Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021

by Will Self

From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” by the Guardian , Will Self’s Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature. Self takes us with from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback, and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell, and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald’s childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs’s Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers, how, what, and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self’s trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humor infuse every piece. A book that examines how the human stream of consciousness flows into and out of literature, Why Read will satisfy both old and new readers of this icon of contemporary literature.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Books About Books, 21st Century, British Literature, Literature

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

William Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He was married to the late journalist Deborah Orr.

Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why Read collects some of Will Self’s essays from 2001 to 2021, most containing a literary angle, but some are about random topics like Self’s personal history with Australia, a trip to the haunting modernist ruins of Chernobyl and the ongoing environmental crisis. It’s a decent collection that’s got some stuff I enjoyed, some stuff I didn’t, and some stuff that was a bit of both!

His Literary Hub pieces - Why Read?, How Should We Read?, What to Read? and Reading for Writers - that give the book its name, were mostly underwhelming. For all his deployment of syntactical obfuscation - dammit, now I’m doing it! - I mean, big words what sounds right clever but ain’t as hard as it finks it is, the points of these essays range from underwhelming to obvious.

His conclusions to the above questions: it’s freeing to enjoy books whenever, wherever (Shakira 4eva), we should read indiscriminately and often, don’t be afraid of new tech (Kindle), and to read widely. All of which is, well, duh - to me anyway. Though How Should We Read? does explain why Self deliberately uses complex language: he believes it’s important to challenge yourself with books that take you out of your comfort zone in order to experience life and the art form in its widest possible sense, as well as developing yourself intellectually. That is, to read as a gourmand rather than a gourmet - read fun, easy reads, but also read demanding, tough books too. And I do agree with Self in that sense, and, while the messaging is banal, he makes his points in a not-unentertaining way.

(If you’re unfamiliar with Self’s famous wordiness, here are some examples of words I noticed in this book - be honest: how many do you understand immediately, without looking them up? Banjax, pullulating, velleity, epiphenomenal, vermiculated, a “Dionysian timpani”.)

Some bookish essays cover simply uninteresting topics like Self’s essay on how shelves are becoming less relevant now that digital book sales are booming, or, in A Care Home For Novels, how serious literary novels will continue to be written albeit read on a smaller scale. Some essays are just a title - Being a Character, Literary Time - where I can’t recall a thing about the content.

That’s a repeated problem I find with Self. His essays are often meandering and unclear as to their point which makes them difficult to grasp while reading them and makes them next to impossible to remember afterwards. Perhaps that’s a point he hasn’t considered in his complex approach to writing: clarity of prose, while “easy to read”, also leads to more impactful material on its audience?

His non-literary essays are my least favourite. I didn’t care for reading about architecture or skyscrapers in Isenshard (conflating Isengard from Lord of the Rings with the London structure, the Shard), or at least the way Self writes about them, or his time down under in Australia and I.

He repeatedly returns to the subject of the internet and the shift of book sales from the classic bookshop to online hubs like Amazon, eBay, and digital libraries. None of which I found particularly noteworthy, except for his repeated use of the weirdly sexual sounding BDDM - his abbreviation for Bi-Directional Digital Media, that is the assemblage of computers, the web and the internet. The only technological-tinged essay I enjoyed was The Last Typewriter Engineer, where Self talks about his brief fling with writing on typewriters and had me google image-searching all the models he mentioned - some are pretty swish.

His Playboy article on Chernobyl was decent, written around the time of the Fukushima disaster. He walks the deserted ruins and it’s an eerie tour. It’s also a little depressing how many times humans continue to cause environmental disasters like this. There are also elements of his environmental crisis essay, Apocalypse Then, which are engaging.

My favourite essays were when he focused on a particular work or author. His introduction to Junky (William S. Burroughs’ best book) is superb - Self is also a former heroin addict - and I liked reading his thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, particularly as I’ll probably never read it (I remain Conrad-phobic having endured Heart of Darkness too many times in my youth - not because the story was traumatic but, good lord, Conrad’s prose; the tedium, the tedium!). He also praises, in a rather backhand way, Orwell in St George for the French.

