100 books in a year. Six to ten.

I have decided to read 100 books this year. Is that far too many? Just enough? Laughably few? Let's find out together. 

Last time I talked about books 1 to 5, which you can find here.

And now - books 6 to 10. 

Berzerker - Adrian Edmondson

I've been a fan of The Young Ones since it first crashed into my life in the early 80s. It made a huge impression and I've followed its main players ever since. Adrian Edmondson is, as I'm sure you're aware, one of those players. 

And what a book. This is an absolute delight, and very quickly became one of my Favourite Things Ever. It is a wise and wonderful tale, told with compassion and wit, bristling with playful prose. One of the best things is, he doesn't tell his life story in strict chronological order. Good. I generally can't be bothered with autobiographies where we spend the first 200 pages watching them grow up in a council house. Get to the bit where you're famous, please. 

That said, I loved all the early life stuff too. He's a great writer, and there's a loose, conversational style to the whole affair that holds your attention. It's like sitting there, listening to a very funny man tell you astounding stories until the sun goes down. He has an amazing ability to demonstrate the gentle warmth and melancholy of an older man alongside the still burning flame of his earlier, crazier self. 

When I read most books, a little bit of me is watching the page count, delighting at the achievement as I near the end. Especially this year, as every book gets me one closer to my target. However. While reading this book, every page closer to the end made me a little sadder, that this beautiful, joyful book was going to come to an end.

Elevation - Stephen King

A brisk and breezy King book, which I flew through in a couple of evenings. Don't be fooled into thinking I'm a fast reader, though. I'm painfully slow. It's just that this was nice and short - practically a short story by King's standards. 

It's a relatively recent work, and the old boy seems to have lightened up somewhat. My main knowledge of King is of the early stuff - The Shining, Firestarter, It, all that lot. So I'm used to the relentlessly 'horror' fixated version of Stephen King, where the reward for being a lovely, decent character is that you suffer a horrible but extremely well described death. 

It's nice to see that the decades have mellowed him. This is positive, affirming and funny. Maybe he's been like this for years, while I wasn't looking. I guess I'll find out when I read more.

Lolita - Vladamir Nabakov

What a peculiar book. I'm very much glad I have read this, but I often wasn't glad to be actually reading it at the time. Not because it's badly written. Quite the opposite, if anything. 

As you'll probably know, this is 'that book' that Sting was singing about in his famous song "I am trying ever so hard not to sleep with this schoolgirl". It's about a man who fancies under age girls, and it's told from his point of view. Bonkers, right? But also fascinating. Not least because you spend a lot of the time thinking, "Who allowed this book? It feels like this book shouldn't be allowed. Am I allowed to be reading this book?"

The book is inherently critical of it's pervy protagonist, but that's subtext. The actual stuff of the writing is the narrator describing how much he fancies Lolita. And he's very good at describing things and making them sound sexy. Stop it, narrator. Socks aren't sexy. Except you make them sound like they are, and you're very good with words. God damn it.

Anyway, the main message is 'don't go out with underage teenage girls'. Never mind the moral issues - they sound like absolute nightmares. They'll be very mean to you, and say some very hurtful things, and mock all the stuff that you think is cool, and you'll never get a handle on their moods. 

(But also do mind the moral issues, obviously).

You Are What You Watch - Walter Hickey

I like books about popular culture and how it reflects ideologies, and how our brains make sense of stuff. So I found lots in this book to like. It's fun when books talk about television, because I've seen lots of television, and so I feel less stupid for a while. 

This is a bit of a mess, though. If it had a focus, I couldn't work out what it was. There'd be an amazing bit on how out brains interpret the visual information sent by our eyes, and how that explains how we tell stories. And then some seemingly aimless wandery nonsense about statistics that I didn't care about. 

Was it just that I wasn't properly paying attention? Well let's not rule that out. But I came away with the impression that the brief was 'write down everything that you've ever thought, referring occasionally to films and TV, until you hit the word count." If that was the brief, then well done, mission accomplished.

A Study In Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle

Another shameful omission. I had never read a Sherlock Holmes story in my life. Ridiculous, eh? I look like the kind of person who should have a big collection of all the Sherlock Holmes books, sitting on my shelf in the correct order, next to my replica pipe and magnifying glass. Well. Turns out I am as much of a nerd as you think, but also much lazier than you realised.

