves but steadfastly continue to buy books, convinced that the piles we have made in each room add a sort of messy, erudite charm to our home.

So yes, our books are the autobiography of my reading life, and his reading life, and our reading life together. They’re a record of something, and so, on an emotional level, they are priceless. They’re a representation of the possibility of all the knowledge we could acquire, the thoughts we could have (and an account of the knowledge we’ve already acquired, the thoughts we’ve already had).

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And yet I have resisted the the obvious attraction of the e-reader for some time. For someone like me, an iPad or a Kindle makes all the sense in the world. They’re portable, so that when I travel, for instance, I don’t have to worry about leaving behind a book I might need to refer to, or incur overweight baggage charges because I can’t decide between Romantic Moderns and Landscape and Memory. And an e-reader would allow us to increase the number of books in our possession without necessitating new furniture.

But, equally, for someone like me, this is a terrifying prospect: books without their bodies? To what would I attach my memories, my notes; what object represents the awful weight and great joy of possibility, if there is no object?

I read Chee’s account of his relationship with the e-book, and I was impressed by how steadily, how fairly, he represented several sides of himself: the lover (or hoarder) of books in their physical form as well as the blogger, the obsessive reader of online news, the open-minded adapter of technology. I thought, I see myself that way – split in a way by my devotion to both the book and the screen. But it was not until Chee picks up Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West that I really saw myself in his essay; or rather, that I really saw the potential for myself in his essay.

Perhaps it’s because I, too, stole Black Lamb and Grey Falcon book from a family member to add to my growing collection of books I might someday read. I was 16, and I only moved it from my mother’s study upstairs to my bedroom downstairs. It’s been there ever since, unread, mostly untouched, never even selected to make the move first to Boston and then to England with me. It was one I knew I wouldn’t read, and its heft made it an easy choice to leave behind.

Chee rediscovers his stolen copy lying underneath his iPad and falls into it unwittingly. “When I paused to make coffee,” Chee writes, “I admitted to myself I had finally started reading the book. But also, I was reading again in the way I’d always known, previous to the internet, previous to the vigil. I wanted to cheer a little but I also didn’t want to disturb it either, and so instead I kept reading, which was perhaps the only right way to celebrate this. If I had in fact remapped my brain with my e-reader, which I suspected, the map I’d found had led me back here.”

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The reason I have so steadfastly resisted even considering an e-reader, let alone actually buying one (because there are a million reasons to resist buying one, even if they sound illogical when you write them down: a lack of money, the ridiculousness of bringing another gadget into the house, the potential that you might not, after all that, actually use it) is because reading is sort of a physical sport for me. It requires equipment – I take a pen with me to the bookshelf like a fencer takes a rapier to a match, I carry a notebook with the book for extended reactions. I underline, I make notes. Halfway through a paragraph I realise that this reminds me of that, and I scurry off down the corridor to find it, whether it’s in the kitchen stacked on top of the broken microwave, or in a place of honor on the desk in my study (where the books I refer most often to live).

An e-reader, I’ve always argued, doesn’t allow me the same possibility: it requires me to simply sit and read, to not make my own contributions to the text. Worse, it doesn’t then give me a record of having read the book! What are those notes I make, really, but markers of a journey, little bread-crumbs to help myself find my way back to the state of mind I was in when I read a particular book?

In fact, the way I read a book is the way I read an article online – pausing to make notes, to copy and paste quotes, to begin to formulate my own response, which I will then post on my blog, or else let languish in a folder called “to work on”. And when Chee writes that he is reading in the way he’d always known – “previous to the internet” – I realise that this is not a bad thing. I am so hung up on defending the intellectual potential of the internet, so hung up on refuting those who suggest it has made us shallow, that I have forgotten to consider that the way I read is not necessarily, not always, the best – the most pleasurable – way to read.

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The truth is, I make work for myself when I read. I paddle upstream, I kick and scream my way through every sentence. I argue in my head with authors who are long dead, formulate elaborate letters that will go unsent to those who are alive. I don’t want to give this way of reading up entirely – part of it is pre-internet, after all, part of it is simply my way of reacting to a text. But suddenly I think that I, too, could benefit from remapping my brain with an e-reader – or at least, I think that remapping my brain with an e-reader would not be the worst thing, would not be detrimental to my ability as a reader and writer to understand and interact with things.