Even in his longer, more convoluted pieces, there are snippets I liked such as learning about Kafka’s life in Kafka’s Wound, seeing Self’s criticism of Karl Ove Knausgard’s autobiographical My Struggle series (I also don’t like them) in On Writing Memoir, and his comments on Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (overrated) in Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners.

If you’re a bookish person like me, you’re probably bound to get a fair amount out of Will Self’s Why Read, even if - as everyone always says about every collection, fictional or non - it’s a mixed bag. It’s a cliched statement for a reason!

If you’re in the mood to sample a smaller offering by this author, and if, like The A-Team, you can find it, check out The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker instead, which is a fun little book collecting Self’s food review columns where he eats at and evaluates everyday establishments like McDonald’s and KFC.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went to see and hear Will Self in Brighton at the Brightelm Centre 11.11.2022. He was in discussion with Duncan Minshull. A long standing acquaintance of his, and veteran of the BBC radio 4. The set up for the interview/discussion made a huge difference. I saw Will Self once before three years previously for the Goldsmiths Prize short listing (for Phone ).
What a contrast. And this explains the mostly extreme views of Will Self- you love him, or you hate him. There’s no in-between. Self clearly likes and respects Duncan Minshull and consequently this was a benign, reflective, and very amusing will self on display. That was not the vibe at Goldsmiths college.

A few things came out in conversation that were (mostly) loosely connected to the writings (which span over twenty years).

• The essays revolve around Literary Hub articles. Editor said need to have a theme, and hence the title and the very loose connection between them.

• WS did a lot of caddying for his dad. “I think about golf more than I should”(!). This was an interesting reveal for me and explained a number of otherwise puzzling references to golf in the Umbrella trilogy. WS confirmed to me later that a not insignificant amount of material in that trilogy was autobiographical.

• WS continues to employ an old fashioned, analogue, way of writing, and has a lasting love for the typewriter. (this is the specific subject of one essay). Unfortunately typewriter ribbons are becoming harder and harder to source. Brian Rothwell in Wigan is the last one standing!

• Beryl Bainbridge is a better read than Hilary Mantel.

• JG Ballard (Claire Walsh). WS mentor was fondly recalled.

• In 2014 WS delivered the Richard Hilary lecture in Oxford. The epithet “The Novel is Dead” was assigned to WS and has haunted him since! WS actually said the novel has ceased to be central to culture.

• WS gets a cheap thrill reading about people caught in terrible natural disasters. He cited the example of Jonathan Franklin 438 Days: An extraordinary true story of Survival at Sea.

At the beginning of Why Read, Will Self cites Marshall McLuhan, author of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). This was a prescient study of the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness (the term global village originated here).
What I liked was McLuhan’s ideas about how to quickly assess a book. He recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. ”If you like that page, buy the book." On the first page the author expends the most effort trying to draw the ignorant reader into the story, while by page 69 the story should be well into its swing, so you are reading not so much to discover things as to get a sense of the style and feel of the book.

This is a theory that I have subsequently applied as I browse prospective purchases, and it hasn’t failed me yet!

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any collection of essays, particularly when gathered over an extended period of time, there will be hits and misses, but as Self writes of such personal matters, each will resonate with at least 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.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding collection without a single weak, uninteresting piece. I found myself challenged and provoked agreeably on every single carefully crafted page. Self’s nonfiction and journalism are DENSE with learning and the way he presents this learning to the reader is provocative in the way that the best friendships are.

