Reading Groups: a new idea

 

photo by Paréj Richárd on Unsplash

I became interested in reading groups when I was having dinner with three librarians at a conference recently. They were all members of the same (long-distance) reading group. When asked what they were currently reading, none of them could remember! I’ve heard of books having an influence, but never of a book having so little effect that three members couldn’t recollect the title, or even the plot. It suggested that the real motivation for many reading groups is just to get people together; which perhaps is no bad thing. Reading may be for many reasons; I remember my mother borrowing armfuls of romantic fiction titles from the local public library, giving me the impression that filling the time was the key function of these books.

Following my discovery of the forgetful reading group, as an exercise, whenever I meet people for social chat, I asked them if they are involved with a reading group. All the women are present or recent members of a reading group; none of the men. Then I asked them how they got on with the group.

Organisation

A common gripe among members is having to read something they don’t like. However, the mechanism for choosing books seems to invite this kind of criticism – in one case, one person chooses all the books, but in several instances it seemed to be not quite a democratic process, meaning that each member had an equal opportunity to suggest new titles entirely of their choice. Of course, looking for consensus is its own form of censorship. Something very innovative is unlikely to be chosen if suggested by only one member.

Which books?

Strangely (in my opinion) reading groups seem to concentrate on fiction, and recent fiction at that, “recent” meaning from the last 25 years or so. Suggestions that something older could be considered are usually not received with any warmth. Perhaps I’m unusual, but I feel that this kind of selection process is likely to focus on subject matter rather than quality, I would imagine.

A reading group that never meets

One local reading group enthusiast talked about a very different formula. The group never meets in person; the group leader simply assembles every few months extracts or comments from the members, which she then distributes as a print booklet for the others to enjoy. I was given an example of this output, and initially I was very excited. My enthusiasm waned somewhat when I realised that many of the extracts were just that, included without any comment, leaving me none the wiser if the reader approved or disapproved of the extract, or of any other opinion. The reprinting of an entire Tim Dowling column from The Guardian suggested an uncritical enthusiasm.

What are reading groups for?

So often, a discussion about a book involves people talking past each other. X likes the book, because she enjoys horse riding. Well, it might be a justification, but not for Y, who likes historical dramas. You sense we aren’t really talking about the book, here: the act of reading is reduced to individual taste, rather than engaging with the text in a meaningful way. But perhaps I’m over-thinking it – maybe the dinner is the most important criterion, not the book.

A new idea for reading groups

Having to read a whole book is a slog; life’s too short for me to devote several days, if not weeks, to struggling with a book I didn’t choose. My preference would be to select short stories, or something so short that everyone can read it even the same day if necessary. Perhaps even better might be to have a reading group where nobody has to read anything new at all! Each member simply has to talk about something interesting they have read since the last meeting. There is no obligation for others to read it; but the person reading it will feel the need to justify their choice to the others. I will promote it as “the reading group where nobody has to read anything new”, an idea so novel that it will probably be suspected as some kind of plot. Not, of course, a fictional plot. 

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How India transformed the world

 

Ashoka Pillar at Vaishali, Bihar, India (c250 BCE) [Wikipedia]

After the excellence of Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019), it proved a real challenge to get through The Golden Road (2024). It might have sold more copies than the earlier book, but it is a much less entertaining read; it’s not so easy to follow the vast canvas. In this book, Dalrymple has taken on subjects well outside his core territory. His thesis is that India exported religion, culture, and science, during the period from the Buddha (C5 BCE) to around 1250, not that he tells you explicitly these parameters. Dalrymple is a great narrative historian, but not all histories make for good narratives, and this book is an example. Within a few days of finishing it, I could remember only a few key individuals, such as the monk Xuangzang. History of science is not his forte, and I feel there as an element of uncertainty about his arguments that is revealed by the vast number of footnotes (there are around 98 pages of footnotes for 289 pages of text). Referencing your sources is a good principle, but here the subject is too vast, both by location and by subject, for Dalrymple to keep in manageable proportions, and the endless footnotes suggest he hasn’t quite mastered the (largely secondary) sources. He draws on a few primary sources, but many of the references are to other secondary works (inevitable, given that he is covering India, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia over a period of 1,000 years).

