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The old stories are the best.
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| Reading, especially of the classics, is booming Photo: Getty Images |
A NORTH LONDON
book club, which includes a top civil servant, a senior Bank of England
official and one of the country’s best-known publishers, normally picks
the latest novels to dissect. But when lockdown began in late March its
six members decided to take on “Madame Bovary”, Gustave Flaubert’s
masterwork about the danger of getting carried away by social and
romantic ambition. The shift in the book club’s tastes was a reaction to
the anxious zeitgeist, says one of its members. “We wanted a book that
had stood the test of time. Something rock solid.”
This
book club was not alone in turning to the classics in times of crisis.
The British almost doubled the time they spent reading books, from
around three-and-a-half hours a week, according to Nielsen, a research
firm, to six during lockdown, and with bookshops closed and publishing
schedules interrupted, many people found themselves browsing their
shelves and opening volumes they already owned but had never got round
to reading. There was much talk of poetry, and of immersion in the
Russian greats...
Weighty tomes are doing particularly well. After Marcus Aurelius’s
“Meditations”, Everyman’s bestselling titles are a two-volume edition of
Tolstoy’s stories, then 1,400 pages of Montaigne. Faber & Faber
reports that its most popular title in lockdown, after Sally Rooney’s
“Normal People”, was “A Fine Balance”, Rohinton Mistry’s 600-page Indian
epic set in a city by the sea, published in 1995.
