For one thing, it’s easier.
I have only to walk to my bookshelves and there is material enough for the rest of my life and then some.
The bad ones never get better and the good ones sometimes get worse, but all of them change in some way, offering different virtues, different vices, different pleasures to when they were first read.
This is true even of the irreproachables, the best of Larkin, say, or of Waugh.
For the only dependable test of the written word is time.
The Da Vinci Code has already failed that test and hear me now when I tell you that Harry Potter will fail it too; few works could match its cliche-to-page ratio.
Last night I took down a book by Clive James that I probably haven’t looked at this century.
James was born in Australia in 1939 and died in the United Kingdom 80 years later.
In that time he wrote plenty, including several novels that sold well because of his name, although they weren’t much good.
But his non-fiction will endure.
Unreliable Memoirs is a comic masterpiece and his collections of criticism, especially the early stuff, are a delight.
The one I took down was The Crystal Bucket, a collection of television reviews written for a Sunday newspaper in the late 1970s.
It is hard to imagine anything more likely to prove ephemeral than reviews of forgotten television programmes.
But they sing, because, as always, it isn’t what you say but how you say it.
It’s all in the language.
Indeed, as James himself says, when mocking a weather-forecaster’s misuse of English (plus ca change...) "if the language goes, everything goes".
I could easily fill the rest of this column with quotations.
He has a gift for imagery.
A Rock and Pop Awards Ceremony "had the lasting importance of someone breaking wind in a hurricane".
Perry Como "gave his usual impersonation of a man who has been simultaneously told to say ‘cheese’ and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow".
The Incredible Hulk "has the standard body-builder’s physique, with two sets of shoulders one on top of the other and wings of lateral muscle that hold his arms out from his sides as if his armpits had piles".
James knows that to explain a joke is to kill it.
"Cliff Richard sang a song of his own composition. ‘There’s nothing left between we two,’ he warbled thinly. Us were in luck."
James’ jokes aren’t just jokes for their own sake.
They skewer the truth.
"A sense of humour," wrote James elsewhere, "is common sense dancing".
And in these pages he is applying common sense to a common art form.
Good television is a splendid thing.
To mock bad television is to take the medium seriously and to do the critic’s job which is to discriminate.
And time and again he underlines the truth that applies to every art, including his own, which is that it’s all in the how, not the what.
Indeed, the how is the what.
The spine of the book may be crumbling with age, but the truths on its yellowing pages are as fresh as ever.
However, it is for one previously unremarked passage that I bring the book to your attention today, a paragraph published on April 9, 1978 reviewing an arts programme called Horizon.
"‘You are about to see something absolutely amazing’, said the voice-over ... Amazing it was: a machine reading an ordinary printed book to a blind man.
"The secret was the silicon chip microprocessor, which is a way of connecting together about a quarter of a million transistors in a space the size of your fingernail.
"The result is a Lilliputian computer with endless implications for the future."
If I read that in 1978, I expect I muttered "yeah, sure" to myself and thought no more of it.
When I read it just now, I shook my head and chuckled, wryly.
Books change.