The book describes well the transmission of Buddhism via traders and wealthy donors (who paid for the large number of sculptures and buildings across SE Asia) – not the way I imagined early Buddhism at all.

perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.[p42]

To give an example of the strength and weakness of the book, here is a quote that had me scratching my head:

But just as it was the conquest of northern India by the Kushans that opened the way for the Buddhist conquest of China, so it was the Umayyad Arab conquest of Central Asia, and its absorption into the wider Islamic world, that opened the way for Indian learning to seduce the western mind with its brilliance and sophistication. [p246]

Even if you are familiar with the Kushans and the Umayyad conquest, which I am not, you will find this proposition contrary to your expectations. Dalrymple is stating that in both cases, India was conquered, and yet its ideas were exported. That may have been the case (take the Roman conquest of Greece), but it requires some explanation.

The big questions I have from the text are around these cultural spreads. Why was Buddhism so popular outside India, when it did not spread even across the whole of India? Why did Jainism never gain significant followers outside India? And then, why did Buddhism start to be replaced after around 1200 in China and SE Asia? As a historian, Dalrymple is of course dependent on his sources, but these questions I think deserve answering.  

A few notes on the e-book (Kindle) edition

• Uses CE/BCE in the text, but AD/BC on the paperback cover
• I am reading the e-book and there don’t appear to be any illustrations. As often happens with e-book editions, there are credits for photographs, but not a photo to be seen. Nor does this edition have any maps.
• The index has a very strange layout, not helpful at all. Here are the first few entries:

• Readers use page numbers to get some idea of the type of reference, but if all the references are to “here”, the reader has no clues whatever – are these references found close together, in one chapter, or widely separated?
• The book has ten chapters, and as often found in pop history books, the chapter titles tell you little or nothing about what the chapter is about; the main coverage of the monk Xuangzang, who travelled from China to India in search of Buddhist learning, is covered in the chapter “The Sea of Jewels”.

All in all, Dalrymple is a fine historian, and all credit to him for using art and architecture as a way in to periods of history about which I for one know very little. It could have been better organised, but I am grateful for the insights and analysis provided. 

The Museum of Other People (Adam Kuper, 2023)

 

Anyone who believes the world of museums was staid and unchanging needs only read a few pages of Adam Kuper’s book to realise the civil wars that have broken out in recent years, most notably around museums of anthropology – which were typically founded as “museums of other people”, or as part of a cabinets of curiosities. It all began with terms like “civilization” in the 18th century:

Museums of civilization [such as The British Museum and The Louvre] embodied the Enlightenment theory of history. All human societies progress from a lower to a higher condition … the goal toward which all must travel is what French philosophers in the late C18 began to call Civilization.

At this point, you remember how, while most museums seem to have existed forever, some have closed, and you ask yourself why. There was once a Museum of Mankind in London, and a Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Both were in the tradition of collections of the artefacts of “primitive” people. Over time, questions began to be raised, and today, any collection with an ethnographic angle reveals a fundamental uncertainty, a defensiveness, towards the displays, as the museums have been caught unawares that their current treatment of “other people” is inadequate – we no longer call them “primitive”, for a start. This was very visible, for example, from a recent visit to the London National Maritime Museum Pacific gallery, which had many glass cases, and looked to me as if it had been set up forty or fifty years ago, but which now has signs prominently displayed at each entrance, stating something like “we recognise this collection is presented with colonialist assumptions, but we haven’t had time to fix it". That is the quickest, and most unsatisfactory, way to deal with the problem.

Kuper’s book makes for gripping reading, as museum after museum struggles to rethink its collection policy, its view on returning objects (return to where?), and lurches from justifying its collections on artistic, then on ethnographic grounds, and then changes track again.

