Pengiun has come up with the great idea of releasing a series of 20 paperbacks “thin enough to slip into a commuter’s pocket featuring thinkers and revolutionaries from Seneca to George Orwell, from Machiavelli to Ruskin, St Augustine to Marx and Engels” according to today’s Guardian. It’s to be sold as an attempt to “inspire readers to discover or revisit some of the great philosophical and revolutionary writers”.
Something fit for universal praise? No, of course not.
“John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University College London, yesterday led the assault, suggesting there was an ‘inherent timidity of textual choice’ [in the series of books].
He said: “What the editors have done is to choose the short and easy option every time … bite-sized snippets from Hazlitt, Orwell, Woolf, Freud etc. Hanging over the project is the sense that this curriculum is all you need and one senses a disinclination to raise the hurdle too high for the paying customer. This list shrinks down great ideas to smarty-sized sweety size.’”
It’s ironic, if fitting, that an academic can criticise someone for shrinking great ideas (great ideas that would otherwise be known to only a few) down to “bite-sized” or “smarty-sized sweety size” proportions (which, as a result, lead to the ideas becoming known to a far broader audience).
Not that they’re all bad, of course. Thank goodness for AC Grayling, whose fascinating What is Good? I’m reading at the moment. He has a straightforward observation: “If we show people that there are interesting and accessible ideas in these works it may draw them into the great treasure trove of ideas. It is a good thing.”
There: bite-sized, to the point, and absolutely right.
Remember those tiny tiny “Penguin 60′s” they did about 8 years ago for their 60th anniversary? I had loads of them in my loo at Uni. Bloody great – 60p – so I’d buy them to read on the bus. Cheaper than a choccy bar, and twice the chewiness.
On which note, here’s a bite-sized thought for the day: John Sutherland is wanker.