Broken Spines and Other Sins

In 2016, while on the presidential ­campaign trail, Donald Trump explained to the Washington Post that he doesn’t read because he is “always busy doing a lot.” You could almost hear the eyeballs hitting the floor as they rolled out of the heads of bibliophiles the world over. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s elective illiteracy was taken as a sure sign of his philistinism — just one more piece of evidence that he was unfit for executive office. Such easy judgments might remind us of Leonard Bast, the impoverished striver of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, who believes that books are a stepping stone to self-improvement. In one of my favourite moments of modernist fiction, Leonard is eventually killed when a bookcase topples down on him. Undergirding both this Bastian idealism and our offhand dismissals of Trump is the naive tendency to equate reading with virtue and intelligence. Trump, of course, is a toilet bowl of a human being, but I doubt whether our opinion of him...