So I made my first foray into the world of Conan Doyle. I know about Holmes, of course. I've seen various films and TV adaptations, most strikingly the recentish Moffat/Cumberbach incarnation. All very enjoyable, but I knew they were modernised to appeal to my easily distracted brain. What would the book be like? Full of... I don't know, old stuff. Long sentences. Horses. People staring at wallpaper for fun.

Anyway, it's very good, obviously. Conan Doyle's prose style is way snappier than I'd expected. I was amazed that Holmes was every bit as weird and waspish as Cumberbach's version. He was funny. Alert. Not the stuffy old patrician I'd expected. Also, the book takes a thoroughly bizarre turn half way through and jumps to a seemingly different story, in America, featuring totally different characters. It's as if David Lynch has taken over, and it's great. And then at the end it goes back to Sherlock Holmes saying, "So anyway that's why all the murders happened," and that's the end of the book. Glorious. 

That's all for now. See you next time, for five more books I read and at least partially understood.

100 books in a year. One to five

 Afternoon all.

Now, here's a thing about me. I've got a degree in English Literature. Got it in the 90s. And it's basically ridiculous that I have it. I am very poorly read, and spent a lot of the time during my degree hiding from lectures and doing anything I could to avoid reading books. I know - ridiculous. Three years to read! Imagine the pleasure of that. And I ran away from it. 

Anyway, this year I decided to do something about it. I set myself the task of reading 100 books over the year. That feels like a lot, and enough to redress some of the balance and stop me feeling like a total fraud. They won't all be 'literature', as you'll see, and in fact some of them will be complete rubbish. But they will be, indisputably, books. 

I started this in January. A smarter man would have thought to chronicle the journey immediately. But I thought of it now, several months later. Maybe I was subconsciously afraid that I'd instantly fail, and so was saving myself the accompanying blushes. I still could fail, of course. But I've made a decent start. And, lucky you, I'm going to tell you all about it, here in this blog.

Here's the first five I read.

Doctor Who: Myths and Legends - Richard Dinnick

Well, we're off to a pretty ropey start. This isn't going to impress the ghosts of my past, is it? This is less 'diving into literature' and more 'paddling in the shallow end where you always have been, reading about Daleks.'

Well, we're going to have to live with it, because it was fun and I enjoyed it. Doctor Who books are the reason I started reading in the first place, back there in class 1:1 at middle school. Nine years old and amazed at the joy of this mad, creative universe, where vampires tear space apart and techno wizards play with the laws of time. 

That sense of wonder has never gone away, and I'm glad I can still enjoy myself as if I was a child. 

Carry On Jeeves - PG Wodehouse

There are loads of authors names who linger at the fringes of my consciousness. I know the words, and have a dim idea of what they are like. But I've never bothered to actually read their stuff. PG Wodehouse sits very firmly in that category.

Or sat, should I say, because now I've read one. Who knew it was so easy? You just decide to read it, and then it happens, and then you've changed from being a person who never read it, to a person who has. Amazing.

After reading it, I very excitedly told everyone else how good and funny it is. And they all looked at me as if to say, "We know. Literally everyone on earth except you has read it. And if they haven't, they've watched the TV show." Well, fair enough. But it was new to me, and I was popping with happiness. I mean, I'd had a vague sense of the posh clever butler and his dim master, but now I could see the elegance and music of the writing. It was like finding the source of a river from which all modern comedy flows. Wonderful.

Gwendy's Button Box - Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

My mate Gary lent me this. I was delighted for two reasons. One - it was short. I could tell just by holding the thing as he passed it to me. "Excellent," I thought, "this will tick one of my 100 books off really quickly." This was early days, remember, when I was wondering if my reading target might have been foolhardy and optimistic.

Reason two is pretty basic - I like Stephen King. He's one of the few authors I do know well. He's easy to read, and that's a major plus for me. I have no interest in wrestling through clever prose, where the guiding principle seems to be 'the more confusing my sentences, the cleverer my text." Maybe that makes me less smart. If so, I'm reasonably OK with it. 

This book tells a fun, engaging story, with no messing about. I cared about the people and enjoyed the things that happened. Well done King, and whoever Richard Chizmar is. 

The Man Who Was Thursday - GK Chesterton

Behold! Literature. I think. 

So, full disclosure. I was inspired to read this by watching the film Peter's Friends. I love that film, and watch it most years. Films are easier than books aren't they? I could watch 100 of those in a couple of months, and still have time to play computer games. 

