The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (39 page)

I hesitate to say any more about
Wide Sargasso Sea
. It is such a deep book that, actually, I don't want to write about it all, at least not here; I simply want to soak in it a little longer. This is the limit of the blog process for me. It took Jean Rhys twenty-five years to form an appropriate response to
Jane Eyre
, and when she did, it was not as a first impression or a string of jokes. What can I add in a day?

Note to self and others: read
Wide Sargasso Sea
but please keep your opinions to yourself until you know what they are.

Today is Day 6 of reading:
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac.

‘
We don't have to drive across America to achieve our inner self
.' Julian Cope

‘Cult' books again. As you may have noticed, I am down in the cult ghetto at the moment. I just finished
On the Road
and before that
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. After a break for
Paradise Lost
, it's
American Psycho
and
The Dice Man
next. I am methodically corrupting myself, twenty years too late.

As I've noted here before, there is a big pile of teenage books I never bothered with when I was a teenager because they seemed too obvious and too prescribed. This would include a lot of American writing, e.g. Bukowski, Heller, Thompson, Burroughs and especially Kerouac. What did these famous junkies, Death-dwarves and Americans have to say to straight-assed English me? Not much, I suspected. On the evidence of
On the Road
, my instincts were correct. It started off OK but after Day 1, the Road got rough and led nowhere.

‘“It's not my fault! It's not my fault!” I told him. “Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be.”'

On the Road

On the Road
is a paean to unfettered selfishness and male ego, suffused with toddlerish petulance and a love of cars and fear of women which would embarrass a
Top Gear
presenter. Some neat-o
riffs and percussionistic prose but mostly just a lot of driving and drinking and repetition and drinking. In the course of the novel, Dean Moriarty sires four children and marries three women, and every one of these broken lives supposedly represents a defeat for poor old Dean, who only ever wants to be free, man,
yass, yass, yass
. Several times we are told he moves around a room ‘
like Groucho Marx
'; I'd have liked him more if he made like Harpo and SHUT UP, YOU TEDIOUS PRICK.

I saw a documentary on TV a while ago about Andy Warhol. Warhol's work was presented as a provocatively fey and truly rebellious response to the suffocating expressionist conformity of the art scene of the 1950s, the sweaty, grunting muscularity of Pollock, Johns, etc. Art need not be torn from the soul or the hetero libido, said Warhol; art can be merely pretty or mass-produced or all surface. It need not be a monument to its maker's ego.
On the Road
is the literary equivalent of the stuff Warhol was trying to get away from, Johnny Cash to his Velvet Underground.

You know, this is a whole lot more fun when you don't like the book. How depressing.

This is not another book about poverty; it is a snapshot of a society that has more than it can handle. My copy has this William Burroughs quote on the back cover: ‘On the Road
sold a trillion Levi's and a million espresso machines . . . the alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.
' That's not a ringing endorsement, is it? But it is accurate. What this book did was substitute one myth of American freedom for another. It bred a new generation of consumers, fit and able to take over from their frustratingly thrifty parents, who had had to combat an economic depression and a real
war, rather than choose to impose a simulacrum of those conditions on themselves for ‘kicks'. Their alienation, restlessness and dissatisfaction were soothed, contained, by Levi's and espresso machines and an image of rebellion which has endured for fifty years – Dean Moriarty, James Dean, Holden Caulfield, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, Spider-Man – and been profitably exported across the globe in comics, cinema, rock'n'roll and ‘cult' books, the same ‘cult' books
your grandparents read
.

Time for something NEU!

Today is Day 1 of reading:
Paradise Lost
by John Milton.

This is getting ridiculous.
Paradise Lost
is clearly going to be a challenge. After work and family, there is so little time. I can utilise it to read
Paradise Lost
or write about it, but not both. What I need is another me to update this blog. Maybe I could hire the Kadare-bot.

I am going to exercise some restraint and keep these entries much shorter, otherwise I won't finish all the reading I still have to do. Will you miss me?
Moi non plus.

Today is Day 12 of reading:
Paradise Lost
by John Milton.

Mostly harmless.

Today is Day 4 of reading:
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis.

Mostly harmful.

Today is Day 1 of reading:
The Dice Man
by Luke Rhinehart.

Mostly dreadful. Ugh.

Today is Day 3 of reading:
The Dice Man
by Luke Rhinehart.

The Worst Sentence from the Worst Paragraph from the Worst Book on the List of Betterment, so far:

‘Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts.'

The Dice Man
: please, please make it stop.

ANDY MILLER
is a reader, author, and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including
The Times
,
The Telegraph
,
The Guardian
,
Esquire
, and
Mojo
. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and son.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Fourth Estate.

THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY.
Copyright © 2014 by Itzy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN 978-0-06-144618-4

EPub Edition December 2014 ISBN 9780062100627

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1
‘Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.' Alan Bennett,
Independent on Sunday
, January 1991.