Tuesday 26 October 2010

Is Mad Men better than books?

I’ve just watched the last two episodes of Mad Men and I’m starting to think the unthinkable. It feels almost sacrilegious but I got more from that 90 minutes of TV drama than I would have done from reading a book.

I’ve always thought of myself as a book person. I’ve got two English degrees and have never forgiven my parents for not buying me a membership of the Puffin Club. But I can’t remember the last time I read a novel.


I’m still attached to books. I’m always overdrawn at the library and my bookshelves are full of things waiting for me to read them. I still read non-fiction, because I want to know things and books can be easier than the internet. But too often novels make me feel that my time is being wasted. At the office book club, I have a good record of hating everything we read (apart from poetry).

Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s because the novel is a 19th century art form and we’re in the 21st. Perhaps there are better ways now of telling stories.

*spoiler alert*

It would be hard in a few pages of a book to fit in the drama, the pathos, the backstory and the nuance that you get in these few seconds of TV: Don tells Peggy that someone important has died: ‘the only person who really knew me.’ And Peggy says: ‘That’s not true.’ And you know that, actually, it is.

I feel for those imaginary people. I’m immersed in that world. I’m still there even after it’s finished. That’s exactly how I felt as a child reader, in the 60s, with my Puffin paperbacks.

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