When I found my book on Blinkist I wasn’t sure how affronted to be

Whenever I pass through the Smart Thinking section of a bookshop, I invariably think of the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Calasso, who died in 2021, was an author of many uncategorisable works of non-fiction, whose sprawling oeuvre examined the mythic underpinnings of modernity. As the owner and figurehead of the Milanese publishing house Adelphi Edizioni, he presided over Italian literature like an impossibly cerebral sovereign.
I knew Calasso for the last few years of his life – he took an interest in my writing, and Adelphi published my first book in translation – and though we met a handful of times, I was too much in awe of him to have ever been on anything more than cordial terms.
A couple of years before his death, Calasso visited Dublin for a public interview; the afternoon before the event we went for a walk around the city and stopped by Hodges Figgis so that he could buy a book he’d been looking for. In the window display I spotted his recently published The Unnameable Present. He was pleased to see it, and asked in what part of the shop’s vast interior he might find it shelved. I was slightly at a loss. His books were, famously, resistant to generic classification and would have been out of place no matter where you shelved them. (He told me once that his book Tiepolo Pink – a series of digressive, dauntingly erudite riffs on the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, known for his Rococo ceiling frescoes – was categorised by Amazon under Interior Decor.)
“Well,” I said doubtfully, “I’ve seen my book in the Smart Thinking section here, so, if I had to guess, you might find yours there too.”
“Smart Thinking!” he said. “What is this Smart Thinking?”
I told him it was a catch-all bookseller category, in the English-speaking world, for the sort of non-fiction books that were based on big, buzzy ideas and aimed at a broad popular readership. A lot of these books hovered around a crowded intersection between business, self-help, pop-psychology and popular history. These were the sort of books you’d get the gist of from listening to a half-hour podcast interview with the author: vehicles for information and ideas, without much if any literary intent.
Calasso was a famously serious man but he seemed to derive a small, private amusement from learning of the existence of this quasi-genre and of the fact that he might be considered part of it, even if only for the purpose of shelving.
Later that afternoon we had tea at his hotel, and during a lull in the conversation – he had been telling me how I should approach my second book: advice which I was honoured to be given and knew I would never take – he squinted across at me over his teacup.
“Mark,” he said. “Remind me. What was this phrase you told me, about the books?”
“Smart Thinking,” I said.
He repeated the words with an air of bewildered enchantment, italicising them in his Florentine lilt. “Smart … Thinking.”
With increasing frequency these days, I hear the ghost of Roberto Calasso intone these words in my ear. Specifically, I hear him whenever I open Instagram and am presented with an ad for an online service called Blinkist. Blinkist takes non-fiction titles, grinds them down into a dense, informational mulch and presents them to its subscribers in the form of 15-minute audio and text “explainers”.
It’s a bit like a literary version of those protein sludges marketed at people who believe they don’t have time to eat lunch.
In a very funny and acute essay about Blinkist a few years back, Rosa Lyster positioned it as an artefact of a culture drastically over-invested in the notion of productivity.
“Each text,” she wrote, “is mined for its actionable takeaways, even when the actionable takeaways should prompt the user to snap his laptop over his knee immediately, as in the summary of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.” (Odell’s book, for those who haven’t read the 15-minute summary on Blinkist, is the most prominent recent polemic against precisely that culture of productivity.)
Blinkist is, in this sense, a reductio ad absurdum of the entire Smart Thinking quasi-genre, whereby a book is a vehicle for information and information is, in turn, a means toward increasing one’s own value within an economy of knowledge and skill.
One advertisement for the service offers you the chance to “Unlock the genius behind ChatGPT” by reading OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s “Top 9 Life Changing Reads”. Even if you grant the exceptionally flimsy proposition that Altman is a genius, the suggestion that it might be possible to reverse engineer a person’s mind by reading the books that influenced them is, frankly, bizarre. But it’s bizarre in a way that reveals something crucial about a certain approach to reading as a means to an end – as a way of realising, or “unlocking”, one’s own potential.
I’m not such an inveterate aesthete as to suggest that reading should be an entirely useless pleasure. In fact one of the reasons I read as much as I do – and I suspect this is true of most people who read a lot – is a vague sense that the next book could, in fact, change my life, even if only in some minutely subtle way. But the pleasure of reading is also its great value: the experience of witnessing a writer’s thoughts unfolding and fashioning themselves on the page, and of thinking along with them, often in ways that lead away from the book at hand into previously undiscovered places.
Consuming a Blinkist summary is to actual reading as generating a text on Chat GPT is to actual writing. And the best books, the most life-changing books, cannot be reduced to takeaways any more than they can be generated by software; like the best conversations, they go on being unresolved, and fundamentally irreducible to summarisation.
When I did a search on Blinkist and found that my own first book was available to its subscribers in informational-mulch form, I wasn’t sure how affronted to be. On one hand, I’d hate to think I’d written the sort of book that could be boiled down to a series of actionable insights. But on the other hand, a further search revealed that a “summary of key ideas” is also available for Ulysses. (Finnegans Wake remains as yet uncracked by Blinkist.)
Calasso, as far as I can see, has avoided the fate of summarisation. I don’t imagine he’d be disappointed to be overlooked by Blinkist but I’m a little sad I’ll never get to tell him about its existence.