“I’ll see your eidolon next Tuesday,” writes Will Self, 61, when I email to arrange a video call to discuss his new collection of journalism, Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021, which is centred on the concern (as he later told me, or my on-screen spirit-image) that “people are dumbing down their entire response to their own culture by their unfettered use of social media”. Self’s 26 previous books include Umbrella, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2012, and its sequels Shark and Phone, the latter a single 624-page paragraph which the Telegraph called an “epic anti-tweet”. Speaking from his home in south London, he said he liked the description “because the book was a deliberate attempt to call people’s attention to what was being lost by the digital. I don’t think the Umbrella trilogy is that hard to read at all; it’s only hard to read in contrast to a tweet. By Donald Trump!”
How did you pick the pieces in Why Read?
Until fairly recently, certainly since 2001, I probably wrote an average of 150,000 words of journalism every year, so there’s a vast amount to choose from. My New York editor said that in the age of the web, collections like this need a theme or else readers feel they’re just getting a grab bag they could’ve sourced themselves. So the emphasis fell on the impact on reading and writing of what I choose to call bi-directional digital media.