I don’t think one way of reading is better than the other. In fact I think both are necessary to good thought (at least for me). And I’m not going to buy an iPad tomorrow (because it’s expensive, because it seems unnecessary, because, because), even if I’d kind of like to. But I am also not going to sit around thinking that an e-reader is absolutely not for me anymore, because that just isn’t true.

And maybe, once in awhile, I am going to try to just sit and read a book (passively, sans rapier and inquisitive attitude). No matter what format it’s in.

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I’m coming to the conclusion that everything I write has its roots in the words of somebody else. I feel incapable of thinking anything worth saying without using another artist for direct inspiration. This is not a bad thing – look at Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, for instance, or Tom Hodkginson’s How to be Idle, both of which rely at least partly on the presentation and then transformation of existing texts.

But it does seem a very internet-age thing. Intertextuality is everywhere; isn’t that what hyperlinks are a manifestation of? Even in the first paragraph of this blog post I’ve referenced, and linked to, two other websites, and two other books. The Internet doesn’t work without links; the web falls apart if we don’t constantly keep building it.

When Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in the 1960s, she was using it to describe how “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” A few years ago I started writing a book which is based entirely on this idea; the words and the story were all mine, but they were nothing without the framework given to me by the excerpts and ideas of others, from Dorothy L. Sayers to Gustave Flaubert.

I use the internet a lot. At work, at home, in between. I exist almost constantly in the online space even as I concurrently exist in the physical world. And what I can’t tell is this: do I write the way I do because we’re in a digital era? Or do I so enjoy the digital era because it adheres to the way I think ideas should function?

Chicken, egg. Either way, I think that hyperlinks and intertextuality – whether online or in print – are what makes ideas come alive.

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Writers have it pretty hard. I’m not talking about money or status or the sheer hassle of it all – though there’s that too. I’m talking about the way in which they are talked about. To look at the discussion around writers and writing as a writer is to see yourself adrift in a sea of impossibility.

Literature – by which I only mean consumable words, be they in books or articles or blog posts – polarises people, and because it’s consumed so voraciously, so constantly, and so publicly, opinions are expressed vociferously, and often as articulation of fact, not belief.

The question as a writer – and indeed as a consumer of writing – becomes: who do you trust? The critics who say writing should be about writing? The critics who say that it’s all about telling a damn good story? The critics who say it’s all about message and meaning? Or or the ones who say a piece of writing must have all of these components, and more?

Surely it shouldn’t matter – write what you want, says the voice of reason, and let the world be judge only after – but the truth of it is that it does matter. I’ve written about this before. It’s easy, even natural, to feel compelled to take some opinion or advice under consideration. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and what another man feels can be integral to the development of a piece of writing. The difficulty comes in discerning what, after all that, you actually feel about your own work. The storm that results when two opposing opinions converge upon a paragraph of yours obfuscates your own beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a Books blog post on the Guardian website from 13th May, Andrew Gallix examines the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, writing, “The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to ‘remove the novel from the realm of art’. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message” (a sentiment which calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message”). In this case, simply by choosing to write, the author is making a statement – and a commitment to that statement.

Gallix ends his piece with these thoughts: “Whenever an author envisages a future book, ‘it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,’ which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that ‘the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of saying.’ Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.”

There are several interesting points in these concluding sentences, the most obvious of which is Robbe-Grillet’s “provocative” suggestion that writing itself – not the message or the story – is the true form of art. I’m not sure how provocative this is really – when we read books and poems in school, aren’t we (ideally) taught to look at phrasing, structure, word choice? Literary criticism itself rarely begins with what an author is saying, but rather discovers what the author is saying by first investigating the author’s method – Joyce’s stream of consciousness, for instance, becomes a window into his work.

But it is provocative enough – even radical – in the context of popular culture. Story is often heralded as the be-all-and-end-all of “good” writing (good writing on its own being empty of meaning), or at least publishable writing. So perhaps to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s statement that “the genuine writer has nothing to say” is alarming indeed, for it indicates that we have lost our sense of what makes a novel a novel, or even a poem a poem or an essay an essay.

