The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (2 page)

Recently, BBC TV broadcast the first series of
My Life in Books
, in which well-known personalities are interviewed about five special books which have shaped their lives. The day after the first episode, I was poking around a secondhand bookshop – nothing remarkable about that, as you'll see – when I chanced on a volume with the mirror-image title,
The Books in My Life
. This was no more than a coincidence.
The Books in My Life
was published fifty years ago; I had never heard of it and I doubt the producers of
My Life in Books
had either. However, on closer inspection,
The Books in My Life
was similar to
The Year of Reading Dangerously
in a number of significant ways. Just as in this book, the author of
The Books in My Life
discourses at length on the stories he read as a child, the influence of fiction on his imagination, the conundrum of personal taste, the problem of ‘great books'. He incorporates letters and diary excerpts into the text. There are appendices which catalogue the author's favourite titles; there is even a satirical, though not unserious, chapter entitled ‘Reading in the Toilet'. And, with a certain inevitability, the writer's name is Miller. Somewhat spooked, I bought the book. On the up side, at least he wasn't called Andy.

The Books in My Life
is the work of Henry Miller, author of
Tropic of Cancer
and other racy
romans à clef
. In the opening chapter, he offers a simple phrase to sum up the authors or books that had remained with him over the years: ‘
They were alive and they spoke to me!
' I cannot think of a more eloquent definition of greatness than that and I borrow it from my predecessor and semi-namesake with gratitude. It encapsulates the type of book I was hunting for during my year of dangerous reading, books that were alive and that spoke to me while I tried to deal with the trials of everyday existence: commuting, working in an office, being a new dad, getting older.
The Year of Reading Dangerously
, then, is a book about great books – reading them, writing them – and how life can get in the way. Whether it is great in itself will depend on whether, as you turn the pages, the machine begins to hum; on whether it comes alive and speaks to you.

Fig. 3: ‘Indubitably the vast majority of books overlap one another.'

(birthday card from Julian Cope)

The first decade of the twenty-first century was, superficially, a good time to be a book lover. You heard about a new book from a friend or on a television book club. Maybe a customer review caught your eye. You purchased the book from a superstore, or you bought the audio edition to listen to in the car or at the gym. Over a glass of wine, you talked about it with your friends or reading group. How did it make you feel? Were you broadly in agreement? Later, perhaps you saw the author discuss the same book at a sold-out event or literary festival. You raised your hand and asked a question; you got involved. And if you had the technical know-how, it became possible to achieve all of the above
virtually
. You read off the screen of an ereader or a tablet computer and shared your thoughts on the Internet. You tweeted and blogged, on the train or up the top of a mountain. The humble book was transformed from a clumpy bundle of paper and glue into a pass-key that unlocked a variety of interactive book-based experiences, most of which involved the chatty participation of other users. In comparison, the more traditional method of reading – i.e. sitting alone, looking at lines of words until the pages ran out – seemed distinctly starchy and pre-millennial.

In short, this was a period in which the phrase ‘you're never alone with a good book' started to sound less like a promise and more like a threat.

However, it wasn't all stimulating debate, dry white wine and a healthy queue in the signing tent. At the same time these innovations were captivating a certain class of reader, libraries and bookshops were struggling to survive. Ever since
the advent of the big chain bookstores in the 1980s, with their armchairs and coffee shops, local independent booksellers have found it hard to compete. Now the chains' market dominance was threatened in turn by the twin forces of the big-box store – who offered deep discounts on the most popular titles, depriving booksellers of a vital source of income – and the Internet which, either in the guise of an online bookseller or as a provider of downloadable ebooks, can pulverise a bricks and mortar store in terms of stock. An average bookshop might hold a few thousand titles; the Internet provides instant access to these, plus millions more no bookshop could possibly contain, however super the store, comfy the chair or aromatic the coffee. Independent or otherwise, the dedicated bookseller started to vanish from the high street.

Meanwhile, public libraries continued to lose funding and the support of the local authorities who ran them. Budgets for books dwindled away. For a while, it seemed as though these institutions might survive as ‘community hubs' – Internet terminals were installed and politicians made speeches where they referred to the library of the future as ‘Facebook-3D'.
²
However, in the wake of the credit crunch and the austerity cuts that followed, many libraries were deemed a luxury the community could no longer afford. Librarians were told their expertise was dispensable and that their roles could be performed by unpaid volunteers. Library closures gathered pace. Accusations of ‘cultural vandalism' abounded; legal actions were launched. Some were successful and some were not. School libraries suffered a similar fate. In bankrupt California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to scrap new school textbooks in favour of ebook and Internet access as the state's main portal to knowledge: ‘It's nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form.'
³

Not very long ago, my family and I were staying at a cottage in the country. In the mornings, I worked on the second draft of this book – which was overdue – but in the afternoons we would explore the surrounding countryside or drive to the nearest town to pick up supplies from the local shop. The cottage was an authentic retreat and had no telephone or Internet access. One morning, I needed to double-check something I had written about
Moby-Dick
in Chapter VI. However, my copy of
Moby-Dick
was at home on the Shelf of Betterment. Never mind, I thought, if we go into town this afternoon, I'll find a copy and look up what I need.

