I have been immersed lately in the story of Nostromo. The character has just sailed to an island off a fictional South American republic to fool his pursuers by burying a horde of silver. After that, he scuttles his boat quietly and slips into the sea to swim back to harbour.
Joseph Conrad’s novel was published in 1904, but has uncanny echoes of today in its battles over precious metals in a fractious postcolonial country. It is also a gripping adventure, the kind that takes its time to unfurl but whose characters and plot steadily tighten their hold on the reader (this one has reached page 254).
Novels can cast a spell in a way that no other form of entertainment quite matches. That was clear this week at Bloomsbury, publisher of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, along with the Crescent City fantasy series by Sarah J Maas and The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s reworking of The Iliad. Its revenues rose by 24 per cent last year, it announced.
Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury chief executive, calls such titles “a marvellous escape in brutish times”. Publishers were rewarded during the pandemic lockdowns as people who could not visit cinemas and restaurants bought books to read instead, and they are still benefiting from changed patterns of life and work.
Theirs is a very old industry, going back to Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century printed Bible, and it is accustomed to fearing the future. It faced an existential threat a decade ago from eBooks and self-publishing, so it is hard for editors to shake off insecurity. Newton’s optimism that even a recession will not hurt too much is not shared by all.
But good books will thrive, whatever happens at Bloomsbury. It is not surprising that David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery since its $43bn merger last year, made an early priority of meeting JK Rowling. Sales of Harry Potter books are still growing 25 years after the first one was published, and she has earned Warner billions.
Readers are familiar with the feeling of their imagination being pulled into a story and consciousness of the real world slipping away, although they are just words on a page. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term “flow” for “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”.
He was referring to forms of work and artistic endeavour, rather than simply reading a book, but there are similarities. Long-form reading does require a bit of effort, especially in a world with many distractions, from watching television to scrolling mindlessly through social media.
Some stories are more accessible than others. Maas writes that her wildly popular novels all contain “elements of epic adventure and heart-pounding romance, though they vary in setting and steaminess”. They feature heroines such as Celaena Sardothien, an assassin who tortures some enemies but has “a heart and a moral code”. What’s not to like?
This makes Maas exalted on BookTok, the literary corner of TikTok, where mostly young readers post video clips, talking about the books that excite them. It has racked up nearly 56bn views in the past four years and can be extremely powerful: The Song of Achilles was first published in 2011 but was turned back into a bestseller last year by BookTok fans.
One of the surprising things about BookTok is the fetishisation of print books: there are clips of readers lovingly arranging bookshelves, and even constructing them. This reflects the fact that print still comprises 76 per cent of consumer book sales in the US, as audiobooks chase the smaller ebook segment.
There are sound reasons to read the real thing, apart from the fact that print books look better on BookTok. Switching attention offline and having to turn the pages stimulates flow (although I am reading Nostromo on a Kindle). As one study of language lessons found, while digital textbooks are good for quick learning, print is “superior for deep reading”.
The new age of reading is not entirely beneficial for publishers and writers. More than half of Bloomsbury’s sales came from its backlist of titles and known authors. BookTok could play a role in bringing the less popular to wider attention, but many of its video clips endorse bestsellers; this has not been a great period to break through as a new talent.
But, far from destroying books, digital technology has made them more popular. Newton believes the reacquired reading habit will outlast the pandemic because people have reset their lives from commuting into offices five days a week. That offers more time for immersion and self-improvement: books cannot only entertain but educate.
Books also offer something rare and precious: a break from economic worries and media fragmentation. The experience of following a narrative so closely that nothing else intrudes is so valuable that every generation craves it. The journey from Achilles to Nostromo to Celaena Sardothien took millennia, but some things do not change.
