Will Self is one of those authors that I have bought his books but have yet to read much of his work. It all started from the hardback cover of Great Apes. I saw it in the store and knew that I had to have a copy. The name Will Self is also aesthetically pleasing, even if, according to some of examples in this collection, it leaves the internet with ammunition to use for when he says something disagreeable. And some of his opinions are disagreeable, especially when it comes to some of his opinions 0on reading. 

In any essay collection that spans twenty years of writing, there are changing opinions. Most of his essays on reading are about digital reading and how it is not as good reading from a screen as it is holding a hardback. He also says early on that if you want to be a serious reader and writer, you have to read and write serious books. He backs down on some of this toward the end of the collection, written in that past few years. The last essay, “Reading for Writers” he states that readers should read whatever they want. He also mentions that readers should read “promiscuously” and how he has several books going at one time. If he reads promiscuously, he chooses to write about white, male writers. It takes the collection 275 pages for him to examine a female writer, Rachel Cusk, in the essay, “On Writing Memoir.” He does mention books by women and marginalized groups in a generic way, but he does not spend the time on any of them. He spends his time discussing Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Karl Ove Knausgaard, J.G. Ballard, Norman Mailer, George Orwell, William S. Burroughs, W. G. Sebald, and a sprinkling of many other male authors. I do not know if this is specific to this collection, but there does not seem to be many indicators that the reading life that Will Self proclaims to be important is very diversified. 

I do like many of the essays, even if some of them seemed a bit like a dinosaur yelling at the meteor, but most of them are fairly interesting. Will Self does write with the authority of someone who stands behind his opinions and essays, even if they are not the most popular perspective. I liked reading his essays about writers and famous works, but I did not care as much for some of his personal essays.  He has completely forgettable essays about skyscrapers and shelving units. In any collection that spans this many years, there are going to be some essays that work better than others, and I would say that for me, this ratio is about half and half. Reading this does make me want to find my copy of Great Apes and see if it is more interesting of a book than Why Read because I feel like I am still supposed to read books by Will Self. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This collection of essays was all over the map for me. I had missed the “selected writings” subtitle and initially felt forlorn that these collected pieces covered a wide range of topics, some of which were utterly unrelated to literature.

However, the book opens with a delightful mediation on shelves of all things, and sets a playful mood. I found the chapter on Sebald to be fascinating. There were also interesting discussions of Kafka, Woolf, and Conrad. I was less taken with chapters on Chernobyl and travel in Australia, and the piece on William Burroughs who I find to be overly fetishized by contemporary (usually male) authors.

All of that said, this is a smart, thoughtful set of essays. I loved Self’s essay on How to Read, and am in full agreement with him that reading should be promiscuous and indiscriminate. Reading widely and obsessively is a major part of a happy life as far as I am concerned.

Thanks very much to the publisher, Grove Atlantic, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.

As with any collection of essays, particularly when gathered from an extended period of time, there will be hits and misses, but as Self writes of such personal matters, each will resonate with some readers. Many of the more literary pieces are densely researched and obviously personal in scope (I particularly was fascinated by W. G. Sebald), but there were others I had to skim. It's a personal choice how to approach a collection such as this, and while there are some that have held me from cover to cover, I must admit this wasn't one of them.

I very much enjoyed reading this! The writing was strong and the story was enjoyable. I recommend it.

I tried to give this author another chance because the only book of his that I read, I did not like at all. I did well, these essays are very interesting and even make you laugh sometimes, as well as make you think. Unluckily some books and/or authors he mentioned, I did not know them well enough to agree or disagree with what he wrote, but it matters little because I continued to fill my endless list of books to read.

Ho provato a dare un'altra chance a questo autore perché l'unico suo libro che ho letto, non mi era piaciuto affatto. Ho fatto bene, questi saggi sono molto interessanti e fanno anche ridere a volte, oltre a far riflettere. Purtroppo alcuni libri e/o autori da lui citati, non li conoscevo abbastanza per essere d'accordo o meno con quanto scritto da lui, ma importa poco perché ho continuato a riempire la mia infinita lista di libri da leggere.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

Why Read is recommended literacy craft from one of the masters. Will Self shares insights into place and literature — well worth the visit.