Anyway. In Peter's Friends, there's a reference to GK Chesterton saying something clever about how the bravest thing an explorer could do would simply be to pop over the fence and talk to his neighbour. And I've often thought how I'd like to be the kind of person who could just make references like that, over dinner. "Oh, it's like GK Chesteron said..." Imagine. People would stroke my face and offer me biscuits. 

So I looked to see what he'd written. Well, loads of stuff it turned out. So I chose this, because it sounded really weird and interesting. I was not wrong. It's all very satirical and metaphorical, and full of big, outlandish ideas. It turns out I like that. So look forward to me quoting it at dinner, sometime soon.

The Human Mind - Robert Winston

To finish off, we have a non-fiction book I bought about 20 years ago. It's been on the shelf, mocking me for all that time. "You're not going to finish me, are you?" it seemed to say. And for most of the time it was correct. 

I have a bookcase dedicated to what Waterstones would call 'Smart Thinking'. That's where books like this go. They're for visitors to stare at, really. Sadly, I'm more often in the mood for something along the lines of 'Relatively little thinking, but plenty of robots and shooting'. 

Well this book wasn't going to be the boss of me. I got it down and ruffled its pages, trying to find where I'd left off. Page 32. That wasn't great. However, the book did smell delightful - that faint, musty vanilla smell of old pages. 

The contents were almost as good as the smell. I like stuff about how the brain works, and how we think. It's a bit outdated in its attitudes, and Winston does have a tendency to go on rants about how he thinks research grants should be spent, and what is wrong with people, and why can't he have a million pounds to play with brains please? But on the whole I had a fine old time with this and I know know a bit more about my brain. Like, for example, why it has trouble retaining information from clever books.

So there we are. Five books I read. That's not a bad start. See you next time (and, theoretically, 18 subsequent times) for the rest.

Read about books 6 to10,  here. 

In Heaven, Everything is Fine

A few days ago David Lynch - the wonderful film director, artist and human being - slipped off this plane of reality and into the next. He died, victim of his own very strong desire to spend his entire life bathing in a web of cigarette smoke. In fairness, he did look great. But his passing leaves my world a little smaller, and I am sad. 

Much has been written about Lynch. A long line of people have queued up to have a go at explaining his mad, elliptical movies - like people lining up to try and open a particularly tight jam jar, all convinced that they would be the one with the strength in their wrists to manage it, despite the clear failure of everyone who went before them. His work resists interpretation, and so of course the attempts will continue forever. The jam's going to stay in the jar, and we just get to peer in and wonder.

I can't open the jar either, and I'm not going to try. I have no clever insight. What I do have is my own relationship with his work, snaking through the years as I come across each new film. I think, really, that's all any of us have. 

Here, for your reading pleasure, is my particular journey beyond the red curtain. 

Eraserhead

One Thursday in the 1980s I called round at my friend Paul's house to see if he was coming out. We were not-quite teenagers, and so were in that phase where plans extended no further than "I knock on your door and, if you are free, we wander round the streets giggling and climbing walls." Imagine that now. If someone knocked on my door, out of the blue, and said, "Let's just hang out with no particular agenda," I would chase them away with a stick. 

On this particular Thursday, I went into the living room of Paul's parents' house to wait while he got ready. His parents were watching a film, and that film was bonkers. There was a woman, singing, on a stage. Except there was something wrong with her face. She had huge, hamster like cheeks and strange, rough skin. She was smiling, but her eyes were desperate and sad. The whole thing was in black and white, and felt vaguely nightmarish. Paul's dad looked up at me, and by way of explanation said, "She lives behind his radiator." Right. Thanks Paul's dad. Paul and I left the house and probably went to sit on a shed roof or something and talk about Blake's 7. But that weird, mysterious image of the woman stayed with me. 

Years later I saw all of Eraserhead, and it was as delightfully uncanny as that first impression suggested. I've seen it maybe a dozen times since, and every time it is equally unsettling. The non-sequitur imagery pulses with the logic and tone of a nightmare: the moon faced guy, the radiator lady, the baby... oh God, the baby. A couple of times I've made a new friend and, excited to share my world with them, stuck the film on, with the caveat that it is 'probably the weirdest thing I've seen.' The way they looked at me afterwards suggested that this was not adequate preparation.

Wild at Heart

I went to university in the early 90s, just as Twin Peaks was unfurling its tendrils across the television landscape. I didn't watch it at the time. I'd missed the first season, I think, and wasn't in a position to catch up. Plus, and this is probably the real reason, everyone else was watching it. And by everyone, I meant all the cool people on my course at college. They were really into it, and went on about it, and had cool in-the-know conversations about the Log Lady and Bob and The Owls and all that.

