The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (40 page)

2
Andy Burnham, former Culture Secretary, from a speech to the Public Libraries Association, 9 October 2008.

3
San Jose Mercury News
, 7 June 2009.

4
While the mug is blue, the cat itself is ginger.

5
In the interests of full, Patrick Bateman-like disclosure, here are the brands which make up this breakfast. Grapefruit: Jaffa, pink, organic. Orange juice: Grove Fresh Pure, organic. Bread: Kingsmill, wholemeal, medium-sliced. Low-fat spread: Flora Light. Marmite: n/a. Coffee: Percol Americano filter coffee, fairtrade, organic, strength: 4. Sundays – All-butter croissants: Sainsbury's, ‘Taste the Difference'. Jam: Bonne Maman Conserve, strawberry. I drink the orange juice from a type of Ikea glass called Svepa which, through a process of trial and error, I have determined is the perfect size for consuming a carton of orange juice in equal measures over four successive mornings. Then I go out and disembowel a dog.

6
‘I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in Ecce
Homo
, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “thick oil-free cocoa”, convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest.' Michel Houellebecq,
Public Enemies.

7
I am aware
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
was published long before
The Da Vinci Code
. The Albion Bookshop has since closed down.

8
The book is orange, the cat is black.

9
‘Good Heavens!'

10
‘I need a smoke!'

11
‘Elena, my love, there is something we need to discuss . . .'

1
Formerly
Hancock's Half Hour
, and nothing to do with the Will Smith movie
Hancock
, though no less hilarious. The title changed in 1961 after the departure of Sid James.

2
A knowing transposition? The correct title of Russell's book is
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.

3
George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. For minor comic effect, however, I have left Hancock's words unaltered, thus giving you, the reader, the impression that he, Hancock, thinks George Eliot is a man. Ha ha! Sorry for these nit-picking footnotes, by the way, I know they disrupt the flow, but fans of George Eliot, Tony Hancock, Bertrand Russell
et al
. are an unforgiving lot and it is necessary to reassure them that what they are reading is unimpeachably correct, to the extent that I have compromised, even ruined, the opening of this chapter in order to secure their trust, solely to prevent the wholesale dismissal of a book it has taken me almost five years to write, simply because they, the so-called experts, might mistakenly assume that I don't realise George Eliot was a woman. Of course George Eliot was a woman! But where experts are concerned, it goes without saying that nothing goes without saying.

4
Our university may have considered itself progressive but these eleven words earned him an F (for TELLING THE TRUTH).

5
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.

6
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.

7
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.

8
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
'.

9
‘I made the mistake of going on a TV quiz show and admitting that I'd never read
Middlemarch
. . . and I don't think I'll ever live it down. When I saw I was in trouble I went out and bought it, and I'm planning to read it. I hear it's good.' Salman Rushdie to John Haffenden, 1983.

10
An echo of Roger Hargreaves here. I am thinking particularly of the words with which he draws
Mr Strong
to its droll yet satisfying conclusion – ‘
Ice cream! Ha ha
!'

1
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.

2
‘Uncle Vanya, we must go on. We've no choice! All we can do is go on living . . . all through the endless days and evenings . . . we will get through them . . . whatever fate brings. We'll work for others until we're old, there'll be no rest for us till we die. And when the time comes, we'll go without complaining and we'll remember that we wept, and that we suffered, and that life was bitter, but God will take pity on us! . . .' Anton Chekhov,
Uncle Vanya
, Act 4.

I always wanted to copy out this speech in the ‘Further Comments' box of my annual appraisal form.

3
In fact, the TUC now owns the original handwritten manuscript of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
. It can be browsed in its entirety at www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php.

4
In the late 1960s, the film director Jean-Luc Godard denounced the French film industry as inherently bourgeois and announced that henceforth he would only produce work which conformed to his increasingly Maoist political beliefs. This resulted in several short films that whatever one's opinion of them as cinematic art – and I think they are pretty wonderful – are unambiguously terrible propaganda.
British Sounds
, which Godard made around this time for (of all people) London Weekend Television, consists of uninterrupted footage of the deafening production line at Ford's plant in Dagenham, Essex, a naked woman wandering up and down stairs in a flat, interviews with a group of Ford employees, a generic bunch of hirsute students sitting around and chatting and, finally, a montage sequence of clenched fists punching through paper Union Jack flags. It is laughably pretentious and woefully inscrutable. Had the director been bold enough to screen this for the workers at Dagenham, they would have been more likely to rise up and seize Jean-Luc Godard than the means of production.
British Sounds
was never broadcast by LWT, but these days you can find most of it on YouTube.

1
Morrissey bought two copies of a book by Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums) of The Jam about what a bastard Paul Weller had been to them by splitting the group and abandoning them to fend for themselves. ‘That's not supposed to be very good,' I said. ‘Mm,' smiled Moz, ‘but they're not for me.' Do you think they were intended for Morrissey's estranged Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke (the bass guitar) and Mike Joyce (the drums)? I do.

Princess Diana, in the period when she was separated from Prince Charles and trying to assert her independence by making tentative outings to McDonald's, Harvey Nichols, etc., chose something from the psychology section about the effects of bad fathering on children with eating disorders. The manager of the shop immediately forbade any of us from contacting a tabloid newspaper with this scoop, though I am revealing it here for posterity. Towards the end of the transaction, a paparazzo ran into the shop and tried to snap Diana and, to a far lesser extent, me. The next morning, the manager wrote to Kensington Palace to assure them that this breach of privacy had nothing to do with us and the Princess should feel confident that she could return to our portals whenever she wished, discretion was our watchword, etc., etc. It was that sort of shop.

