The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a potato on demand. Yet I was not satisfied.

      One of the certainties I found myself questioning was my belief in art. For as long as I could remember, from childhood on, I never doubted that ‘great’ books or ‘fantastic’ singles or ‘brilliant’ films were the prerequisites of a balanced and full existence. Their presence in my life as an adolescent and a young adult was constant and their absence unimaginable. If I needed to go without food so I could buy an important record or novel, I went without food – the hungry consumer. But lately I had begun to ask myself whether this loyalty had amounted to anything more than a shed-load of stuff; two shed-loads in fact, one at the bottom of the garden in a bona fide shed and the other in a storage unit up the road.

      However meagre my spiritual beliefs, however much I toed the modern secular line, my faith in art had never faltered. Culture could come in many forms, high, low or somewhere in-between: Mozart, The Muppet Show, Ian McEwan.^fn5 Very little of it was truly great and much of it would always be bad, but all of it was necessary to live, to be fully alive, to frame the endless, numbered days and make sense of them.^fn6

      fn5. If one were to plot a graph where the ‘x’ axis is ‘high culture’ and the ‘y’ axis is ‘low culture’, with Mozart at the top of the former and The Muppet Show at the far end of the latter, Ian McEwan’s corpus would perfectly bisect the two – the Bonne Maman Conserve in a Wonderloaf baguette.

      fn6. In a neat QED, I have stolen the phrase ‘endless, numbered days’ from the title of the best Iron & Wine album Our Endless Numbered Days.

      Lately, though, I had been feeling like a sucker. As I contemplated the stacks of CDs and VHS tapes, old theatre programmes and superhero comics, wearing a fading t-shirt for some group that had probably split up, they seemed to represent the opposite of the enlightenment they had originally promised. Like me, they were nudging obsolescence. I saw I had got it wrong. I had confused ‘art’ with ‘shopping’.

      Books, for instance. I had a lot of those. There they all were, on the shelves and on the floor, piled up by the bed and falling out of boxes. Moby-Dick, Possession, Remembrance of Things Past, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, a few Pevsners, that Jim Thompson omnibus, The Child in Time, six more Ian McEwan novels or novellas, two volumes of his short stories … These books did furnish the room, but they also got in the way. And there were too many I was aware I had not actually read. As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, ‘It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.’^fn7

      fn7. From ‘On Reading and Books’. Though it was written a hundred and fifty years ago, this essay by Schopenhaeur still has much to tell us. Also, for nineteenth-century German philosophy, it is significantly funnier than you might expect.

      These books became the focus of a need to do something. They were a reproach – wasted money, squandered time, muddled priorities. I shall make a list, I thought. It will name the books I am most ashamed not to have read – difficult ones, classics, a few outstanding entries in the deceitful Miller library – and then I shall read them. I was thirty-five years old. Ten books maybe, ten books before my fortieth birthday. Yes, ten books in five years; one book every six months; that seemed like an easily achievable goal and vaguely decadent when you held down a full-time job and were still unable to drive to the supermarket to buy a chicken you didn’t know how to cook, because you’d learned to do neither, because you’d been too busy shopping. Excellent! Books first, driving lessons later.

      For the next couple of years I did nothing with this plan except congratulate myself on it. I thought about the list a little and talked about it a lot. In the pub, at parties, over lunch, I would sketch out the idea and coquettishly disclose a title or two: The Master and Margarita, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch. And each time somebody responded with a disbelieving: ‘You’ve never read The Master and Margarita / Pride and Prejudice / Middlemarch?!’, I would chortle at the effect my words had created, and thus pull a little further away from ever beginning the books in question. Better to speak volumes than to read them.

      And so two and a half years passed. Our son arrived. I was halfway to forty and I had read precisely none of the books I could have read in that time, now lost. I hadn’t even drawn up the list. There was no list. It existed only in my head, occasionally summoned into being for an easy laugh, the contents of which could be reshuffled as circumstance or listener demanded. It didn’t matter anyway, because it was all a load of shit.

      Then two things happened.

      I was talking about the list yet again with an old friend from university, in that manner of ironic bluff and counter-bluff reserved for all men who were students in the 1980s, and in their hearts are students still.

      ‘Two and a half years gone,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got two and a half years left. I’ll never do it! I’ll never read Middlemarch!’

      ‘No,’ said my friend. ‘You won’t.’

      He meant it. He was neither bluffing, nor calling my bluff. He knew I would not do it, was certain of it, based on his familiarity with my character, his understanding of my family and work commitments, and his appreciation of how tired we all seemed to be these days.

      And I knew he was right.

      (I should also add that, when we had first discussed this idea, my friend went out and bought Middlemarch, bought and read it and, for the record, enjoyed it. He may possibly have done this because I told him – falsely – that I had already bought, read and enjoyed it myself.)

      The second thing that made me stir myself was the aforementioned Sudoku.

      Somewhere near Gillingham on a dank November evening, stuck between stations, scratching digits into a box like a tin monkey, after a day at work doing much the same thing in Excel, I experienced an epiphany: Why was I wasting my life like this? Words were my passion, not numbers. And there suddenly rose before me, as if to holler, STOP!, the ghosts of all the printed matter I had consumed in the preceding weeks and months: culture supplements, heritage rock magazines, photocopies and blurbs, Private Eye and the Radio Times, prescriptions and descriptions, print-outs and spreadsheets and Sudoku, Sudoku, killer Sudoku.

      Something had to change and I had to change it.

      So when Alex and I went to Broadstairs the following day, the appearance of The Master and Margarita there on the shelf of the Albion Bookshop seemed providential. Here was my chance to make good. It was a wild and inspiring and faith-renewing ride and when it was over I wanted to try another one. Plus now I was someone who had read The Master and Margarita. I felt like I had put something back.

      Middlemarch, then, was the book I chose to tackle next. But Middlemarch was a much bigger dipper than The Master and Margarita. If that had been a fairground ride, this was like a trip on Space Mountain™ – a formidable test of nerve, and one I wanted to get off way before the end.^fn8

      fn8. Not the sort of comparison F.R. Leavis would make, eh readers? Actually, Frank much preferred Nemesis™ at Alton Towers, which he described in a letter to friends as both ‘physically and conceptually rigorous in the Greek classical tradition’ and ‘wicked – I totally spilt my drink and crisps’.

      If War and Peace is the most distinguished unread novel in Russian literature, and Remembrance of Things Past its even lengthier French counterpart, then Middlemarch has a modest claim to being the equivalent СКАЧАТЬ