The key is in the second part of the assertion, that, “He [the genuine writer] has only a way of saying.” A way of saying. Superficially, a voice. But contained in that way of saying, that voice, is much more. Meaning, story, urgency. Recently I read a review in the Observer. “There are poets who have nothing to say but a feeling for words,” begins the the author. “There are poets who have something to say but no capacity to say it. And then, rarely, you read poems…that have a tremendous, unshowy intent. The feeling is that they needed to be written.” As one commentator on Gallix’s piece writes, “Style over substance? Affect over story? Count me out.”

For my part, I certainly would not be inclined to argue that we should write simply because we like the sound of our own voices, or that we find a particular phrase too pretty not to share – but to ignore the importance of pretty phrases in the context of a writer’s way of saying would be an enormous shame, because it would be to ignore the medium entirely.

A further interesting point in Gallix’s conclusion comes with the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of “creative writing classes” in his final sentence. In a way it reads as a glib jab at those would-be writers who want to “improve their craft” – a phrase which, by the way, I generally despise, but feel is appropriate here. Certainly the very first commentator on the post, who simply quotes Gallix’s “creative writing classes should always start and end on that note” and adds, “can’t they just end?”, seems to have read it that way. This interpretation seems to be validated by Gallix’s own response to the aforementioned comment. “That would be a more radical solution!”, he writes.

The meaning is appropriately ambiguous – radical in a positive or negative way? a solution to what? – but it does bring up some interesting ideas about the study of writing itself. Classes and courses around creative writing are easy to dismiss as pointless, even harmful. “Can’t they just end?” is a common enough sentiment, often spoken with a tone of intellectual superiority – which may be deserved, I don’t know. The implication here is, again, that writing should come naturally, that it shouldn’t matter what others say about it – write what you want in the way that you want, and it will either be good enough or not good enough.

But this is rarely the case. Good writing – whatever I may mean by that, and however you may interpret it – is rarely a completely isolated enterprise. On top of the fact that we are often heavily influenced by circumstance, context, experience, and other writers, there is also the simple fact that any author will edit and revise his work, often a number of times, and for better or worse, before publication or presentation. Sometimes, amidst all this, advice – an exchange of ideas, a reminder that we are not alone – can be immensely useful, especially before we have learned to completely trust our own instincts. Moreover, practice itself is valuable, and there are those (myself included) for whom a class or a writing group or a degree is a way to grant themselves permission to practice.

I have my own reservations about creative writing classes – and I say this as someone who holds a masters in the subject. But my reservations are different, mostly rooted in experience. It can be dangerous, for instance, to let too many vultures feast upon the carcass of your confidence. Helpful suggestions are not always helpful when they come too frequently, and too frequently unmediated. Furthermore it is not always productive, as an artist or an advocate or whatever else a writer may be, to overthink things. Too much time wallowing, too many conflicting opinions shared liberally, too much consideration, will ultimately only help you produce a work which is ambivalent at best. So I understand reservations about creative writing classes – I live those reservations.

But still such classes are not something to be eradicated. Consider what Gallix has written about Robbe-Grillet: “Every novel, according to Robe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is ‘known in advance’. ‘The New Novel,’ as he put it, ‘is not a theory, it is an exploration.’” And if we start to look at writing as an exploration, it starts to make sense that some of us choose to explore our writing in an exploratory context.

What this all really means is simply that, as a writer, you’ll never win. You’ll never be immune to hard-hitting criticism (though why would you want to be?). If you’re too rooted to the past, too ahead of your time, if a sentence is out of place or a particular word not exact enough, you’ll have someone saying so.

The interesting space is the space between these criticisms – and this, I think, is probably why we should write. Between one extreme and the other is a whole world ripe for exploration. It may be that Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” has progressed again – “far from representing a rejection of the past,” Gallix writes, “the quest for a new novel was…very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed”. The new “New Novel” is not necessarily the novel itself but the area around the novel; indeed, the novel has been flattened, expanded, and democratized. Maybe it’s the internet – I can go online and read a blog about a French writer and filmmaker I’d never before heard of and in a matter of hours create and “publish” my own response. We all have a say now; we’re all in a creative writing class, and even those of us who wish such classes could “just end” are participants in it.

