The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (35 page)

Reading group notes © Andy Miller 2014

This book could not have been written without the considerable help of the following people.

At Fourth Estate, my editor Nicholas Pearson has been a friend, collaborator and shrink. He has also had to be very, very patient. I promised him I would complete this book without recourse to the phrase ‘demise of the Net Book Agreement' and I have kept that promise until just now: sorry for that, Nick, and also for the major delay in delivery. I would also like to thank Victoria Barnsley for her belief in me, first as an editor and subsequently as an author. Thanks too to Rebecca McEwan, Michelle Kane, Olly Rowse, Minna Fry, Paul Erdpresser, Kate Tolley, Essie Cousins, Laura Roberts, Julian Humphries, Clare Reihill, Louise Haines and especially Jo Walker, who not only designed the cover but also filled it with precisely the right number of books without having to be asked.

At Harper Perennial, John Williams acquired the book and was a vital early source of enthusiasm and encouragement; he subsequently commissioned me to write two long essays for his online journal
The Second Pass
, in which I was able to rehearse the approach I planned to take with this book; thanks, John. Back at Perennial, the book passed through the hands of Jeanette Perez, then Michael Signorelli before ending up on the desk of my editor, the wonderful Hannah Wood. She and publisher Cal Morgan have embraced the book as one of their own and I am deeply grateful to them both for their energy, care and commitment, and to everyone at Perennial.

At Curtis Brown, my agent Jonny Geller has been an invaluable source of good humour and good advice whenever I have needed either; thanks also Doug Kean and, latterly, Kirsten Foster.

All my friends from Canongate, especially Jamie Byng – the only person I know who says he never lies about books and I believe him – and ‘Digital' Dan Franklin, who was still analogue when I met him.

All my friends at Faber & Faber, especially Stephen Page, Hannah Griffiths, Bridget Latimer-Jones, Julian Loose and, all the way from Forest Hill, John Grindrod. #CroydonTillWeDie.

At different times and in different ways, the following people inspired or assisted me: Mitzi Angel; David Barker; Richard Bedser; Alex Clark; Jenny Colgan; Peter and Polly Collingridge; Dick Copperwaite; Jackie Copperwaite; Steve Delaney; Peter Doggett; the late Patric Duffy; Travis Elborough; Victoria Falconer; Tim Grover; Rupert Heath; Sorrel Hershberg, Edie and Reuben; Tom Hodgkinson; Kate Holden; Leo Hollis; Tony Lacey; Stewart Lee; Sam Leith; the Lyons family; Dominic Maxwell, Emma Perry, Polly and Flora; Jeremy Millar; assorted Andrew Millers; David Miller; David Mounfield; Paul Putner; Dan Rhodes; Pru Rowlandson; William Rowlandson; Andrew Sandoval; the Sargent-McSweeney family; all my sparring partners in Sparta B.C.; Matt ‘
Are You Passionate?
' Thorne; Rob Weiss and Mary Claire Smith; and Neil Young.

Special thanks to the brilliant Jenna Russell, Dot in the Menier Chocolate Factory production of
Sunday in the Park with George
, for sharing her thoughts on performing the work of Stephen Sondheim.

Many of the books on the List of Betterment were purchased from Harbour Books in Whitstable. Thank you Keith & Emma Dickson, Vicky Hageman, Matthew Crockatt, Elizabeth Waller and Kirsten Boysen for allowing me to wander in, check the correct spelling of, say, Knut Hamsun, and wander out again. Honourable mentions to Oxford Street Books in Whitstable, Waterstones in Canterbury, managed by the doughty Martin Latham, and both branches of the Albion Bookshop in Broadstairs, now sadly defunct. Whitstable Library and the British Library at St Pancras filled in the gaps.

The book itself was mostly written in two places: a substantial part of the first draft was completed at Dot Cottage, near Winchelsea Beach in Sussex, where I learned to chop logs with an axe and operate a wood-burner, much to the amusement and concern of Michael Crosby-Jones and Margot Prew, who were wonderful hosts to a struggling writer – discreet yet touchingly reluctant to let their guest die of hypothermia; the remainder was written, and then rewritten, in a quiet house round the corner from where I live. Unlike my house, there was no telephone, no broadband and no TV to divert me. It is little exaggeration to say this book would never have been finished without the generosity and forbearance of Anthony and Julie Robinson.

I would like to award £10 book tokens to each of the following in recognition of their outstanding contribution.

For almost a century of friendship, Matthew Freedman, Michael Keane and Paul Wright.

For tough love above and beyond that which was strictly necessary, Ben Thompson and Nicola Barker.

For singing and playing guitar with me, my partner in the Gene Clark Five, Tim Donkin; and for letting the GC5 make an unlovely noise in her lovely home, week in, week out, the divine Elise Burns.

‘Finished your book yet?' For commencing all telephone calls with this enquiry, week in, week out, Clinton Heylin.

For laughing and making me laugh, Neil, Sue and Nicol Perryman.

Thanks, Mum and Dad, for giving me this love of books and for letting me follow it wherever it has led.

God save the Kinks.

Finally, my wife Tina and son Alex are the not-so-secret heroes of this book and the saga on which it is based, my life. They have to go through it with me, the whole lot, in real time, without any of the funny bits. Without their humour, patience, company and love, neither book nor life would be worth persevering with. Thank you.

AM

Hello, and welcome to my blog – the List of Betterment!

My name is Leonard Bast. I live in the south of England with my wife and son in a house.

Likes: books, jam doughnuts, The Kinks.

Dislikes: football, cars, the novels of W. Somerset Maugham.

In November last year, I began a small but ambitious experiment: to work my way through a dozen or so books I had always meant to read but had never got round to, owing to idleness, apathy or lack of confidence. Not that this ever stopped me from pretending to have read them! LOL!!!

Anyway, here is that original list:

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