Book Snobbery and The Philosophers' Mail

Whilst I was at university I encountered a lot of book snobbery and am embarrassed to say that I probably perpetuated a lot of it too. I bought into the idea that some books were just better than others because other people had said so. By the end of university I was making my own mind up about what I liked and what I 'should' be reading which led me to be a lot less judgmental about other people's choices. However, the sad truth is that just because I grew out of my book snobbery doesn't mean that other's have.

Knowing that book snobbery exists is one thing. I expect it from literary magazines, insecure English undergrads, and the middle class. I expect it from people and institutions that I would generally consider to be conservative, but I do not expect it from the forward-thinking online publication The Philosophers' Mail.

I clicked onto their website last weekend to catch up on some news and was confronted with this:

It reads: 'We're a news organisation with a passionate belief that too much news is bad for you. We want you to take regular 'News Sabbaths', periods when you willingly cut yourself off from all the information except that which you gathered yourself through your own senses. This News Sabbath begins late on Friday evening and continues til Sunday evening. During that time, try not to go anywhere near a news source. Resist the impulse to check your phone. Instead, look at the world firmly through your own eyes. Examine your anxieties; spend at least half an hour talking to a child; take your partner out for a meal; look at the sky and notice the movements of the wind; listen to the song of birds; read a book written before 1800; have one very long bath. We look forward to seeing you again next week.'

There is so much about this that infuriates me, but the condescending paternalistic tone is not what this post is about. Near the end of their News Sabbath Pseudo-Manifesto, The Philosophers' News has suggested that as part of the enriching of your soul you should read a book written before 1800. Are they then suggesting that books written after this date do not achieve this? Should books post-1800 be kept for Monday-Friday where we ignore children, indulge our phone addictions and consume so much information that independent thought is temporarily paralysed? 

Let us not forget that this time period excludes even those considered great like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and that's just fiction books! The 'literary cannon' has been something I've shunned for a while, but seeing even these heavyweights excluded by TPM is quite worrying. It is worrying that a publication that tries to be progressive and optimistic would uphold such conservative notions about books and people's reading patterns. It just goes to show that book snobbery is absolutely everywhere. I fully intend to point this out to TPM and I encourage everyone who believes in egalitarianism in the world of books to do the same.