"This book has really saved my life," Paul Gascoigne once said of his
autobiography, Gazza: My Story. The great midfielder was speaking
metaphorically of course – but his assertion begged another urgent
question: could a book save one's life in literal terms, too?
Specifically, could it stop a bullet?
It's exactly this question that American short-story collective
Electric Literature set about answering last week. In a video posted
on YouTube, Electric asked, via its spokesman, comedian Tom Shillue:
"Of all the big books that came out in 2010, which would be the most
likely to protect you in the event of a shooting?"
Up before the firing squad were David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns
of Jacob de Zoet (480 pages); Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (562); Rick
Moody's The Four Fingers of Death (736); Adam Levin's The Instructions
(1,030); Joshua Cohen's Witz (800); and a Kindle (several thousand
kilobytes).
With more than 1,000 pages, and a solid hardback cover, you might
think The Instructions would be the most reliable
book-cum-body-armour. You'd be wrong. The bullet blows a hole so big
Shillue can shove his finger through it – and he's appalled.
Franzen's Freedom doesn't fare any better. Meticulously proof-read it
may have been – Franzen had the first editions recalled because of a
minor error – but it's certainly not bullet-proof. Indeed,
post-shooting, the book looks like those withdrawn first editions:
pretty pulped.
The Kindle, The Thousand Autumns, and Moody's The Four Fingers of
Death – "aptly named", Shillue points out – are similarly
unprotective. Thank heavens, then, for Joshua Cohen's Witz. "It's
almost intact!" notes Shillue, picking pieces of bullet out of the
back pages.
Of course, if you really wanted some surefire literary armour, you'd
be best off putting a Bible in your breast pocket. In 2007, a US
soldier serving in Iraq claimed he was saved from a sniper bullet by
none other than the Good Book.
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