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Ceri Radford

Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

Reading habits and revamped classics

If you manage to get through a whole four books a year you're a heavy reader, if you read three you're medium and you can count yourself as a light reader if you finish just one.


Colourful marketing from Penguin

These strange statistics are buried in the footnotes of a Penguin press release from last week, which marked the sixtieth anniversary of their Classics editions.

I asked Penguin for details on how the survey was carried out and they're getting back to me, but in the meantime I'm savouring the dubious assertion that I read about as many books in a month as a 'medium' reader does in a year.

Sceptical as I am, it has helped just slightly assuage that nagging feeling that I'm not well-read enough.

Even with a literature degree behind me and a reading habit bordering on OCD according to Penguin, I still get daunted by the vast tracts of important books that I've not yet read.

When I started this blog, well-meaning friends and colleagues bombarded me with comments along the lines of "Have you read x,y,z by x,y,x? You have to write about it!"

Of course, half the time I hadn't, and on a few occasions I hadn't even heard of the must-read masterpiece or of its author. It made me feel a little uneasy. But then I guess you can never be thin enough, rich enough or well-read enough.

Given how infrequently dedicated readers apparently get through a book, there were other surprising nuggets in the Penguin footnotes: "Reading is an important activity for 79 percent of us, more popular than sex (69 percent), TV (67 percent) or computer games (15 percent.)"

And this bit from a survey of 4,000 people – I can't help but wonder how the question was phrased. Please rank the following activities according to importance? Which of the following are more (or less) enjoyable than reading?

The main point of the press release, of course, was not to shine a light on the murky priorities of the British reading public, but to shine the glaring light of publicity on the anniversary of Penguin Classics.

I've missed the boat to really comment on this one, given that I was on the plane to Switzerland at the time, but one aspect of the Penguin PR machine did amuse me.

In the drive no doubt to make classics seem modern and appealing, Penguin has divided its most revered titles up into 'dog with waggiest tale'-style categories. So John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men becomes the 'best tearjerker ever written,' while One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest becomes 'best crazies ever written.'

Even moreÂ bizarrely, Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil) which, if I remember rightly, involves two runaway kids abducting a monk, performing unspeakable sexual acts on him and then strangling him to death, all in an abstruse reflection on metaphor and narrative becomes 'best sex ever written.' Maybe that explainsÂ one of thoseÂ previous statistics.

At one point in the release, Penguin classics are described as "beyond fashion," at another we're told they'll be given limited edition "funky coloured jackets."

I could get worked up at the heavy-handed attempts to shoe-horn a formidable range of books into a glib, frothy, fashionable format, but I'm not going to.

Penguin isn't some kind of state-sponsored cultural institution on a mission to enshrine great literature from the vagaries of popular taste and market economics. It's a business, and as such cannot afford the luxury of intellectual prissiness.

They have to sell a lot of books to a lot of people to survive, and if this means the odd funky jacket or incongruous accolade then so be it.

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