Five Post-Literate Books you Shouldn't Read
Dave Parriot
Ulysses
The essence of Post-Literate society is that, like a “global village” posited by Jacques Ellul, it trades in conspiracy theories. Ulysses has both in spades. The main character is a Freemason and works in advertising. These lamentable stereotypes are making a comeback thanks to the oligarchs of Dark Tech, who take free speech to ridiculous extremes. The book is also written in a deliberately funny way, with no beginning, middle or end; possibly to imitate the Irish accents of the characters. Indeed, no less an authority than Bernadine Evaristo, winner of the Booker prize, says you shouldn’t waste your time reading books as complicated as this. You would think the anti-intellectual bent of the culture industry would interest journalists talking about ‘post-literacy’ and, in fact, make them reassess their judgment but you’re wrong. Bernadine Evaristo is simply More Literate than Curtis Yarvin because she just is.
INSTEAD OF THAT TRY THIS!!!
Londonland by Jim Babylon
If you want a book which really takes you inside a modern metropolis, try this one on for size. Britain’s premier Anglo-Gaullist and Parliamentary assistant (39 ans) to David Lammy shows you the ropes of “The YooKay” with its oblong-shaped Jamaicans, hook-nosed Arabs, sleazy Indians and stupid Poles. Of course, you aren’t supposed to reference that but unfortunately nobody can remember a single other line from this book including me.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Did you know that 96% of people who watch pornography go on to kill somebody? Perhaps, even themselves? I don’t either. I don’t know what I’m talking about. The fact is, pornography is clearly part of post-literate society. The essence of literate society, by contrast, is a repressive attitude to human sexuality. That’s what books are about, I suppose. But not this book. This book is evil. There is certainly no reason for anyone under the age of 54 to read it. In fact, there is no reason for anyone under the age of maybe 26 to read anything. The way to fight post-literate society is to ban books like this, and mobile phones, which increase the amount of text-based information young people can assimilate. This is the sort of thing you might see under a New Sort of Toryism coalescing around a broadly Anglo-Gaullist platform of street-votes and building nuclear power plants when Nigel Farage manfully decides to make Kemi Badenoch P.M despite winning 400 seats.
INSTEAD OF THAT TRY THIS!
The Collected Sondheim: edited by Maggie Hamm M.P
There’s nothing more pristinely Literate than the concept of Musical Theatre. When you see the posters lining the Tube; the Lion King, Wicked, unbroken stints of 45 years straight: you feel that Brand Britain might (just) resist the YooKay and Slopulism. That most literate period of history, the late 20th century, had as its crowning art a form revolving around audience participation and singing along. Post-Literate society is above all solitary, while also being hostile to the individual, while the essence of Literacy is noise: team-building: the swell of warm bodies on the Sofa or in those Stands at Queen’s Park. Sondheim, the Goethe of this quintessentially literate art, receives an equally capable editor in the form of one of the Tory Party’s rising stars (27k followers on x – boom). What a breath of fresh air it is compared to the “weird” Reform Party, whose leadership do strange things like start businesses and read philosophy, to see someone with such ordinary, down-to-earth hobbies as writing Musical Theatre as a heterosexual adult enter politics.
The Charterhouse of Parma
A novel which satirises the backwards ruling class of a post-revolutionary society desperately trying to turn the clock back to a previous era of history simply has no relevance to modern Britain. Face it. Nothing new is actually happening in the news. Rather, everything is simply collapsing with no replacement at all. There is no actual organic cultural or political change in my lifetime, rather we simply enter the age of ‘Post-Literacy’ and ‘Permacrisis’ the moment my own political and cultural tastes stop being relevant.
INSTEAD OF THAT TRY THIS
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Look, I’d much prefer this slot to go to a topical book written by one of my friends but for whatever reason, every centre-right pundit in Britain has to pretend to be a fan of tedious 19th century realist fiction and children’s literature written by sedulously English authors. Whereas the post-literate Online Right have obscure debates about funny little foreigners, the emerging “high status Right”, connected to the Anglo-Gaullist project of Kemi Badenoch, principally write thinkpieces titled “Why they’re trying to make Winnie the Pooh Woke,” or “the importance of Thomas Hardy” (stick that up yer Malaparte!)
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
No. Just No.
INSTEAD OF THAT TRY THIS!
Moab is my Washpot: Stephen Fry
Whereas postliterate society only really emerged with the creation of TikTok in 2023 (sic), everything before that point was decidedly literate. The late 90s and 2000s were, for sure, the absolute peak of Enlightenment discourse. Step into the TARDIS and travel back in time to the age when real intellectuals dominated public life; and didn’t use emotional arguments.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Whereas in post-literate society, people believe that ‘ideas’ can be ‘debated’, in Literacy we hold to the tried-and-tested concept that behaviour spreads through “social contagion” and there’s no need to discuss what causes it at all. Werther is full of seedy manosphere tropes, its male protagonist never once attempts to “understand the emotional lives of women” and behaves in an egotistical way by putting his feelings above the Harm caused by his actions to those Around Him. The book sparked a wave of suicides documented in the hit Netflix documentary Adolescence something which only ever happened with the invention of social media. This is why we need a ban on books like this for the under 16s, potentially under a new, “progressive Right” Conservative government led by Kemi Badenoch.
INSTEAD OF THAT TRY THIS
The Rest is History
Strangely enough, the concept of Post-Literate Culture does not include the one exclusively oral form of communication resurrected in modernity: podcasts. This is because podcasts are listened to by middle-aged people while TikTok mobile phones are used by the one demographic collectively refusing to vote for centre-right and left-wing parties. When you read Osama Bin Laden’s manifesto to rationally assess its arguments via a TikTok link you are in fact being post-Literate but when you sit in your car listening to other people tell you what to think about the past, you are communing with the humanistic spirit of Boku no Pico della Mirandola. Let Tom Holland and Dr. Dominic Cummings waft you away to the mythic past, covering the proud castles of the Norman lords, the billowing garments of Kublai Khan’s court and the robust spell-casters and battlemages of the Anglo-Celts. A must read.