I read this essay a little while back about how it’s difficult to find good art. Everything now is sequels or reboots, the argument ran, and there’s just not much else out there. I made a note (read a book, I’m begging you), and moved on. But the argument stuck with me. It kept coming up. It’s part of the thrust of Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, which I’ve been circling around for months now. James is, to reiterate, a shithead, but he’s right to warn against forgetfulness – against cultural amnesia. So much is available to us today. “Mozart never heard most of Bach,” James writes. “We can hear everything by both of them.” It’s an idea he borrowed from Hazlitt’s ‘On Personal Identity’ (if we were to become Shakespeare, Hazlitt says, we would “cut ourselves out of reading Milton, Pope, Dryden, and a thousand more”), but he’s not wrong. James writes that today, “one can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.” You just have to make the effort to go and find it.

And it is an effort to go and find things, for sure. If you’re not trained in the arts, you might not know where to begin. It can be hard to orient yourself. Sometimes you want some direction, or a bit of a prompt. Let me tell you about some stuff I’ve been reading, in the spirit of James – well, rather, in the spirit of our shared culture – it all boils down to referrals from other people. Referrals are always personal, of course, and they can get to be a little gossipy; for instance, James has me reading John Drummond’s Speaking of Diaghilev, which starts with 77 pages of Drummond complaining about the difficulties of arranging interviews. He spends a bunch of time on how the ballet dancer Anton Dolin left him holding the bill for drinks and some flowers. It’s not really important, but Drummond was pissy about it, so he wrote it down, and now you’re hearing about it. That’s – sort of how all this works. It’s normal. Lean into it.

Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a 2015 novella about grief, loss, and Ted Hughes. It’s about a poetry professor whose wife dies, and the crow from Ted Hughes’ Crow moves in to help him and his young boys process their feelings. I’m not always obsessed with Max Porter – he sort of does sad boys struggling with society, which isn’t really my thing. I read his 2023 work Shy, and it’s very competent, but not for me – I gave it to an ex-cop who’d just published a book on mental health in the police force. But the overtly literary stuff in Grief drew me in. Books are always about other books, even if some of them don’t know it. Max Porter got me into Ted Hughes. When I started writing about Hughes’ Poetry in the Making, his guide to writing poetry – that’s all linked back to Porter.

James writes also about the importance of reading in other languages. If you’re not personally at that point (and I’m sure not), you can still explore international literature in translation. For example, I have a bit of a focus on the Middle East. It seems so much the focus of our modern day – the history of it all, and the ways in which that history flows through into the present moment. Did you know that France, Israel, and the UK secretly agreed that Israel would invade Egypt, back in 1956? The Egyptian government under Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, and the British and French didn’t like it. They sponsored Israel to invade – and they were pressured to stop by America, which threatened the UK’s economy. Bizarre to imagine in today’s climate, but there you go: the Suez Canal Crisis. If you want to learn more about the recent history of the Middle East, and particularly European meddling, James Barr’s Lords of the Desert and A Line in the Sand are probably a good place to start. If you want to approach through art, Rose Issa’s Arabicity and Arab Photography Now are both options, or Andrew Quilty’s This is Afghanistan 2014-2021 for something a little more documentary. Or there’s Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz is the titan of contemporary Egyptian literature. He’s written over thirty novels, and much of his work is available in English at this point. I try to read at least one of his books every year. He writes a lot about modern Egyptian politics, not necessarily in terms of the movers and shakers: often in terms of the low-level schmucks who get caught by regime change. It’s all people trying to find their way in the world – so often his books are about decency and integrity, money, corruption. They’re about people who figure out what they want only really in the aftermath of disaster. Autumn Quail is about a disgraced civil servant thrown out of office for taking bribes. In the Time of Love is about how people grow up. It’s about a son who comes to own a theatre, but it’s also about marriage and commitment and our relationships with the people around us. They’re all precious books.

A plug as well for the Very Short Introductions – they’re great. You’ll be familiar with the thing of titles like ‘A Short Introduction to Whatever’, which sit in contrast to the full scholarly works – you know, if you want to start with a topic, but you don’t want to commit to Nigel Townson’s 600-page Penguin History of Modern Spain. Of that breed, the Very Short Introductions are a good place to start. They’ve been going since 1995, so actually a surprisingly long time, and they cover some 700 titles. I have Very Short Introductions to Spanish literature, terrorism, the Puritans, the Soviet Union, and literary theory. They’re approachable, they’ve got great bibliographies, and they’ll orient you without overwhelming you. In some ways, anything with ‘Introduction’ in the title is a good place to start. Some of the books that are simply titled ‘The Twentieth Century’ or similar will give you a bit of a starting point too. I have a book from the ‘Art Essentials’ series, Contemporary Art, and it’s just the last fifty years or so of art history. It’s a great place to begin.

With all of this, I should emphasise, none of these were books that I picked up at university. I didn’t study any of these – my lecturers didn’t make me read them. It’s stuff I went out and found. That’s to say, you don’t really have to follow any firm guidelines with this stuff. You don’t have to read this or that – you don’t need some special reading list made up by a professor. The thing you do get from university is the discipline and the habit of curiosity. It fosters that sort of thing. It’s not exclusive to the university environment – that’s just a good way to get it. If you have it already, or if you have the commitment to go out and develop it, you’ll be fine. That’s also really where I part ways with the argument that everything is sequels and reboots. That might be the case if you’re only watching Disney+, or if you’re just watching the two or three big films that come out each year – but it’s also very easy to go down the road to the local bookstore and pull something off the shelf. Go read Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People, or Olga Ravn’s The Employees, or The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt. Read Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles – it’s a sci-fi verse novel written in Orkney dialect. There’s so much out there. And if you get through those, you can go back and read the classics.

Look, it’s fair to say that it’s mostly new media getting the marketing budget. All the advertising and so on is always going to be focused on the latest thing – and the scope of that latest thing does, in some areas, seem to be narrow. But really that’s just to say that we shouldn’t get caught up in marketing. There are other ways to find things. Is it probably necessary to do your own work? Sure, and there are some very simple tips for doing that. When you read a book that you like, look up the publisher. I love Saqi Books – someone recommended to me The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, and now I have maybe half a dozen books from their catalogue. Or follow some of the review magazines. I’ve always liked the TLS – their shipping to Australia is nightmarish, but they have online editions, and their end of year roundup is always worth a look. You can find these magazines everywhere. Australia has the Australian Book Review, the Sydney Review of Books – there’s plenty of others. They’re around. You have to do some searching, sure, but it doesn’t even have to be expensive. Sign up to your library. Get their monthly newsletter. There’s a lot out there. You can do it. Go find them.