The issue of how many of the famous objects came to be held in European and US museums, such as the Benin bronzes, is described in horrific detail – looting, or via a dealer after looting, is the usual route. Nonetheless, however compelling the reading, the problem remains for the anthropologists: how do you hold a collection that represents a people? Is it possible to build such a collection without being patronising? I don’t think the first chapter, “Faraway people”, quite matches the coverage of the subsequent chapters. A recent visit to the Museum of Manchester suggests one idea increasingly seen in museums: information boards featuring a living person, who is interviewed for the display.

This isn’t the first book to describe a problem without identifying a successful solution. Nonetheless, Kuper has a gift for narrative, and brings the unexciting subject of founding and managing museums to life. His narrative skilfully combines fascinating background details about pioneers whose name we know but whose background we don’t – who, for example, knew about James Smithson, the illegitimate son of an English duke and his lover, christened Jacques Macie, and subsequently founder of the Smithsonian? The breezy style makes for compulsive reading, and the reader doesn’t (usually) notice when the narrative drifts off to something unrelated but a good story, such as how Jeremy Bentham’s body came to be preserved at University College London. Kuper is such a fluent writer that he keeps your attention throughout, and we don’t worry too much that he is better at describing what has gone wrong rather than suggesting better solutions. He points out, for example, that the modern concept of providing “closure” by reburying skeletons dug up for experimental purposes in the 19th century may well be inappropriate, in that it was in many cases unlikely that these dead people were buried in the first place. In other words, we are still imposing our ideas of what the civilization might have been like.

I recommend the book highly, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the way that some museums claim to have solved the problem of their collections of skulls and artefacts by stating the provenance – back to the white European (usually) who acquired the objects in not very clearly stated deals.

Made in Ancient Egypt (Fitzwilliam Museum)

 

Container in the form of the god Bes (1550-1069 BCE)

Great show, but poor for children – and hence poor for anyone who is not a specialist. We learn a lot about what the conservators have been doing, but not much about ancient Egypt generally. If you want to know why ancient Egyptians tried to preserve their dead, this show won’t tell you. There is a lot of valuable information on how things were made, much of it in the section introductions to the catalogue, but I feel much more could have been made of the information. For example, one monument has the recently discovered signature of the sculptor, in hieratic characters, rather than hieroglyphics. But what is hieratic? It is briefly explained on a later caption, but not explained at all in the catalogue, nor mentioned in the glossary. A friendly attendant explained that hieratics were used in less formal settings. A comparison of hieratics and hieroglyphics would have been welcome.

I visited the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum with two children, aged five and eight. They enjoyed the show, and tried whatever interactive tools were available

 

No attempt to show any hieroglyphics

The two young visitors are very keen on hieroglyphics, and there were plenty of these to be seen. But there was an opportunity missed by not providing any indication, either in the captions or in the accompanying  guide of the hieroglyphic names of the person celebrated on the object. This was tantalizing! We are told this is, for example, the Stela of “Dedia” – but where does this name appear on the stela? To write the catalogue entries, someone must have known what these names are in hieroglyphics.

 

Catalogue has no index

This is a fundamental error. If this is a book accompanying a show, we should be able to find items in the show, and see wherever they are mentioned.

 

Interactive exhibits don’t display their actual function

Some of the interactive exhibits were great – a do-it-yourself squared template enabled children to create their own drawing of a possible sculpture. But other interactives looked more informative than they turned out to be. An example of this is a model showing how a bow system can be used to turn a drill. By moving the bow backwards and forwards, the motion is transferred to a circular turning of a drill that then makes a hole in stone or wood. But the example showed nothing being drilled. Children could move the bow, but to no purpose. It didn’t advance their understanding in the least.

 

14 pages of quotes by experts

These are mildly interesting, but only peripherally. A few of them are conservators, but most of them academics. One conservator compares the baskets in this exhibition with an example at the British Museum (not illustrated) which is apparently “close to perfection”.

