The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (6 page)

Plus, now I was someone who had read
Middlemarch
and
The Master and Margarita
. Two down.

We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say ‘I like this' or ‘I don't like that', to make snap
decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps ‘I don't like it' is an inadequate response. Don't like
Middlemarch
? It doesn't matter. It was here before we arrived, and it will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn't get it. I need to try harder.

I learned to love
Middlemarch
. I had also been reminded of the value of perseverance. I determined to finish what I had started. So the following weekend, we finalised the selection. I wrote down the names of the books on a piece of paper and Tina witnessed and signed it. We christened it ‘The List of Betterment'. And afterwards we sat down to a special Sunday lunch which Dad had prepared for the whole family.

Baked potatoes.
¹⁰

Postscript

This was not quite the end of
Middlemarch
. Of the novels I read during this period,
Middlemarch
is one that stayed with me over several years – haunted me, I should say. As one deadline after another expired, and still I came no closer to completing work on this book, I would remember poor old Casaubon and his unfinished
Key to all Mythologies
: ‘
the difficulty of making his Key to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind
. . .' And I would also recall Dorothea's forlorn plea to her husband: ‘
All those rows of volumes – will you not now do what you used to speak of? – will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write
. . .'

And so I give thanks that, if you are reading these words, I have been at least partially successful and not conked out at my desk before I could finish what I started; and I also give thanks that we, unlike the Casaubons, are still married.

Fig. 4: Propped up by a saint.

(photograph by Alex Miller)

Post Office
by Charles Bukowski

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell

‘Let us now take wage labour.'

The Communist Manifesto

‘They had given up everything that makes life good and beautiful in order to carry on a mad struggle to acquire money which they would never be sufficiently cultured to properly enjoy . . . They knew that the money they accumulated was foul with the sweat of their brother men, and wet with the tears of little children, but they were deaf and blind and callous to the consequences of their greed. Devoid of every ennobling thought or aspiration, they grovelled on the filthy ground, tearing up the flowers to get at the worms.'

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

‘This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.'

Post Office

I was sitting in Tiny Tim's Tearoom reading
The Communist Manifesto
, while I waited for my mother to finish her shopping.

‘Can I get you anything else?' enquired the proprietor.

‘Just the bill, please,' I said.

‘Right you are, comrade,' she said. I paid for my bourgeois scone and went to wait outside.

The book I was holding was not the little red book but a slim, modishly-designed paperback from a series called ‘Great Ideas'. Its cover blasted out the manifesto's rousing final declaration in embossed, faux-utilitarian type: ‘
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE
!' Standing in the street, book in hand, it was hard not to appear as though you were trying to make a point. I tried to adopt an air of intrigued neutrality and not burning revolutionary zeal.

My mother arrived, and catching sight of the cover, uttered the reproach she still reserves for special moments of filial disappointment.

‘Oh, Andrew,' she said. I slipped the book in my pocket.

Actually, I quite liked the idea of being perceived as a communist. I didn't even object to being called ‘comrade'. The last time I had affected a similar display of left-wing solidarity was as a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, my blue fisherman's cap and enamel Lenin badge attracted more cries of ‘wanker' than ‘comrade'. But that was then. The old ideological schisms were dead. No one cared enough to call you a wanker any more.

Nestling in my pocket next to
The Communist Manifesto
was the List of Betterment, which I carried round with me like Dumbo and his feather.

THE LIST OF BETTERMENT

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