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Toughen up. It’s the end of the line for soft, middle-class authors. Lefty-baiting headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh has declared that “gentle parenting” advice books by middle-class writers are sabotaging families by insisting adults become friends with their children.
She’s probably got a point – most mums and dads have watched with a cocked eyebrow as a Boden-clad parent has tranquilly informed little Johnny that punching another child in the face while playing in the sandpit “might not be what they like” – but I say Birbalsingh is not going far enough. Why stop with the parenting books? Why not fillet the whole damn bookcase of toxically middle-class ideas? Visionaries such as Chairman Mao have tried it before – with, admittedly, mixed results – but this time we’ll do it right.
Let’s face it, the bookshelf in every Victorian terrace house with a side return extension isn’t there to be read, it’s there to be seen. Your copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens has been avidly absorbed right up to the second chapter; the Jilly Cooper hidden in your bedside cabinet, on the other hand, is so well used that some of those pages have been torn to shreds. Why the disparity? Crippling middle-class literary competitiveness.
It’s hard to say why books ever became objects of show, rather than functional items, though we can probably blame the monks who spent their years copying out and beautifying volumes for nothing more than the aggrandisement of their order and the prospect of centuries-later inclusion in Umberto Eco mysteries. The Reformation thankfully put paid to that game. So now a domestic Reformation may be called for.
How best to clean up that toxically middling bookcase? First off, there’s the low-hanging fruit. Any textbook on parenting that sports a soft-focus cover image of a child happily walking hand in hand with a grownup, written by anyone with a double-barrelled surname, is straight into the recycling bin. Ditto for anything recommended by an ethereally calm Instagram influencer or a member of the Green party. Burn before reading. Protect yourself. Protect your family.
After that, we’re on to the fiction. The golden rule is: nothing in translation. If it was written by anyone who lives more than 12 nautical miles from the British coastline, it’s out. Keep in mind, too, that anything described as “vital” or “necessary” by a newspaper critic is to be viewed with the deepest suspicion. No book is “vital” or “necessary”. Not one.
After disposing of the wrong’uns, you’ll want to replace them with the sort of book that Nigel Farage likes to read: Scouting for Boys, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Boy’s Own Annual 1948. Something about a loyal dog, perhaps.
If you’re looking for a literary classic, Nicholas Nickleby is a solid choice in the family home, due to a depiction of Victorian schooling that will scare the bejeezus out of any child; hopefully terrifying them into doing something at school other than vaping and recording violent drill rap TikToks. Immerse your offspring in these reliable works and they’ll thank you one day.
At the very least, if you make these changes there will no longer be any danger of being “friends” with children; and anyone who has heard the drivel they come out with will appreciate the value of this.
Reading, like the curious American phenomenon the spelling bee, has too often become divorced from its primary literary function and turned into a method of social place-staking: leave boxing to the working class, polo to the aristocrats, the middling folk have novels by Salman Rushdie to be paraded in conversation. It’s time we thought about how to reset that.
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Perhaps the answer is to make reading a private affair like it used to be. Instead of displaying your books like Ernest Hemingway showing off the head of some rhino he’s blasted to kingdom come, shut them away to be enjoyed privately, perhaps by candlelight.
Then we can drop all the pretence. If you like a felon-bashing Jack Reacher story, fill yer boots and be proud of it. If you secretly want to binge the latest Dan Brown romp, then why not? Anyone judging you for doing so is really only jealous. Just think how much more space you will have on your bookshelf for The Da Vinci Code or Jack Reacher: Killing Floor when you’ve ditched Sally Rooney’s latest navel-gazing drear.
Once the novels are gone, keep checking along the shelf and decide what you actually look through. All those Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks that leave you searching for herbs hand-plucked from the slopes of the Judaean mountains, when the children would be happier with chicken nuggets, can go; and the same for all those biographies of Nelson Mandela that sound really interesting but have never been opened. If you don’t use or read them, they’re ballast to be dropped.
Once we stop treating books as relics for show and veneration, we can also stop treating their authors as prophets. Like football players commenting on international relations, the fact that someone has been handed a megaphone really doesn’t mean they have the first clue what they’re shouting about. Yet, social mores seem to weigh on middle-class parents to largely outsource the raising of their young to books. This is despite that fact that doing so devolves all moral instruction to Peppa Pig.
We can end on positive news, though: it was revealed last week that many children have stopped reading almost entirely and now prefer to have the words spoon-fed to them by audiobook. That will make it easier to conceal from your finger-wagging middle-class peers the fact that they like Enid Blyton books.