So I say again: writers have it pretty hard. They (we?) are standing at the centre of a battleground. It’s noisy and nerve-wracking – but I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be.

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I’m reading another book I don’t like. It’s something I do; it annoys the Man, he can’t understand why, when we’ve got so much high quality literature at our fingertips, I would deliberately choose to plough my way through something that makes me visibly angry. But a part of me likes the sensation; I’m an arguer, and a reader, and if I can combine the two, I see it as an effective use of time.

So this time it’s Saturday by Ian McEwan. The critically acclaimed account of a wanky neurosurgeon in the throes of some sort of middle-class crisis. The objection I have is simple enough: that the book makes me feel stifled, that Perowne, the protagonist, and his lawyer wife, his successful poet daughter, his groovy blues-playing rebel son, are suffocating in their perfection, their carefully measured angst. They slouch through their expensive London house like a parody of the perfectly imperfect family, just off-beat enough. It makes a fallacy of the ordinary struggles of everyday life. These people, they don’t struggle. They glide. Everything has propelled them toward this life, towards the ownership of modestly luxurious things, towards the London life, the clean, comfortable London life. Not a manor house, or a vintage car, or even an esoteric loft apartment, but the old house that overlooks a tree-lined square. It’s all so ordinary, so alarmingly propagandistic–this is what happy people look like, this is what ordinary, talented, beautiful people do. They flirt with unhappiness, but it’s never a personal unhappiness. They gaze out windows and consider the state of the world with the same glib resignation that most of us reserve for a consideration of our outdated hairstyles or strained bank balances. It’s as if all the life has been sucked from them, replaced by a distinctly urbane imitation of the stuff.

So why read it? Because after all that, I’m impressed with the language. The precision of it. A quasi-imitation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway suits McEwan’s ability to describe a thing–a feeling, usually–specifically. Each moment of Perowne’s morning is outlined, amplified, enhanced by the way it is written. A dull man’s dull activities, explained beautifully. That’s worth something.

(Plus, I like a good rant, and reading something that agitates me allows me to do it on my blog. Win!)

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The books on our shelves arrange themselves. A visitor to our house might wonder what perverted system of order we’re using, what method of organization. It’s not like a library; there are no numbers on the spines, no categories. Nothing is arranged alphabetically, by genre or by import. We’ve lived together for two years now, but from the moment I moved in our books have co-mingled, kept each other company. There was never any question of separating our collections. It would be futile at best, disastrous at worst; we both saw this (contrast with the experiences of other book lovers, for whom a marriage of libraries is a Major Event–I start to think the Man and I are stranger than anyone thought possible). A separation of books would be like a separation of selves; it would be akin to sleeping in separate beds. A false intimacy.

Two years later the books have shifted, as books tend to. Very few are still where they started out on the shelves; and some don’t make it on to the shelves at all, but lie in piles by the side of the bed or on the desk. We have many books. This haphazard system ought to perplex us; but the funny thing is this: mid-sentence, sometimes, one of us will need a very specific book, maybe one we haven’t looked at properly in years, and we always know where it is. We know exactly what books we have and don’t have and could, if pressed, probably tell the story of every single volume in this house (that one bought second-hand in Boston, that one stolen from an ex-girlfriend, that one borrowed and never returned to a friend, that one purchased from an anonymous Waterstones somewhere). It’s as if we both have this massive, mental catalog, shared, full of shifting information.

But this is why I think there is an order, after all; this is why I think the books arrange themselves. Because the way they are means that whatever you are looking for, whatever you need most to read at any moment, will suddenly pop out at you. In any room of the house you will find yourself looking at a wall of books, or at least a pile, and if you’re desperate enough, one of them will start to shimmer, or to call to you, will demand all of your attention, and when you pick it up you will realize that yes, of course, this is what you were looking for–even if you hadn’t known you were looking for anything at all. Maybe it’s because of this, which I found in the book I hadn’t realized I desperately needed until I slid it from the shelf last night: “the meaning of things lies not in things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.”*

*Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted at the start of A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things

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