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

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СКАЧАТЬ Office by Charles Bukowski

      The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

      The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

      ‘Let us now take wage labour.’

       The Communist Manifesto

      ‘They had given up everything that makes life good and beautiful in order to carry on a mad struggle to acquire money which they would never be sufficiently cultured to properly enjoy … They knew that the money they accumulated was foul with the sweat of their brother men, and wet with the tears of little children, but they were deaf and blind and callous to the consequences of their greed. Devoid of every ennobling thought or aspiration, they grovelled on the filthy ground, tearing up the flowers to get at the worms.’

       The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

      ‘This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.’

       Post Office

      I was sitting in Tiny Tim’s Tearoom reading The Communist Manifesto, while I waited for my mother to finish her shopping.

      ‘Can I get you anything else?’ enquired the proprietor.

      ‘Just the bill, please,’ I said.

      ‘Right you are, comrade,’ she said. I paid for my bourgeois scone and went to wait outside.

      The book I was holding was not the little red book but a slim, modishly-designed paperback from a series called ‘Great Ideas’. Its cover blasted out the manifesto’s rousing final declaration in embossed, faux-utilitarian type: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’ Standing in the street, book in hand, it was hard not to appear as though you were trying to make a point. I tried to adopt an air of intrigued neutrality and not burning revolutionary zeal.

      My mother arrived, and catching sight of the cover, uttered the reproach she still reserves for special moments of filial disappointment.

      ‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said. I slipped the book in my pocket.

      Actually, I quite liked the idea of being perceived as a communist. I didn’t even object to being called ‘comrade’. The last time I had affected a similar display of left-wing solidarity was as a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, my blue fisherman’s cap and enamel Lenin badge attracted more cries of ‘wanker’ than ‘comrade’. But that was then. The old ideological schisms were dead. No one cared enough to call you a wanker any more.

      Nestling in my pocket next to The Communist Manifesto was the List of Betterment, which I carried round with me like Dumbo and his feather.

      THE LIST OF BETTERMENT

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Post Office – Charles Bukowski
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – Patrick Hamilton
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

      In making this final cut, I had tried not to think too hard about what ought to be there and to let the heart take over. I only wanted to read books I wanted to read. Here, though, was the ink-blot, the echocardiogram. What did the reading say? What did it say about me?

      Well, with one exception, these were all novels – six British, three American, two Russian, one Irish, one German.^fn1 Three women, eleven men. My internationalist credentials were intact but my gender bias could use some work.

      fn1. This is a headache. I have divided the books along these lines but a similar exercise using the writers’ nationalities would produce a markedly different result. Post Office, for example, is a distinctively American novel by an author who was, strictly speaking, German. Somerset Maugham, whose stories are synonymous with England and Englishness, was born, passed much of his life in and died in France. The Communist Manifesto is the work of a couple of Prussians. Murdoch, Tressell and Beckett were native Dubliners, but would one categorise The Sea, The Sea or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as Irish novels? I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. No doubt someone from the TLS will be in touch.

      These were all books I had told people I’d read when, actually, I hadn’t.

      These were books by authors whose work I was unfamiliar with, with the exception of Beckett (plays – short) and Austen (Emma – as a student, could not recall anything about it), not that that had prevented me from giving the opposite impression, often to myself. Also, all the authors were dead.

      There was nothing here that could be described as a thriller.

      There СКАЧАТЬ