Some of this book's flaws are the flaws endemic to non-fiction collections, where pieces not originally intended to sit alongside each other will often contain a degree of repetition. Not that fiction collections are immune, but there it tends to be themes, types, maybe a very occasional figure of speech. Speeches, essays, introductions, articles: here there is less carpet and more pattern, so whole examples and arguments recur. Some of which come to seem like fun recurring characters: Augustine astonished at seeing someone read silently; Kafka cracking up at his own work, its comedy obscure to the English reader. Others, less so: the coinage 'BDDM', for bi-directional digital media, and its antithetical "autonomous Gutenberg minds", do not generate increased fondness with repeated encounters. Not least because it's less clear what they're saying; the Augustine story is valuable as history, but also for the way it illustrates something significant about solo, silent reading, the way it lets us shape the story in our own head, to our own specifications (which has a particular interest for me as the reason I don't really do audiobooks). Whereas BDDM...what does that do, beyond looking like a typo every time, especially given the letters next to each other on a keyboard? It gives a sciencey sheen to the idea that reading on screen isn't quite the same as reading on paper, which maybe it isn't, but is that more significant than not having to cut pages anymore, the demise of the errata slip, the shift from scroll to codex? The frustrating thing is that while so much of the collection comes back to this hobby-horse, the author has enough self*-awareness to intermittently acknowledge that in large part, it's just a function of his age and personality to be so hung up on this – what he elsewhere identifies as "the empirical sample of one". The account of one writer having to move to pre-digital methods for first drafts because he kept finding himself falling into a Google-hole over everything he was writing about is interesting, especially when the record shows he has an addictive personality; his insistence that this says something about the world at large, less so. To be fair, this may have something to do with these pieces about reading being for LitHub, a site which has always tended to get my back up for reasons I can't entirely identify, so the fault may not all be Self's. But I much prefer it when he addresses the issue more light-heartedly, as when contrasting the experience of wandering with a volume of poetry in your pocket with "The Prelude Experience, a Wordsworthian virtual-reality program I invented just this second", or admitting in Will Self-Driving Cars Take My Job? that "given this piece's fantastical facetiousness, and its trademark melange of the Mandarin and demotic, you'd be perfectly entitled to suspect it's been written by a computer which has digested a lot of my old copy."

Which is the other half of the problem, isn't it: that parodic Self persona and style, so easily spoofed by anyone with half an inclination. Including him, because sometimes he does live down to it, though mercifully not too often here. And while sometimes he does go overboard with the sesquipedalian verbiage, I did enjoy his little dig at the British notion that anyone doing that is automatically a target for suspicion. Against which Self asserts, amusingly and not altogether falsely, that Orwell is popular with the British precisely because of being another bloody Etonian, "a laconic but straighttalking character immune to the foppery and flippancy of the hated foreigner", and that the rules laid down in his Politics And The English Language are just another expression of that establishment's casual privilege, because Orwell himself is one of the few writers capable of writing anything interesting while abiding by them. This is one of a few places where I was reassured to see that Self's puckishness hasn't entirely curdled into the fogeyishness of so many former enfants terribles; see also the essay on Kafka, which grabbed me less for Kafka himself - a writer almost erased by over-reference - than for its thoughts on that very over-reference, and literary theory in general, zipping writers into the body bag of a particular agenda, "an abuse of scholarship that makes the pinpoint deliberations of medieval schoolmen appear positively utilitarian."

Other writers addressed in depth also tend towards the canonical (though the canon itself is the subject of a couple of pieces which dance along the edge of outrageousness without quite saying anything substantial), but then I suppose if you're going to commission an introduction from Will Self it would be for the likes of Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs; reissues of the real niche mob are more Iain Sinclair's turf. More interesting, on the whole, are the times he writes about writing in general without getting tangled in the BDDM thickets. Granted, while I sympathise with the complaint about "the vast number of novels (and indeed non-fiction works) almost exclusively concerned with the complex thoughts, tortuous feelings and subtle velleities of people – or characters – who themselves spend far too much time reading books", I also find it a bit rich coming from him. Yes, you could argue that it's stating the obvious to argue that "reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding", but given how many people from the government down still sneer at fiction, it's still a long way from a truism. And at his best he can really put his finger on something, as when he identifies the key distinguishing feature of fictional characters: "of necessity their incomprehensible situation must be rendered comprehensible for it to exist at all". A more general and pithier expression of my own frequent observation/frustration that a fictional character presented as a social butterfly will still tend to have a smaller circle than a real life recluse, simply because a novel can only take so many characters.

