Tower and Town, October 2019

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A Difficult Read

I love books; I like the feel of them, I like the way they are constructed with different methods for different purposes. I like being able to lend, give and borrow books and I like being able to flip through the pages and stop if something catches my eye or write in the margins, but I am a slow reader.

I could read a map with understanding long before I could read a book. When approaching my 11+ exam, I had two books to read but I was over-faced so my mother had to read them to me.

Sixty plus years later I am still a slow reader. I have to hear each word in my head in order to understand it. Consequently perhaps, a thick book is a daunting prospect. I have three such books about my exploring heroes that have sat on my bookshelf unopened for more than thirty years! As a Christian it is presumed I have read the bible cover to cover several times... Sorry to say...

Perhaps therefore you can imagine my feelings when entering an excellent bookshop like The White Horse.... pleasure at the presentation and the quality of the books, awed by variety of topics, yet totally overwhelmed. Even when I want to buy I often leave, buying nothing. Yet books fascinate me but my subject interest is limited and, rather like my early joy in the Ordnance Survey maps that my father let me ponder over as a five year old, I now ignore the fiction shelves and the pastel coloured books on how difficult was this or that woman’s early life. I look for atlases, for geographical and scientific discoveries. I soak up information on sailing-ships and how they were rigged and managed. I’m fascinated by the evolution of aircraft or the way changes in air pressure affect our weather and why.

Some years ago I acquired a ‘how to do it’ book. The right hand pages were diagrams of the topic in question, the left hand pages gave a written description of the process. I recall ploughing through several such pages because I thought all those words must contain information that the diagrams could not. Not so; the text laboriously said what I had perceived in thirty seconds of looking at the diagrams.

So where do I stand on LitFest? Well, I do wish it well and I am envious of those who can devour the written word easily and with delight. I nod politely when people talk knowledgeably about authors I’ve never heard of, and yes, I do feel I’m missing out, almost deprived. But then I open my map of the Lake District, or Snowdonia or perhaps the Alps and I see not just a flat page with coloured lines, I see the mountains, the valleys, the tumbling streams or glaciers, the lonely farmsteads. Each map is a three dimensional picture with stories, many stories, geological, historical, cultural, and I need no fiction writer to create these stories for me.

Peter Noble