 

Lack of background information about ancient Egypt

I know little about ancient Egypt, but this exhibition didn’t increase my knowledge very much. There is no mention of dynasties (although most of the exhibits are from the New Kingdom and Middle Kingdom) and no indication of changes in practice during this thousand-year period. I know this was an exhibition about makers, but most of those visiting will have little knowledge of ancient Egypt. For example, exhibit 27 is a lovely figure of Bes, described as “a popular household god … closely associated with protecting women in childbirth and children”. But that’s all you get – the rest of the catalogue entry is about the making and details of the object.

 

Overall

Great show, but I recommend any visitor starts with the permanent Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam before seeing this rather technical show. Some of the captions in the permanent Egyptian galleries at the Fitzwilliam are more informative than those for this exhibition. 

William Nicholson

 

 

The Pallant House Gallery exhibition of William Nicholson was a fascinating visit. On the basis of this show, which looked to be a representative survey of the various types of his work – portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and book illustration – he strikes  me as immensely talented, but not achieving as much as I would have hoped in any of those categories. His later work seems to me very poor; many of his best works look to have been done before the end of the First World War, when he appeared to be more able to take risks.

In caricature, he had a genuine talent – the drawing of Queen Victoria was what made him famous, and his illustration of Rudyard Kipling is wonderfully evocative.

 

 

Portrait of his son Ben at age 7.

His portraits of children were sensitive, but there seem to be very few examples of adult portraits. He was good at painting women, following the style of Corot, with a dressing-up box in his studio so his models could adorn themselves with wild hats. Nicholson himself was quite a dandy – his polka-dot dressing gown appears in more than one image of him. Later portraits by him can be woeful, such as the Sidney and Beatrice Webb portraits (1928).

 

 

Nicholson can capture the wildness and elemental quality of some Sussex landscapes. He certainly followed Whistler in being prepared to eliminate any unnecessary detail to focus on only one or two objects.

There are few depictions of specific locations, but one stunning view of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Are there other, similar works? A landscape from Bengal could have been painted anywhere.

Still life

Nicholson chose simple objects, rarely a combination, and often depicted the reflections of light on a silver jug or vase. He shows talent, but many of the compositions appear to me rather sparse, not a satisfying mise-en-scene. One or two of the flower paintings are good, such as the Cyclamen (1936).

 

 

Caricature and illustration

Nicholson’s drawings and designs are full of life and movement. Even sketches for costumes have a satisfying vividness about them that makes them worth viewing in their own right, not just as preparatory sketches for a theatre play. They have a very characteristic thick  line, which I think must have been done with a carefully handled brush – there is little sign of Nicholson using an ink pen, although there are traces of pencil in many of the orks.

 

I’m afraid to say, despite William’s talent, his son Ben Nicholson goes beyond anything the father produced. Just one work in the permanent collection was enough to make this clear, an abstract work called “1946 (Still Life – Cerulean)”.

 

How to learn about reading by not reading anything

 

Woman reading, by Corot (National Gallery of Art)

Daniel Karlin, a former professor of English literature, writes about how he gave up reading for a year to see what effect it would have. What did he learn?

Just to clarify, he made it clear he didn’t actually give up reading – although retired, he continued to edit literary texts by the poet Robert Browning during his non-reading phase. He states he didn’t get any withdrawal symptoms — “mine wasn’t a habit” — but this may be connected with editing Browning, which might have been enough to put him off reading anything else. Nonetheless:

1. He found it difficult to think for himself. “By depriving myself of books, I had removed the wall against which I bounced my thoughts.” He reports, but doesn’t accept, Charles Lamb’s statement “I live to lose myself in other men’s minds”. I certainly agree that we read to “bounce” our thoughts, rather than to lose ourselves.
2. He finds it difficult to remember specific extracts, and even the plots, of works he is familiar with. I don’t think this is exceptional: most of the books I have read I have forgotten the details of.
3. “The world of books is still the world”, a statement by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, implying that what we read and what we experience are interlinked. Like the world, books can corrupt, as well as inspire.