But
Moby-Dick
was nowhere to be found. The town's bookshop had closed down the previous year and the library did not hold it in stock. I asked the volunteer behind the desk if I could use one of their Internet terminals but she told me their server was down and they weren't expecting it to be restored for several days. Finally, in a big-box store on the ring-road, I located Melville's great novel. It was one of a hundred classic books in the
Nintendo 100 Classic Book Collection
, a cartridge for the Nintendo DS handheld games console. I don't know if you have ever tried to read
Moby-Dick
on a DS in a Tesco car park – I doubt you have – but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamour of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.

I accept that this story illustrates that it is technically possible to buy a copy of
Moby-Dick
on what passes for the high street. It might also be advanced as further evidence of the adaptability of the book. But to me it demonstrates how marginal good books might become in the future. Surely
Moby-Dick
deserves to be something more than just a sliver of content on a screen? I feel much the same when I see books piled up on pallets in big-box stores, like crates of beer or charcoal briquettes, and I am shocked to be reminded that there is nothing intrinsically special about books unless we invest them with values other than ‘value' and we create spaces in which to do it.

Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church.

So it has been my mixed fortune to be occupied with this book about books in a period of frenetic cultural upheaval, with further trouble ahead. Several competing forces threaten to alter the way we think about reading, what we read and how we read it – the Internet, bookstores, libraries, our governments. Meanwhile, the last decade has given us blogs, book groups, festivals, all the chatter of the social network, developments which, while they may indeed be progress, are not the thing itself. They are not reading.

Having begun on the back foot, let me finish on the front. I have wasted enough ink telling you what this book is not. Over the course of a year or so, the slow process of reading these fifty great books, and the other two, gave me back my life. The actions I describe here, inspired by a particular volume or a passage of writing, were often the direct result of chatting with no one except myself. I was my own 3D Facebook; number of friends: one. And therefore, as you read this book, please consider it a passionate defence of those two elements I consider most at risk from our neophiliac desire to read fashionably, publicly, ever more excitedly: patience and solitude.

Because, when you stop and think about it, the rest is time off.

Andy Miller

The Garden of England

Summer 2013

‘Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.

What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.

Such a life has not been granted me.'

Michel Houellebecq,
Whatever
(
Extension du domaine de la lutte
)

‘I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world – this world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.'

Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Russian Literature

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

My life is nothing special. It is every bit as dreary as yours.

This is the drill. Every weekday morning, the alarm wakes us at 5.45am, unless our son wakes us earlier, which he sometimes – usually – does. He is three. When we moved into this house a year ago, we bought a Goodman programmable radio and CD player for the bedroom. The CD player, being cheap, is temperamental about what it will and will not play. When it works, which it sometimes – usually – doesn't, the day begins with ‘I Start Counting', the first track on
Fuzzy-Felt Folk
, an arch selection of children's folk tunes on Trunk Records. (For a few weeks after we got the CD player, we experimented with alternative wake-up calls, from Sinatra, to the Stooges, to Father Abraham and The Smurfs, but the fun of choosing a different disc every night quickly turned into another chore, one more obstacle between us and our hearts' desire – falling asleep.) ‘I Start Counting' is a lilting and gentle song, a scenic shuttle-bus ride back to Morningtown, and the capricious CD player seems to like it. So we have settled for ‘I Start Counting'. ‘
This year, next year, sometime, never . . .
'

But on those mornings when the CD won't take, the radio kicks in instead. These are the days that begin at 5.45am not with a soft dawn chorus of ‘I Start Counting', but with the brutal twin reveille of
Farming Today
at ear-splitting volume and the impatient yelling of our only son, who has invariably been awake for some time. ‘Is it morning yet?' he enquires, over and over again at the top of his lungs. We lie there, shattered. Someone somewhere is milking a cow.

I stumble downstairs and make a cup of tea. In the time it takes for the kettle to boil, I put some brioche in a bowl for my son – his favourite – and swallow a couple of vitamin supplements, cod liver oil for dry skin, and high-strength calcium (plus vitamin D) for bones. The calcium tablets are a hangover from a low-fat diet I put myself on four years ago, wanting to get in shape before Alex was born, one of the side effects of which, other than dramatic weight loss, was to make my shins ache from a real or phantom calcium deficiency. The pains soon went but the tablets have become another habit. At that time, my job was making me miserable. For too long I compensated by eating and drinking too much, wine at lunchtime and beer in the pub after work, with the result that for the first time, in my early thirties, I had become a fat man with a big, fat face. I shed forty lbs. and have successfully kept the weight off, so that now, combined with the effects of sustained sleep deprivation, my face is undeniably gaunt. Acquaintances who haven't seen me for a while look concerned and wonder whether I'm ok. ‘Have you been ill?' they ask. I love it when they do this.