I subscribe to the Mark Twain dictum that a ‘classic’ is a book that ‘people praise but don’t read’.
We are frequently told, for example, that Joyce’s Ulysses is the best novel ever written when, in reality, it is close to unreadable. In cricket, people bang on ad nauseam about CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, a gut-wrenchingly awful book written by an angry man that, again, is a waste of eyesight. Classics, it turns out, have a far higher incidence of crapness than your average pot boiler; it is just that they got the PR right, and people kind of assumed that they were deep.
Hence, like you, I now take great trouble in choosing the books I read and, once started, they get exactly 60 pages to make their point. If they haven’t engaged me by then, the next stop is the Cancer Research shop in Midhurst. No turning back, and no remission for good behaviour.
Sometimes my reading goes really well, and there are times when I beg the book I am reading to grow an extra 50 or 100 pages when I get close to the end, even when there are red hot replacements lining up to be devoured. Sometimes, I embark on something ambitious, something with small print and big concepts, and I delight my non-graduate brain by both getting it, and sticking with it till the end. Either way, it is a ritual of delight for me. Every day 30 pages. Every week, a new start. Every year 50 books. I cannot even begin to describe how important they are to me.
But right now, I am in the reading equivalent of purgatory, with four books on my bedside table that have all conspired to make me either cross or depressed. One is by a cricketer who was plagued not only with anxiety and mental illness, but also with the worst ghost writer in the Northern hemisphere. The next is by a nature writer who moved house to escape his own depression and ended up making his entire readership of twelve miserable in revenge. The third is a woman, yes that woman, who walked round a long-distance footpath with her ill husband and made me want to go and lie down in the middle of the A272 with her relentless missing of the point. And finally, Darren McGarvey’s excellent Poverty Safari, which everyone lucky enough to live in a nice house should read, which just introduces you to a Britain you’d rather not know about.
Last night, in despair, I grabbed an old book called Painting Rainbowsfrom the shelf at the top of the stairs, and settled under the duvet to try something completely different. To be fair to it, it kept me awake, but only because it was so breathtakingly awful that it defied putting down. A good book, they say, is three things: a good story, well told, which works. This was a rubbish story that had the temerity to call itself a reworking of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (still the best short book ever written, for my money), based on New Labour and the Millenium Dome. It was shockingly badly told, actually so badly that I recommend you finding a copy and trying it yourself, with its shallow characters, laboured metaphors and twists in the plot that were more obvious than Jean-Claude Juncker’s lunchtime snifters. And in no sense, even the most charitable one, did it work. I utterly adored it.
Its author was one Roger Morgan-Grenville, back in 1998, and there is a loosebound copy that I will wing to the first reader of these blogs who promises in a witty way to read every last word of it and then write a review which will be published for all to see. Trevor doesn’t count, as he uses all my books as loo paper already.
Tonight I will revert to an old favourite (Asterix and Cleopatra) but I cannot tell you how proud I am of the literary steps I have taken in those 21 years.
It almost makes me feel like giving Ulysses another go. Almost.
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