The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (30 page)

‘What about the books?' I asked. There were at least a dozen boxes of books in there that we still hadn't unpacked. Up in the house, our bookshelves were already crammed; columns of paperbacks gathered dust on the bedroom floor and stood heaped along the newly plastered sitting-room wall.

‘Can you remember what's in any of those boxes?' Tina asked.

Suddenly it came to me. ‘My copy of
Krautrocksampler
,' I replied. ‘Other than that, no.'

‘You have your answer,' she said.

So we emptied the boxes in the garage, and the attic, and the kitchen. We emptied the storage unit we were renting and paid it off. Little by little, we decided which books we wanted to keep and which would be going to the charity shops. A few we sold. The rest we offered to the members of our respective book groups, who, true to form, were irritatingly picky. A man came with a van and took most, though not all, of the magazines to the dump. Either a great weight lifted from my shoulders or a chasm opened up inside me that will never be filled. At this stage, it's hard to say.
⁷

In this way, we renewed our vow to reading.

Please don't misunderstand: we still possess an awful lot of books. Not counting ebooks, we own three different translations of
War and Peace
alone.
⁸
Extra shelves have been constructed in the bedroom and the sitting room and they are already flush. There are still unopened boxes in the garage and unread cookbooks in the kitchen. But, between us, we are curating a library which we mean to put to good use, which Alex can refer to and be proud of, full of books that either mean something to us or which, one day, we shall have time to read. We think twice before adding to it; we know how fortunate we are to have all these books within our grasp. It is not Yasnaya Polyana but it is ours – if you borrow something, try not to break the spine.

After
War and Peace
, there was a week left before the one-year deadline was up. The plan had always been to conclude with
Howards End
by E.M. Forster, for no reason other than the fact it had ‘end' in its title. But it also included the character of Leonard Bast, the uncouth suburban clerk who attempts to improve himself with culture, for which impertinence he is symbolically crushed beneath a collapsing bookcase; ‘Leonard Bast' was the pseudonym under which I had published my failed blog. And at a wedding the previous summer, a man I'd never met insisted to me at inappropriate length, i.e. before, after and even during the speeches, that
Howards End
is, and I quote, ‘a
Bildungsroman
about the limits, no, the
limitations
of art'. But now we had almost reached the limits of the List of Betterment, I decided I would rather place my trust in a higher power.

‘You choose the final book,' I suggested to Tina.

She thought for a moment. ‘Have you ever read any Wodehouse?' she asked.

So this is the way the List of Betterment ends, not with a bang but with a Wooster.

I knew we had a copy of
Code of the Woosters
somewhere in the house. Propitiously, it was in the first place I looked: on a shelf next to our bed. We read it over the next few days and both thought it was great. Was it a
Bildungsroman
about the limits, no, the
limitations
of art? Not as such. It was more a funny book about a stolen cow creamer. This, I suggested to Tina, meant it was a work of
countercontradictatoriality
; she pointed out that even a frightful chump like Bertie had passed his driving test. We finished the book and returned it to the shelf. A few days later I handed in my notice. And that, after fifty great books and a year of dangerous reading, was that. It was time to start again.

Like me, Tina had done much of her reading of
War and Peace
on the train to and from London. One morning in late October, a couple of weeks in, she had arrived at the office with the great book still in her hand. A colleague, a woman a
few years senior, caught sight of it and asked how Tina was getting on. She replied, truthfully, that we had spent much of the previous evening arguing about whether Bolkónsky's vision of a ‘lofty infinite sky' represented a proof or a denial of the existence of God, a theological dispute which had grown rather heated, concluding with me sleeping downstairs on the sofa.

‘That's so lovely,' said her colleague. ‘I can't imagine having a discussion like that with my husband.'
⁹

Late in
War and Peace
, as Andrew Bolkónsky lies mortally wounded, he experiences an epiphany: ‘
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love
.' What graceful words these are and what a laudable sentiment. We could take them at face value and stop the book right here – in Bolkónsky's final utterance, ‘
How good it would be!
' However, that is not where Tolstoy leaves it. ‘
These thoughts seemed to him comforting,
' he observes a few sentences later. ‘
But they were only thoughts
.' This, to me, is the mark of Tolstoy's genius; he was too committed to telling the truth, as he perceived it, to let even a dying man off the hook. And we are all dying men.

So instead, let me suggest an alternative coda from elsewhere in the book:

‘In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.'

This is where the List of Betterment had led me, back to a small oasis governed by love and shared subjectivity; I was glad to be home.

A few days later I did read
Howards End
. Is it truly an enquiry into the limits, no, the
limitations
of art? Actually it is. Did I like it? Sorry, that's none of your business. The Countess agrees. Don't you know he's got a book to write, she says. Now clear off.

But our business here is not quite concluded. A moment ago, I wrote of Tolstoy's commitment to telling the truth in his work. I feel I must do the same.

First, that quote from
War and Peace
about small oases ‘governed by love and shared subjectivity'? I'm afraid it may not actually be from
War and Peace
. It may not even be Tolstoy. When I said ‘elsewhere in the book', I actually meant this book, the one you are currently reading. What happened was, at some stage during the List of Betterment, I scribbled that quote on a piece of paper but failed to make a note of which of the books it was from; and now I can't remember. I have searched several times but I haven't been able to find it again. Sorry about that.

