I was dismayed by Janan Ganesh’s article ‘What and how to read’ (Opinion, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, 3 August). His claim that ‘to read well is to ignore the now’ is a grim formula.

If he were to reject contemporary fiction as it is promoted with big marketing budgets, I would agree with him. Bookstores and book pages are crammed with books that publishers spend their money on, whether they have literary merit or sex with dragons. But if the reading public takes Ganesh’s advice and stops reading anything that hasn’t stood the test of time, it not only destroys the chances of those who may be, or could become, great. It also misunderstands the changing appreciation of readers for fiction.

Take Edna O’Brien, the Irish novelist who died last month at the age of 93. When her first novel The Country Girls was published in 1960 and became a Success of the scandal due to the perception that it was in some ways a ‘dirty’ book. It took decades for her to be perceived as a serious literary novelist, addressing pressing issues about women’s lives in Ireland. However, had her readership waited 20 or more years to decide whether she was worth engaging with, she would not have continued to be published.

Novelists, like everyone else, live in the maelstrom of time, but those of us who write about contemporary life try to extract the essence of our lives today. This was also true for The Great Gatsby as it is from Central England, Caledonian Road And Little things like thisWe must not just look back to the past (on which Britain is inevitably dependent) but deal with the here and now.

The present is too urgent to be left to journalists alone, even one as intelligent as your columnist.

Amanda Craig
Novelist and critic
London NW1, United Kingdom