It’s that last discovery that fascinates me. Karlin marvels that when he read Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as a young teenager, he identified more with “the ideals of Englishness, Britishness” than the Jewishness he was born with, “the side from which I turned away”. “Scott was joined by C S Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan and Ian Fleming … I became, and have remained, “English” by a form of literary-ideological adaptation.”

It is remarkable to read this from an English literature professor, who accepts that as part of an English degree “we are obliged to read books which, originally, could only solicit our attention”. Surely this is a clear example of “the world of books is still the world”? The set texts he read as a student are a very specific collection of cultural baggage, typically (from a course in English literature) around “Englishness”. An English degree, can, and certainly in my experience did, have the role of imposing a set of attitudes about Englishness (far more than Welshness, or Britishness) on its students.

Perhaps one reason for this is the justification for the canon of great works. the context of English literature as taught. The stated criterion, of literary quality, is held as the highest goal; the claim is that it doesn’t matter what the writer thought, as long as the writing is good. Literary quality is a very nebulous concept, and something of a mask to hide the absence of historical, political, economic contexts in which each of these writers existed. I don’t disagree that the world of books is certainly not the world. If you take a typical school-leaver starting at university to study literature, they have a head full of books they have read, but often little knowledge of the world, and it shows in their responses to that literature. This means that they unfortunately have little capability or experience to critique the canon of great works they are given. In three years of an English degree a student can only read a tiny fraction of the literature, and the choice of what is read is a culturally determined activity. Paradoxically, the insistence on reading constantly, of providing more than can be absorbed, can prevent any reflection and wider awareness of the context of books. When I studied English, for example, I had little concept that the Enlightenment had ever taken place.

I commend Karlin’s dedication to his purpose, but perhaps the real lesson was not what he intended at all. Perhaps from his year without reading he revealed that even if he was not “addicted to reading”, it  required a prolonged period without reading to begin thinking about how books can have the side-effect of preventing you reflecting on what reading means, and, perhaps, can lead you to grasp what is hidden behind the assumptions of the literary canon.

The common perception is that reading is a good thing, and so, by implication, the more you read, the better. I asked genAI (Copilot, to be precise) about what writers had said about reading, and it was fascinating that all  the quotes it found for me were favourable to reading, for example:

George R.R. Martin: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Mortimer J. Adler: “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

These are just two examples, among many. We are besieged with messages about how good books are for us. So perhaps the paradox that Karlin has discovered is how you might learn more about reading by doing less of it – at least for a while. 

Philip Ball: How Life Works

 

"The real point, as is so often the case with arguments in science (and beyond), is not who is right or wrong but what their positions say about their underlying values and assumptions." 

Philip Ball is a science author and communicator, who is a member of a very rare group: someone who writes with as much authority as the researchers he is writing about. Most popular science writing (this inadequate term is all I have to describe his writing, although it is hardly “popular”) is purely one-way: researchers do what they do, and a science writer (or communicator) writes up in plain language an account of what they do, and tries to put detailed research into some kind of meaningful framework. But Ball wants to go further: not just to describe what some scientists do, not just to create new metaphors, but to contribute to the debate himself. He’s not afraid to state how many scientists were wrong, although that tends to be about dead scientists, and he diplomatically anonymises any negative remarks about what he is doing, such as the researcher who stated his work was dangerously simplifying the situation. 

Ball is also remarkable as a physicist who writes with impressive detail about biology – not many writers can do that. He’s even prepared to tackle topics that most biologists wouldn’t dare approach, it seems: to talk about the nature of life, and even to discuss agency, that highly fashionable world, which is today being applied to hundreds of human situations, but which has never before, in my experience, been attributed to cells. Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised to read that test tubes had agency these days, but that’s another matter. Ball’s basic message in this book is: don’t believe the key to life is a genetic blueprint. Genes provide the framework for the development of an organism, but much of an organism’s development takes place within cells, in response to their environment, and this is not based only around the transmitted genes. A classic example is a six-fingered human. Such a case is very rare, but it can happen, and yet the organism has no difficulty managing to control all six digits. How could this be in the genetic blueprint, which would expect (at least general readers with only common-sense ideas about genetics) state “five fingers, and no more and no less”.   

