As someone who loves to read (I am crocheting this column on a Thursday and already this week I've read a trivial Russian novella, re-read Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, read a very long and blush-making feature in the Boston Review about the very active homosexuality of poet Walt Whitman and read a long feature about the crucial importance of intestinal worms) I'm baffled by news that so few members of the US Congress have read the Mueller Report.
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The famous report, surely crucial to an understanding of the behaviour of the president and of his impeachability, seems to be, at 448 pages, too dauntingly long for lots of congressmen and congresswomen to tackle.
The Washington Post has probed and investigated this phenomenon in its feature piece Did Congress Read The Mueller Report? Mueller himself at his now famous press conference said that he'd rather not appear before Congress because he's said all that needs to be said in his report. But then he grumbled to everyone there that from their daft questions "It's increasingly clear that none of you have read my report."
The Atlantic magazine, noting Mueller's disappointment, even scoffed at him for this, accusing that "Mueller is a man out of time."
"This is the age of alternatively factual tweets and sound bites; he's a by-the-book throwback who expects Americans to read and absorb carefully worded 400-page reports. Has he met us?"
One commentator in The Washington Post has noted that the very election of Trump, a man who has never read a whole book, shows that Americans are living in post-reading times. One poll finds that only 14 per cent of Americans have read any of the Mueller Report.
What does it say about me, I am agonising, that I find nothing daunting about the length and girth of a book of 448 pages?
Here in my study on my bookcase and in the limitless space of my natty E-Reader I have far bigger brutes than that. Hilary Mantel's pleasingly plump Wolf Hall is 650 pages, Cervantes' substantial Don Quixote is 785, Humphrey McQueen's biography Tom Roberts is a brawny 784 and none of these grand reads frightens me. Am I, as dear special counsel Robert Mueller is accused of being, a "throwback"?
Closer to home in these post-reading times we see a similar manifestation of Mueller's "touching naivete" about books and reading in the University of Canberra's amusing invention of its UC Book of the Year project. From somewhere else in the world, somewhere where university students still read books, UC got the idea of urging and enabling every student every year to all read the same novel. Every commencing student is given the book as a present.
My own character-building experience of tutoring at UC had revealed unto me the modern undergraduate's reluctance to read anything at all, even prescribed textbooks said to be vital to their results.
By doing this, UC's touchingly nave luminaries imagined, with every student having this in common, every student everywhere would engage in intellectually stimulating conversation about the novel they were devouring with such feverish emotional-intellectual delight. O, the great humanising good this would do young minds! O the exquisite campus collegiality this activity would create!
When UC first introduced its Book of the Year and sang the praises of what the project would bring about I felt a spasm of scepticism. My own character-building experience of tutoring at UC had revealed unto me the modern undergraduate's reluctance to read anything at all, even prescribed textbooks said to be vital to their results.
A little of this had to do with so many of UC's overseas students struggling to read anything written in English. But it had more to do, I diagnosed, with a general weakening of the intellect and a sapping of intellectual stamina ushered in by the age of the tweet and the text.
Whatever the reasons, methought the UC Book of the Year wheeze would struggle at a time when, for the average undergraduate, to be asked to read an actual book is on the one hand like being asked to climb an intellectual Mount Everest. And on the other hand for a modern youngster to be asked to read a novel is to be asked to do something thought pointless and useless when one could be doing something truly important, like painting one's toenails an awesome shade of purple or looking at puppy videos on YouTube.
Sure enough, when in April ABC Radio National's bookish The Book Show sent an investigative reporter to look at how the 2019 Book of the Year (it is Charlotte Wood's novel The Natural Way Of Things) was going down she scoured the campus but struggled to find anyone who had read it or had any plans to do so.
The disillusioned and despairing book-loving reporter, was "thrilled" when, just about to give up hope, she found one student, Rebecca, who was climbing the intellectual Everest (all 320 pages) of Wood's novel.
What is to become of us, our now reading-phobic species? Where will we learn the truth about things? And what is to become of newspapers, like the one you are reading, agog, at this very moment, when readers (especially the young) haven't the stamina for sustained reading?
Has reading this very column, a daunting mountain of 950 words, left you prostrate with intellectual fatigue? Did you perhaps get halfway up the column only to have to turn back, suffering from figurative frostbite and altitude sickness?
Have I, like my "throwback" brother special counsel Robert Mueller, shown a touching naivety in expecting you to read so much?