Of course, it ought not to make any difference where those lines come from or who wrote them; I stand by every word. They may well have been penned by Tolstoy – given I read two of his books, the odds are immediately halved. And they do have a certain Tolstoyian ring to them. But the longer I gaze upon them, the less certain I am. Perhaps they come from
Middlemarch
or
Everyman
or
I Capture the Castle
; all feasible sources. How about
The Communist Manifesto
or Pevsner? Or maybe they're from
The Diary of a Nobody
; that would be neat. I doubt they are from
Moby-Dick
or
Gilgamesh
and the sentiment seems a bit chirpy for Houellebecq; but then again, ‘nature's savagery'. . . Place speech marks around it and that quotation could be ascribed to almost anyone: Morrison, Bukowski, Kerouac, Brontë. It sounds like the sort of pompous statement Ignatius J. Reilly might spit between mouthfuls of weenie, pushing his hot dog cart up the sidewalk. Or Behemoth, the infernal jabbering cat from
The Master and Margarita
; or the Devil himself for that matter. Or Sir Jamie Teabag or whatever his name is from
The Da Vinci Code
, silhouetted in a cloister in the Vatican or something, shortly after giving his albino killer monk the order to assassinate Tom Hanks . . .

Hmm. Maybe it does make a difference.

Houellebecq is fond of quoting Schopenhauer, and I have grown fond of quoting them both, so it seems right to turn the matter over to them:

Schopenhauer: ‘We remember our lives a little less well than a novel we once read.'

Houellebecq: ‘The fact is, in the end, we forget even our own books. And I don't know why, but this morning, I find that really comforting.'

Second and finally, you may well be asking, what about the other book? I get that
The Da Vinci Code
was the first not-so-great book but the subtitle mentions
Fifty Great Books (and
Two
Not-So-Great Ones)
; where the heck is the second one? Ok, I'll confess: I was going to buy another novel by Dan Brown, skim it
à la
Tolstoy and then come up with a constructive, feel-good reading to bookend the narrative. But when the moment came, I just couldn't face it. Sorry, everyone. If it really bothers you, you have my permission to get a pen, scratch out the word
Two
on the title page and replace it, neatly, with
One
. Not that you need my permission; it's your book.

I realise this may appear like the insolent gesture of defiance I promised earlier I was not about to make; yet with the finish line in sight, here I stand, hands on hips, looking you straight in the eye. Don't you see, though? The race is over and we have just breasted the tape together. I might have pretended that, after fifty great books and a year of Betterment, I ended up a nicer guy and a more forgiving reader, gentler, less scornful; but that would be a fairytale and a lie.

I am myself again. But I no longer tell lies about books.

‘And now I take leave of that young man sitting alone upstairs in the lugubrious parlor reading the Classics. What a dismal picture! What could he have done with the Classics, had he succeeded in swallowing them? The Classics. Slowly, slowly, I am coming to them – not by reading them, but by making them.'

Henry Miller,
The Books in My Life

‘Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill-fitting. Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were inkstained; tiny voices chattered insanely . . .

“Ford,” he said, “there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for
Hamlet
they've worked out.”'

Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

‘What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there.'

Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano

This morning before starting work, after bringing my wife her cup of tea in bed, making my son his breakfast and washing down the customary vitamin pills with the customary Svepa of orange juice, I logged on to the Internet and illegally downloaded a torrent containing 4001 ebooks. The folder occupies a little less than two gigabytes of memory, approximately the size of a family photo album or a couple of movies. At a steady rate of two titles a week, and allowing for fluctuations in technologies and eyesight, it should take me about forty years to read everything inside that folder – enough reading matter, in all likelihood, to see me out. This does not take into account any new or attention-grabbing books that might be published between now and my demise, of course. But if I live that long, I shall be eighty-five and am unlikely to be concerned with whatever passes for ‘an important new voice in fiction' in the year 2054. Surely I will have read enough.

Here amongst the 4001 ebooks are
Against Nature
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and the complete works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. Here is
The Master and Margarita
; here is Dan Brown. But which titles from the List of Betterment are missing? I asked myself. Rather than doing any proper work, I set myself the challenge of hunting them down on the web and, to make it more interesting, threw in every book I really loved as a child as well. By lunchtime, I had succeeded; there were dozens of new books on my laptop, either as Kindle-ready AZW files or in the easily-converted EPUB or MOBI formats. The good news is that I only had to pay for one of them; but as that was
Absolute Beginners
, I didn't really mind. And then, because what I had done was illegal and infringed the copyright holders' exclusive rights, I deleted the morning's spoils from my hard drive except those books that came from Project Gutenberg, and
Absolute Beginners
. So don't be sending me any cease-and-desist letters.

While I was writing this book, the world changed. The digital revolution had been under way for some time, of course, but the aggressive marketing of hand-held electronic readers had not begun in earnest. Consumers in the West who had been groomed to form emotional attachments with their phones and cameras responded eagerly to the idea of a device that could galvanise the outmoded pastime of reading. In the future, no one will read
Pride and Prejudice
from cover to cover, said the head of the UK's oldest paperback publisher recently; they will just tap the screen of their phone or tablet computer and find out more about the bits that interest them, the costumes or the recipes.
¹⁰
In the same period, so-called ‘dead-tree' books continued their retreat from society, like Napoleon's defeated army of stragglers hobbling away from Moscow to perish in wintry and hostile terrain. Library closures continued apace. Booksellers went to the wall in ever greater numbers, chain stores and cosy independents alike; soon the only place to find printed books on the high street may well be charity shops. Where they are available to buy, books have never been cheaper or worth less. The most popular titles can be purchased at large discounts online and in big-box stores; on World Book Night, millions of them are given away for free. And of course, if you know where to look, you need never pay for a book again – though once again, I must remind you that this practice is morally reprehensible and a crime against humanity, like smoking in a crèche, or letting your dog foul the public footpath, then bagging the result and suspending it from the branch of a nearby tree.