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 Ricahrd 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.