Dustin Hoffman, though thoroughly amiable, said and did nothing worth noting nor did he buy a book. This should in no way be taken as an implicit criticism of him. One well-known actress, a local resident of the shop, pulled lots of memorable stunts which would probably amuse and enthral you but even twenty years later I am reluctant to publish them and give this individual the slightest whiff of publicity, even though she is no longer with us. It was not unknown for the entire staff to hide in the stockroom rather than deal with her petulant, ill-mannered demands. She was one of the rudest human beings it has ever been my misfortune to encounter but I am not going to reveal her identity here. Let's just say it's a pity her character doesn't get stabbed through the throat with a camera tripod specially adapted for the purpose at the climax of [NAME OF FILM REDACTED BUT IF YOU'VE GOT ANYTHING ABOUT YOU, YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT IS] and leave it at that.

2
Though the event was held at the behest of Booker, Dame Iris may have chosen to read from her most recent novel
The Green Knight
, rather than
The Sea, The Sea
, and I am writing about the wrong book. Thank you, the then-future Mrs Miller, for the declarification.

3
This has an unhappy resonance with the domestic arrangements of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who would invite guests to dinner at their Islington bedsitter and treat them to a National Assistance feast of rice and sardines, with differently-cooked rice and golden syrup for pudding. ‘One of the most bizarre and terrible meals I've ever eaten.' Charles Monteith, former chairman of Faber & Faber.

1
Turn to Appendix One: The List of Betterment, for additional examples of American cult writing, some of which we shall return to later, e.g. 37,
On the Road
; 39,
American Psycho
; 40,
The Dice Man
. I never got round to
Naked Lunch
or
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, both of which may be found in Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read.

2
One evening, on a late shift at the shop, I was standing alone at the ground-floor till. That afternoon, I had been to a funeral. I had come straight to work and so had not had a chance to change out of the black suit, white shirt and black tie I had worn to the service. I was feeling tired and sad.

Customer: (STARTLED) Mr Pink! Er, has anyone said to you . . . ? Me: Yes, they have. Can I help you?

Customer: It's amazing! Let's go to work! Would you mind if I ran and got a couple of mates?

Me: Actually, I have just been to a funeral today, so I'm not really . . .

Customer: Oh yeah, of course. Sorry. (PAUSE.) Can I bring them in tomorrow to have a look at you?

That night, I shaved off the beard.

3
One of the groups I used to go and see at the Garage, Subterania, ULU, etc. was the Auteurs, led by the dyspeptic Luke Haines, a man whose demeanour, onstage and off, is more Ignatius J. Reilly than Iggy Pop. See his hilariously splenetic memoirs
Bad Vibes
and
Post Everything
(both Heinemann) for proof. Haines' album
21
^st
Century Man
contains a song called ‘Love Letter to London' which eloquently addresses those of us who have chosen to leave the city behind. ‘
They said that they loved you / But they used you as a playground / When they were young
,' he hisses.

4
This is a statement of fact. On our line, people read newspapers, or work documents, or watched portable DVD players, or played on games consoles, or played with their phones, or nodded off. Books were relatively thin on the ground. In a year, I never saw one other person with their nose in what might be termed a ‘classic'. In London, on the other hand, I frequently witnessed people on the bus or Tube engrossed in Hardy, Lessing, Flaubert, Einstein, the Koran and, on one occasion, Hitler. Does reading
Mein Kampf
make you a better person than the one playing Angry Birds? Certainly not! But it does make you more interesting. Don't shoot the messenger.

5
I did not realise
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
was a trilogy until I started it, otherwise I could have claimed it as three novels rather than one. Conversely,
The Unnamable
is the final part of a trilogy, also comprising
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
. I knew this in advance and chose to ignore it. Why? Probably because I guessed
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
and
The Unnamable
were better-known quantities, and sounded more impressive, than
The Plains of Cement
and
The Samuel Beckett Trilogy
. Again, don't shoot the messenger, even though, in this case, the messenger and the message are one and the same.

1
This was the gist, at any rate. I don't watch
Loose Women
with a Dictaphone running.

2
The Wikipedia page devoted to inaccuracies in
The Da Vinci Code
lists dozens of specific mis-statements and errors.

3
‘The worst kind of arse gravy' is a tautology, unless Stephen Fry's books represent the best kind.

1
The extracts here are taken from Louise and Aylmer Maude's translation of
Anna Karenina
, which was approved by Tolstoy himself: ‘
Better translators . . . could not be invented
.' I cannot vouch for its fidelity to the cadences of the original Russian but it is a lyrical read and full of personality – though whether it is the author's is a moot point. Translation is a tricky and competitive business, partly because of the personalities of those involved. There can never be a right answer, yet academics and publishers are always pushing for fresh, ‘definitive' editions. In recent years, another crack husband and wife team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, have cornered the market in crisp new versions of works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol
et al
. Their
Anna
was selected as an Oprah Book Club choice and sold several hundred thousand copies. ‘Tolstoy is not reader-friendly,' Pevear told the
New Yorker
in 2005. ‘Tolstoy's style is the least interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar.' So perhaps the lyricism I detected in
Anna Karenina
was the Maudes' and not Tolstoy's after all. But wait! Pevear ‘
has never mastered conversational Russian
', notes the
New Yorker
, and it is his wife who actually speaks the language. I tell you, it's a hall of mirrors. Fundamentally, there is probably no substitute for the original Russian; but unless we accept a substitute we don't get to read Tolstoy at all.