[Alex Sarll]

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)

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brand new hardback copy borrowed from the Library. I read two essays, 'Why Read?' and 'Australia and I'. I'll be buying a copy. Five stars so far.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hard put to answer affirmatively to this particular title. Odds and ends from twenty years. The usual mishmash of reviews, reflections, and travel. Lit crit, takes on the creative writing industry he's part of as a London university professor, and oddly airless journalism from not only Chernobyl but Down Under. I kept waiting for spark, but embers sifted remained the substance of this jumbled collection.

Sebald, Kafka, typewriters, skyscrapers post-9/11, "Junky" and "The Secret Agent," shelves, memoirs, and most of all the threats of lack of caring about the printed word. Certainly cause for a concern I as a contemporary of Self share. Yet the prose flops about, phrases shopworn, jargon convoluted, the air of deadlines due and keys pounded permeate this anthology. It feels like a resigned "get it over with."

It's not that Selfie devoid of ideas. It's that on the page, they fail to stick. The essays lack staying power. And the ephemeral nature of many of the once-pressing, no works cotton concerns probably mean this little volume will not last long on the library backlist itself where I checked it out, in hope.

[Jane Fudger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays covering the period 2001 to 2021 by writer and broadcaster Will Self. It is an interllectual take on books and why we need to read. The essays are incisive and both perceptive and provocative in his outlook on life in connection with books
I particularly enjoyed his moving essay on W Sebalds childhood in Germany and the rise of William Burrough's novel Junky from a pulp novel to a beloved cult classic.
An excellent read

[Danielle McClellan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 meditation 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 readers.

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.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of Will Self Essays from between 2001-2021. The essays about books (reviews & introductions) are the best ones. The Chernobyl essay & Australia speech are pretty good too. A lot of Why Read interacts with Self's public persona & identity as some sort of public intellectual (?) & shit stirrer, a persona which I am almost entirely unfamiliar with. I liked Book of Dave & Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, but I can't get over how wild it is that this guy is the sort of celebrity in the UK that gets recognized on the street. I hoped that the one titled “Being a Character” would be about Self's public persona, but no such luck (it was more of a humorous look at how & why readers invest real emotion & thus bring life to the characters that they are reading, which was interesting). I have to admit the fact of Self's celebrity makes me somewhat less interested in reading more of his work. The essays about the future & relevance of the written word in this era of the internet (or “bi-directional digital media”) are kind of repetitive, but “bi-directional digital media” is a decent collective name for “the suite of technologies comprising the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the worldwide web, & the internet”. Not sure I buy that it spells the end of long-form literature as we know it, but also not sure that I care. I'll still be reading! Self's complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is on display throughout these essays, speeches, &c. The glimpses into Self's development as a writer, such as how he first read Catch-22 solely to analyze how its narrative & humor work for his own use. I also can't hate on his bragging about being close enough to J.G. Ballard that he inherited his typewriter. I'd brag too!

[Tububa · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is Will Self driving at? Sometimes it is rather difficult to tell. I am not as bewildered by his syntactic pirouettes and lexical excesses as some people, since I read impenetrable dreck for a living. Throw something like uchronian at me, and I readily get that it's a play on utopian, which all of us good etymologists know refers to "not a place". Thus, uchronian is not an adjective for a mysterious country in Eastern Europe but an adjective for "not a time". So it goes, we break out words like picayune and jejune and refer to the internet as bidirectional digital media. Because why use one short, familiar word when a clunky 3-word phrase will do just as well?

So, back to what I was saying: the problem with Will Self's writing here is that half the time he is so intent on clever turns of phrase and uncredited allusions that he forgets to make his point clear. He rants at many easy targets and picks plenty of low-hanging fruits. What was that bit about the Jews? Something about how the Nazis are bad, I think? And yes, readership has declined, so iconoclastic intellectuals such as himself have to slum it at second-rate universities, teaching others how to write creatively. This is a pursuit that Self despises, and says so outright: he is a self-taught writer, and he is convinced that this is the only way to become a writer. That, and you have to read a lot. And you know what? On that, I quite agree with him. I don't think you can learn anything about writing by sitting in a circle and having your paragraph praised or attacked. I do think that by reading critically and closely, you can learn why certain writers entrance the reader, while others pen books like The Book of Dave, which I flung across the room about 50 pages in and haven't revisited.

