The Hindu Business Line : A sniff test

Before you begin writing, it is worth reading How to Read a Novel, by John Sutherland, from St Martin's Press (www.stmartins.com). "An alternative title for this book might be `Reading in an Age of Plenty' or, more eye-catchingly, `Reading through the Avalanche'," begins chapter 1, `So many novels, so little time.'

For, "Every week now more novels are published than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade."

If you had the riches of Bill Gates, here is a suggestion from Sutherland: "You could with a few hours' key-stroking, order up from Amazon.com some half-million novels to be Fedexed, rush delivery, in thirty-six hours."

Caveat, though, is that you may need `a disused airplane hangar to keep the books in and a small army of forklifting stackers and fetchers to move the things'.

How long will it take to read them up? Considering `a reading career of 50 years, a 40-hour reading week, a 46-week working year and 3 hours a novel,' the author calculates that you may need 163 lifetimes to read them all!

"To be `well read' in 2006 requires non-traditional strategies and ruthless short cuts," advises Sutherland.

A prospective reader may have many initial encounters with a book, but the first `close' encounter with the book is the first line of the text, says the author. "This is the moment of coupling."

If you are applying `the sniff test' in the bookshop, `the first line is always worth a quick dab at the nostrils,' guides Sutherland.

Fun read.

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