Well, Ball’s thesis is very well argued, and very persuasive. Incidentally, he claims he has an advantage over science practitioners who also write: practitioners such as Dawkins or Pinker tend to write from a particular viewpoint: they are trying to present a case. Ball claims in an interview that “my books present opinions and points of view, but I strive also to present some balance”. In this book, Ball is pretty determined to present his view, supported by many references to a small number of researchers he uses to defend his case, including Michael Levin (87 references), Evelyn Fox Keller, and Kevin Mitchell. 

Ball’s argument is that life is a meaning generator, by which he means that cells work by responding to their environment and being responsible for autonomous actions. 

We think of how life works in the wrong way: as a kind of teleological drive to make the end-forms long familiar to zoologists, rather than as a palette of possibilities arising from the exigencies of the cells themselves. [p436]

it’s a very valid idea, but Mr Ball takes his time over it. I am no biologist, and Ball takes no prisoners with his terminology. I had to look up all the terms he gleefully inserts in this so-called popular science title: over 100 of them (104, to be precise). He is somewhat cavalier in not always defining his terms. He assumes a familiarity with genetics and with the major developments of the 20th century. His chapter on synthetic biology is getting off the point. His eighteen-page prologue only really starts to make sense after you have finished the rest of the book.

So who, in fact, is he writing for? For himself, because he is clearly fascinated by the problems of present-day biologists. In his interview, he describes the pleasure of not being a researcher, but as a writer “ I was free to choose what I really wanted to do!” Few of us have that privilege. I think his writing, however gifted, betrays the challenge at the root of science communication, which only becomes apparent right at the end of the book. This is not really a popular science title, although it should be.

Ball’s assumed readership is other researchers; plus, presumably, the mythical general readers of Nature who have a wide general education, specifically, an up-to-date science background, and the willingness to look at things in context, rather than in detail. Do such people exist? I hardly think he has written a book of more than 450 pages of text to convert and persuade the general reader. Such a reader would need reading skills of a high order to get through the book, and a lot of patience, to be able to follow his argument. Too many technical terms: in fact, as my aunt used to say “TMI (too much information!)”

Ball’s big new idea (and again, it is rare indeed for a science writer to have such ideas) is that of “causal emergence”, or “causal spreading” – that human-level cognition emerges not from single genes, but from the interaction of components, typically cells, during the growth of the organism. It’s a mistake, in other words, to search for a gene for intelligence. Fascinatingly, the other thinkers Ball mentions with this kind of vision tend to be philosophers of science, as much as researchers.

But the most revealing part of the book, for me, was right at the end of the book. Why bury the essential background in the acknowledgements at the back? Nowhere else does he explain his justification for writing. Looking at the present state of biology, reports Ball, gives you a headache:

 

once you get into the details—the transcription factors and signaling pathways and differentiation of cells, say—it is hard to make out any pattern or coherence to it all. No question seems to have a simple answer, experiments conflict, and researchers argue among themselves. All the same, I came away from my time at Harvard convinced, first, that an attempt to find some new narratives was imperative, and second, that those narratives do exist. [p462]

Certainly, Ball has provided a new narrative, and has repeatedly warned us about the dangers of narratives and metaphors - any metaphor will only be partial and may confuse us. In fact, his answer is largely to show up the inadequacy of existing metaphors, especially the “genetic blueprint” and the “selfish gene”.

My view is that Ball has achieved heroic results in this book by making leading-edge biology intelligible, and by attempting to challenge the current popular world-view of genetics. And, let’s not deny it, Ball is far more entertaining to read than the detailed but often uncommunicative Wikipedia articles and introductions to biology I had to look up. All credit to Ball for tackling such an important question: what life means, not from a theological point of view, but from a biological point of view, an important distinction. But I couldn’t help feeling the book could have been shorter, and the text less technical, to enable him to get the message across in a more accessible way. He should be writing for us, as much as for himself.