I was already pretty much an outsider on my course. I hadn't read enough books, I wasn't as smart as everyone else and I was much less sure of myself. Or rather, I wasn't as good at covering up my not-sure-of-myself-ness. This was just one more reason to feel left out, and so I rejected Twin Peaks, taking control of my outsider feelings by acting like it was a choice. 

However. The people who were into Peaks were also into David Lynch in a big way, and they started a film society called - brilliantly - Lynch Pin. And they showed Eraserhead, which I knew I loved. And they showed Wild At Heart. Well. It's hard to express the impact this had on me. In the first sequence, Nicolas Cage smashes a guys head open, in a shocking moment of visceral violence that made me uncomfortable, horrified and thrilled in equal measure. The film then careened off on a crazy path that was like a banquet of new, exotic flavours and textures. Did I like it? Maybe? I wasn't sure. I just knew there was something mesmerising about the too-dark night through which our heroes drove, the seductive music that accompanied their bewildering adventures, and the out-there characters they met - people who seemed both cartoonish and yet frighteningly real. None more so than Willem Dafoe's appalling Bobby Peru, who leered horribly into my soul from that day on. 

I loved it. And something shifted inside; I couldn't go back to enjoying film in the same way, now I'd tasted this. The next week they showed Heathers (they weren't exclusively a Lynch film club - they allowed other weird, nightmare-adjacent stuff too). Heathers is a very good film with loads of cool ideas. But it felt tame and conventional after the astonishing heroin hit of Wild at Heart. I never properly fell in with the cool guys - and deservedly so, I was a right mess - but I have always silently thanked them for that exposure to the beauty and brilliance of David Lynch.

Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and all that

I completed my degree in literature, having learned many things, chief among them being that I wasn't actually very interested in literature. I preferred film, thanks. Why did books still exist when we had films? (This may, also, be part of the reason I didn't fit in at college - they all loved books and thought they were great). I spent the rest of the 1990s exploring the world of cinema, trying to get a sense of what were the films you 'should' have seen. What were the ones that got talked about, and referenced by magazines - the ones that influenced the work that came afterwards? 

Previously, my guide-ropes through the world of film had been fairly basic. Did I like the actors? Would there be explosions and/or murders? Was it Star Wars? If the answer to any of these questions was yes, I would pursue the film. Now I had something new: the concept that the director was the author of the movie, and that if I liked one of their films, I'd probably like the others. 

So off I went, chasing down the other movies of directors I liked. I would later learn that the concept of  'the director as author' is not so simple. However, in the case of David Lynch, it appeared to be a pretty compelling argument. As I devoured Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and - later - Mulholland Drive, I recognised that weird, otherworldly flavour that I'd first tasted in Paul's living room, and again in the darkened room of the college film club. David Lynch had a set of very clear preoccupations and they appeared to be, in no particular order:

dark, twisted sexuality

cool jazz

no, you may not understand the story

nudity

dreams

violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere

film noir

fluctuating worlds and/or realities

elemental evil

you will laugh, but you will not be sure why

these three or four actors are my friends and get to be in everything

I've lumped these films together because, to me, they are part of the same experience: an awakening into the idea of cinema as one person's vision. As if we're looking not at a person making art, but rather into a world that you can only see when that person briefly pulls at the edge of the world and draws it back, like a curtain you never knew was there.

David Lynch started to become a touchstone for me, like David Bowie: someone I didn't really understand, but who exemplified the things I wanted to understand. A creator who made things that seemed genuine and personal, and unique. I was struggling a lot with that, in the 90s, I was trying to make things - songs, poems, stories - but I couldn't hear my own voice in anything I did. It seemed lost in imitation, in fear of how it might be received, in the foolish belief that it needed to say something. Have a purpose.

For now, I would watch this guy, and others like him, and try to work him out. Not what his work meant - that jam jar wasn't going to open any time soon. I wanted to know what it was he was doing. How he found a way to get that elemental, beautiful stuff inside him out into the world, in a way which made people... feel something. 

How was he doing that?

That will do, for now. We're about to get onto my first viewing of Twin Peaks, and that needs a little time to breathe. See you next time, for warm synths, swinging traffic lights and a decade where I outsourced my emotional life to the inhabitants of a small, beautiful town on the edge of the world.