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The first I knew that anything was up was when my old friend Andy Miller slid into my DMs, as the young people say, on Tuesday. He was courteously alerting me to his role in a Twitterstorm, and my very collateral role in it – in that he’d mentioned online that he reviews books for the section I edit in The Spectator.
The storm started when Andy, as he does most months, posted a photograph of the pile of books he’d read that month. It was a big pile – 21 books in all, including a couple of Daniel Defoes, a couple by Toni Morrison, a couple of early Heaney collections, Beckett’s Murphy, Joyce’s Dubliners, novels by Dickens, Muriel Spark and Carson McCullers, and – Andy being no snob – an old Choose Your Own Adventurebook. He pronounced that, narrowly, his favourite had been Moll Flanders.
Books read (or reread) in April 2019. My favourite – narrowly – was Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. pic.twitter.com/Jy3CuC23Qf
— Andy Miller (@i_am_mill_i_am) April 30, 2019
Andy reads a lot, and seriously. He’s the author of a fine memoir about his adventures in the canon called The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. He co-hosts the books podcast Backlisted. And he writes for me, too. So what was the problem? The problem was that the Sky TV newsman Adam Boulton had quote-tweeted Andy and written: “Well done. Do you have a job or a family?” And this innocuous response opened the gates of social media hell.
We’re used to Political Twitter being a little bit frisky, obviously. Anyone with a view on trans inclusion, anti-Semitism or Greta Thunberg can tend to expect a bucket of the stinky stuff in their replies.
But Book Twitter? With the exception of the odd flurry of spite directed at Will Self, Bret Easton Ellis, unpaid speaking engagements or those horrible impossible-to-open plastic jiffy bags that Penguin Random House has taken to using, Book Twitter is a benign sort of place. You’ll see launches and prize wins congratulated, new books bigged up, reissues of old favourites trumpeted, podcasts shared, and wry allusions to one’s biscuits-eaten/words-written ratio.
But, lordy be: this was something else. A positive torrent of abuse, sarcasm and de haut en bas derision directed at Adam Boulton. “Blimey, that’s an inane response,” was one of the milder replies. “Well done. Do you have any friends?” asked another. Another: “Remember when journalists were well read & literate? Anyone?”
The split was about 70% people who’d had the witty idea that reading was something that could be done instead of watching Adam Boulton on Sky TV, and 30% eye-rolling/monkey sniffing poo reaction gifs.
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