Self's writing is a constant test of the reader's worthiness. Do you get that allusion? Have you read that book? Yes, Mr. Self, I get most of your allusions, but can we get back to the point? I don't need to engage in a penis fencing match with you on who has more allusions, but I'd like to hear something more interesting than "read the canon, because if you read pulp, you're pulp."

On hearing: I think the experience of getting through these essays was enhanced, in unexpectedly hilarious ways, by hearing the audio book read by Self himself, rather than another reader. His nasal Southeastern drawl lends an extra dose of pretentiousness to the text, until he hits upon a word that he clearly has seen a lot in writing but never thought to look up the pronunciation of. There were a lot of these: "paradigmatic" (the [g] isn't silent, Will), every single foreign name and word he utters (I cringed when he pronounced the German word for "lie", Luge, like the winter sled sport). He mangles every Ukrainian and Russian name in the Chernobyl segment, freely metathesizing [t] and [s] so often that I wasn't even sure what to look up later. I certainly wouldn't expect a person to know every single word in every single language. But I would have the humility to either look these pronunciations up before recording them in an audio book, or ask someone to proof-listen for me, and re-record the words that I mispronounced. This clearly was not done here. It means that he is surrounded by toadies who are as in awe of him as some of his readers must be.

The essays weren't all bad, mind. For me, the one big ray of sunshine was the typewriter essay. I snorted when I heard the title of "Will Self Driving Cars Take My Job", too, although the rest of the essay left me cold. Overall, I feel no compunction to revisit Will Self's writing after this collection, and I might well empty my shelf of the two or three of his novels that I own, so that I can free up my Gutenberg Mind to enjoy some pulp.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I begin this review – if it is a review in the strictest sense of the word – I should explain that I have found Will Self rather terrifying. He always seemed to be a person carved from marble sent out to disdain and judge us all. I have, until now, for these reasons avoided reading anything he ever wrote. His apparent personality made me think they would be deliberate challenges to a reader’s patience and vocabulary.

What I’d heard about this collection it made me want to dip in and test the Will Self waters. And I have to admit I was partly wrong. He certainly doesn’t test ones patience. He does, however, test ones vocabulary. In Harry Pearson’s excellent ‘The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North East Football’ one of north east region’s speakers are described as being ‘fond of multisyllabic words, precisely used.’* That description could be applied to Will Self.

This is explained in one of the essays when he explains that as a young reader he would refuse to look up words he didn’t understand and that any book worth its salt would allow you to understand what was meant by its context. He is probably right, but I did find myself looking up a number of words as I read this. Some of which I was convinced I knew, but such is Will Self’s hold on me that I was filled with self-doubt.

The writings in this collection fall into broad categories: on reading/writing in the post-digital age; on particular writers or books and on place, whether that be country or building. I found something of interest in all of these and they made me question a number of assumptions I had made. They echo and reflect similar arguments. The fundamental one being that since the advent of a ‘bi-directional digital medium’ – by which he means the Worldwide Web and screen reading - our relationship to books and to reading has been fundamentally changed. Self doesn’t seem to feel that this is a bad or a good thing. It’s just something that is going to happen, but that this change will also change our world dramatically. This collection is almost a full stop on a literary epoch. The end of Gutenberg times.

This is all tightly argued, but not in a dull way. Self is funny and – sorry – self-aware enough to rise above what could have been a journey through one man’s bonnet of bees and make you think about his arguments. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but I wondered whether that was because my life revolves so much around reading – whether digital or analogue – that I’m blind to what is happening in places where books and reading aren’t the core part of your identity as they are for me.

