STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND READ THIS!!

Seriously, whatever you are doing - get this book and read it! It's been on my counter for a while, tempting me while I did the accounts, worked on the Poetry Festival, and did the post-Christmas re-organisation of the bookshelves. This morning though, when Harriet arrived for work I treated myself to a quick escape for a fab cup of coffee at Tea on the Square (01952 727929) and grabbed Stop What You're Doing as the perfect reading companion for a coffee break.

I chose to begin with Jeanette Winterson's essay, A Bed. A Book. A Mountain., as I had read her new autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? over Christmas and had been fascinated and moved by it. The essay begins with Jeanette lying in bed reading a book about the Cairngorms by Nan Shepherd called The Living Mountain: written in the 1940s it has now been re-published as part of the Canongate Canons series (which I shall be stocking post-haste, in fact - consider it done!). Jeanette muses on what it is about a book about mountain climbing (she doesn't climb mountains, or even hill-walk, she only opened it because 'a book is a door, and doors need to be opened') that can speak to her soul and comes to realise that a book where 'the writer has found something essential and can communicate it' is a book with being:

It really doesn't matter what. The Cairngorms or Wuthering Heights. Cloud Atlas or Moby-Dick. Zen and the Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance or a Carol Ann Duffy poem. Poetry is all about being, and because we are much less concerned with the subject matter or the story of a poem, it is easier to understand Susan Sontag's remark 'A work of art is not just about something, it is something.

David Whyte says exactly the same thing about using poetry to work with desperately jaded workers in corporate business: he says that often in management training courses the talk about the experience of something takes you further and further away from the lived experience of it, whereas poetry is the experience.

Jeanette Winterson goes on to say that reading is probably more important now than at any other time because of the 'saturation bombing of an enervated mass media'. While she doesn't glamorise her working class origins, she nevertheless knows that if people then weren't reading they were probably in the choir or the brass band, or telling stories in the pub, working on the allotment or walking miles in the Pennines. These days, if we're not reading, we're quite likely to be watching telly or on Facebook ('relationships without the relating') or in front of a screen of some sort, or listening to 'fake music from puppet-show bands.' Time for our minds to be quiet, contemplative, imaginative, inquisitive is sorely lacking in these madly-rushed times.

Not reading cuts off the possibility of private thinking, or of a trained mind, or of a sense of self not dependent on external factors. ...

Reading is a way through, a way in, a way out. It is a way of life.

This essay - and the great cup of coffee - turned my day around before it had even started. Passionate about reading as I am, to have access to Jeanette's lucid and beautifully written insistence on the life-saving nature of reading was completely inspirational. I can hardly wait to read the others.