And then there are the pieces about other things. Not always winners; when Self argues that the Shard by day is "almost frantically undistinguished" I can't really engage at all, so different must be the givens from which we're proceeding, even if we agree that it's quite the presence by night. And sometimes overtaken by events: Absent Jews And Invisible Executioners' discussion of how everyone needs to believe the Holocaust was exceptional rings even more bitterly ironic now, though as so often with Sebald, this essay's account of his work makes him seem much more my thing than actually reading Sebald ever has. Even more regrettably topical is the Chernobyl piece, first published in Playboy in 2011 (one of those articles for which people famously read it!), but not nearly such a gently edgy tourism piece now, with a psychopath apparently willing to risk a reprise. Hell, the book's not out for another five months, so he'll likely have gone a lot further by then, lending still more resonance to the quote from "the Ukrainian national bard" Taras Shevchenko: "On your righteous land we've installed some hell within the paradise." In between the obligatory Stalker references (though some of the correspondences are genuinely uncanny), most of it's like this, from the glimpses of nostalgia for Stalin to the now bitterly ironic line about the disaster's role in the downfall of the USSR: "people saw the authorities – these people who were all-knowing and behaving like gods – for the first time they saw them as miserable, helpless, extremely ignorant and arrogant people not giving a damn about human lives." Now we know that was just a brief interruption in service and authorities like that are exactly the sort Russia wants after all. Though I suppose you could argue that the careful management of bi-directional digital media has had its part to play in that.

*Including doing this joke himself.

(Netgalley ARC)

Why read? Reading is such a personal, unique experience for humans. And we vary significantly in what we decide to read.

The new collection of essays by Will Self will undoubtedly make a reader reflect on the reading process – that is, on absorbing the text created by another human being, based on that person's talent and point of view – into our sensitivity. Will Self doesn't suggest any canon of books we should read to understand the world better or feel better about ourselves. He says: "No, read what you want – but be conscious that, in this area of life as so many others, you are what you eat, and if your diet is solely pulp, you'll likely become rather… pulpy. And if you read books that almost certainly won't last, you'll power on through life with a view of cultural history as radically foreshortened as the bonnet of a bubble car."

Hence, we should challenge ourselves in selecting our books to read. "Why read" was a challenging book for me, but I'm glad I stumbled upon it in my journey as a reader. The language is beautiful, and the message is always evident, even if the words are sometimes uncommon. I liked the essays about reading the most, but I also enjoyed many others. There is an excellent essay about Kafka and another one about Sebald. With profound insight, Will Self writes about Burroughs's heroin addiction, analyzing his "Junky"; in other writings, he talks about Chernobyl, typewriters, and bi-directional digital media. Accidently, the last subject made me realize I prefer an old-fashioned paper book if the author decides to pour his feelings over more than 500 pages; for me, reading long prose does not go well with electronic devices.

The essays display an extraordinary intellect and wit and, yet, are very down-to-earth. I'm sure that a person who decides to read them will sometimes come across statements close to our reflections. Yet, Will Self has described them so clearly that they become either a discovery or strengthen our old, but perhaps not fully expressed opinions. Additionally, some of the author's remarks are very humorous. For example, when talking about what writers read after writing, he mentions an image of poor seals in the circus, balancing balls on their noses, and asks the question: "Well, just supposed you were a seal. (…) Surely the last thing you'd want to do after a hard day at the circus is watch another poor seal doing precisely the same thing."

There is wisdom, knowledge, wit, and humor in Will Self's essays. So, why read? Everybody can find their answer. But, paraphrasing the old MasterCard commercial campaign, what we get from reading is priceless.

Will Self delivers a smorgasbord or essays in WHY READ, a treat for readers of all stripes--peppered with sly insights and his signature wit. Highly recommended.

Thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for the opportunity and pleasure of an early read.