His analysis of contemporary culture, including culture wars, seems pretty spot on to me though. He talks about how social media has established a ‘permanent now’ where nothing is ever really in the past or the future. If you want to imagine the future, to bastardise Orwell, imagine a photograph of someone’s lovely meal posted on Instagram over and over again.

Mention of Orwell – he segues clunkingly – makes this a good time to mention that this collection also contains a number of essays on individual writers or books: Orwell, Conrad (The Secret Agent), Sebald, and William Burroughs. These are probably my favourite parts of the collection and bring interesting insight to all of them and make you want to read their books, which is ironic considering all the other writing in this book about the end of reading.

It is, overall, a collection worth reading. Am I still afraid of Will Self? Maybe just a little bit but this has made me want to go and pick up one of his novels, although which one I don’t know. Perhaps I am a bear of very little brain but it seems to me that despite Self’s protestations about how reading – or a certain type of reading at least – is doomed this book suggests that it isn’t.

* I can’t remember which group and I’m quoting this from memory as I couldn’t find my copy of the book to confirm the quote, but it always stuck in my mind. Perhaps it is time for a re-read.

[Tom Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collections of essays are always a bit weird, especially if the author likes to return to certain themes again and again, because you feel like you're constantly bumping into the same 'bits' ad nauseam, and I think this collection suffers from that a bit.
I think there is one good essay in here about how the internet (or as the author insists on neologising, 'bi-directional digital media') is having a drastic effect on our reading and literature as a form. However, that one good essay is rehashed several times with slight tweaks, and I'm not sure it bares the repetition.
I get the feeling that Will Self has become quite unfashionable these days, but I've always had a soft spot for his (quite deliberately) weird use of language. I remember reading him say somewhere that if you've got a language like English, with it's incredibly eclectic, magpie-like vocabulary, you might as well make use of it in all its obscure variety. What I found quite striking, going from essay to essay, is quite how often he jumps ship from English altogether to reach for French phrases (you are never more than a few inches from a 'mise en abîme' in this collection, and an 'avant la lettre' lurks behind many a page). I'm not sure how much this adds really. Perhaps I'm a philistine, but I'm yet to be convinced that 'ressentiment' conveys any added juice that isn't already contained in 'resentment'.
I enjoyed the stuff about Australia, typewriters, Kafka and the philosophy of the self (pun not intended ho ho ho).

[Sarah Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Self’s Why Read isn’t a book—it’s a glove slap across the face of contemporary reading culture. With his signature mix of intellectual swagger and acerbic wit, Self takes aim at everything from the commodification of literature to the art of truly engaged reading. Don’t expect an easy ride; his essays demand attention and occasionally a dictionary.

At its heart, this collection is a manifesto for slowing down and savouring the act of reading—no skimming, no mindless page-turning. Self champions a kind of reading that feels almost rebellious in the age of endless distractions. There’s a lot to chew on here, from his critique of digital media to his musings on the shrinking attention spans of modern readers.

While his tone can veer into the elitist (brace yourself for a few jabs at genre fiction), there’s no denying the brilliance of his insights. If you’ve ever paused to wonder about the role of literature in your life, this book is for you.

Fair warning: Why Read might leave you questioning your own habits—and reaching for the most intimidating book on your shelf. But isn’t that exactly what good writing should do?

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I found some of these essays thought-provoking and well-written (particularly the LitHub essays on reading as well as essays that covered revered writers), I found myself deeply annoyed with Will Self throughout. He’s not well-known in the United States to my knowledge but seems to be, or at least think of himself, as quite the figure in England. I really cannot understand why. His writing is full of obnoxiously large and obscure words and phrases (entire paragraphs could’ve been condensed and simplified), and he seems to think of himself as an expert on everything from writing to climate change. The insufferable nature of his writing (as well as his repeating complaints about the Internet, and the death of the novel) prevented me from enjoying the bulk of this collection.
Oh well. I guess that’s what I get for taking home a free book from Columbia…

[Valeriy · Rating 5 out of 5]

