More on dead tree media

Talking of things that make you re-evaluate your world, I guess the same criterion can be applied to books: bad ones reinforce your existing positions or make no difference at all, good ones make you re-orient yourself, or at least re-examine your beliefs, tastes and attitudes.

I'm currently reading Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and re-reading some Gwyneth Jones. Wilson's book definitely fits into the 'bad' category, for all its status as great twentieth-century literature. It's not a bad read at all - amusing characterisation and all that, but it's yet another smug set of upper-middle-class characters adjusting themselves to the post-war Britain: neither they, nor Wilson, have much to say. Jones, on the other hand, not only tackles the big subjects: political failure, the dark stirrings of the collective unconscious, feminism, science, our social dispositions, but she does so in compelling, confusing, serious but also exciting and often amusing ways. Kairos is perhaps her weirdest attempt to upset our conceptions of what society means (particularly in relation to sex and gender), while the Bold As Love series uses the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle as the basis to examine the purpose and point of nations and states, amongst other things.

Jones is also gradually posting her earlier books, including Bold As Love, as free (updated) texts on her website - presumably as a response to the gradual death of the book marketing model and as the equivalent of the 'director's cut'.