After seeing Will Self face in the Guardian for so many years, I decided I should read something by him. This is my first WS book and it was fun to read. I will most probably read some of his fiction as well. And I am thankful to WS for the lead on Rachel Cusk in one of his essays, I am now reading Outline and enjoy it quite a bit. Initially I was put off by difficult vocabulary WS used, but then I googled it and found out that it is his feature, not a bug. I remember an anecdote that when Tarkovsky was asked why 15 minutes drive on drab Japanese highway in Solaris he answered that if in the audience was some people who came by mistake, they have enough time to leave the movie theater. Possibly, the same idea is in WS using rare words instead of common.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

the literary criticism here is very very good. Sebald as a provincial English writer, Kafka as witness to the 20th centuries traumas, Burroughs and the figure of the addict - appreciative in tone, historically grounded but associative, convincingly argued. the lifestyle stuff (bookshelves, typewriters, travel) I can take or leave. but I defy anyone to tell me that his headline argument: the Death of the Novel hasn't been 100% borne out. his biggest liability in making this case - apart from being an ageing and perhaps increasingly right-wing Englishman - is that he hasn't been capable of writing any of these good novels which he predicted will still emerge despite the historical eclipse of the artform. but in fairness, no-one else has either

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few of these essays I really enjoyed, particularly the ones for LitHub. Including prefaces for other books vexed me. I never decided whether the supercilious air was ironic, so that tone ended up grating on me. I agree with the author that we sometimes have to work for what we read, but some of these essays felt like being difficult was their primary purpose even as he mocked literary theorists for being inaccessible. It's always worth being exposed to ideas and styles that aren't like my own, but that doesn't mean I like it.

[Rebecc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will Self is always a worthwhile read as you may not agree with his opinions but he does challenge & excite his readers. I enjoyed the Literary Hub essays for that very reason & I think he is right about the post-grad creative writing courses, but having said that I have enjoyed many of the books being written by those authors. My favourite essays were Chernobyl & his relationship with Australia; he just has a natural knack for geography on the page!!

[RDax Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Self is annoying for a person who attempts to write. His work is interesting in even the dullest subjects, of which have no interest. The language he uses entices you, and before you know if the book if finished leaving, you wish to have more. Bravo sir. Just read it is all I can really say and enjoy.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cracking essays.

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too pedantic for me. Wish I would have bailed.

[Lucy Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretentious (in a bad way)

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Self's shtick, whilst as effective as ever, wears a bit thin in this collection - but it is nonetheless enjoyable, esp. as an audiobook, with Self's own languid baritone.

[Suraj Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Self is, for readers like us who are like racoons eating out of other people's trash, an almost unused block of cheese. Nothing out of the ordinary, but crucial if you're a starving raccoon.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 just 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.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why Read by Will Self collects a number of his essays so far this century into a nice collection.

Like any collection some essays will speak to the reader more than others. I certainly had my favorites. But even his weakest can, if you're an active reader, generate some ideas and perhaps open an avenue or two of thought for you. Yes, he likes to challenge his readers, sometimes with big words. Don't tilt at windmills and complain about it, then say you also like to be challenged, then cite words you didn't know the meaning of as a reason to not like the way he does it. What you're really saying is that you don't like to actually be challenged, you just want words that you know but some other people might not. But if the words are too hard for you, well, you want your participation trophy anyway. But then, these types will complain about tedium at the end of a long tedious review, so they have no sense of their own (limited) worth.

This collection is ideal for keeping on a bedside table or any place else you might want something short to read without diving back into a longer book, whether fiction or nonfiction. While reading straight through is enjoyable I think reading an essay at a time, spaced a day or so apart, would also allow you to think about what, if anything, the essay means to you.

Recommended for readers who like collections of short pieces as well as those who like Self. I tend to prefer his fiction but these are well worth the time.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably an expansion, and tightening, of his relatively recent Lithub "why and how to read" articles, plus several "the novel is dead" articles for the Guardian...