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

by Miller, Andy

  After a sleepless night and several days of running through the contretemps in my mind, I concluded that the fault was entirely mine. I had not wanted to read Cakes and Ale and had probably done so in bad faith, with the result that I had channelled all my petulance into expressing a dislike for the book, a dislike which of course had been inevitable, with a vehemence that must have seemed like exasperation with the person who had chosen it. Inadvertently, I had made it personal. The alternative explanation was simply that I had been wrong about Cakes and Ale. But that was absurd.

  When my turn came to make a selection for the group, I decided I needed a book about which I could be entirely positive and eloquent and which could not be misconstrued in any way. I chose Beyond Black. The story was strong, the subject matter was accessible, if a little quirky, the setting was familiar and the quality of Hilary Mantel’s prose was beyond reproach. I could vouch for all this because I had read the book for Betterment, but if my fellow Spartans did not entirely trust me, they could always take the word of Philip Pullman, Helen Dunmore, Fay Weldon or any of the twenty or so rave reviews reproduced on the paperback cover and across several fly pages – ‘wonderfully funny’, ‘laceratingly observant’, ‘pins elusive Middle England to the page’, ‘an illuminating study of what can happen when you try to confront the past with honest choices made in the present’.10 And if none of that worked, at the back was a brief explicatory interview with Hilary Mantel and a set of notes for reading groups. I eagerly awaited the next meeting when everyone would thank me for introducing them to such a wonderful novel and I would be forgiven for whatever it was I had misunderstood about Cakes and Ale – i.e. nothing.

  What actually happened was this. I could not get back from London in time for the meeting, so I missed it. A few days later, I bumped into one of the psychotherapists in the high street. Sorry I couldn’t make it, I said, work stuff. How did it go?

  The psychotherapist rubbed his chin. I think we needed you to be there, he said.

  Why? I asked.

  No one could understand why you’d chosen it, he replied. There didn’t seem much to it.

  And before I could stop him, he told me everything they felt was wrong with the book. It seemed rather lightweight. It wasn’t funny. The plotting was obscure, the characters unsympathetic. And wasn’t the author sneering at suburbia? It just seemed strange that you would choose a book like that.

  Right, I said. I see.

  Well, see you next month, said the psychotherapist cheerfully. And off he went.

  The first and second rules of Fight Club should also apply to Book Club, I know that. However, I must speak out. Beyond Black quickly became a Sparta running joke. Whenever it came up in conversation, people rolled their eyes or tutted and chuckled. Every month, however ponderous the choice of book, however po-faced or flimsy it might be, there was always one quality to recommend it: it wasn’t Beyond Black. But I never wavered in my belief that Beyond Black was, and is, a glorious novel, and that all the other members of my reading group were wrong. To Hilary Mantel, I apologise; I hope repeatedly winning the Man Booker allows you to put this unfortunate incident behind you. To my fellow Spartans, I do not apologise; I hope Hilary Mantel repeatedly winning the Man Booker goes some way to showing you the error of your ways.

  The flawed logic at the heart of the book group process runs as follows. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. All opinions carry equal weight. But opinions will invariably differ. Of these, some will be judged to be wrong. Yet if all opinions carry equal weight and everyone is entitled to a wrong opinion, what is the use of being right? The best that one can hope for is a happy medium. Or to express that as an equation: book club = quick chat about book + long chat about school / children / work / family / gossip + wine. Yipee! (sic).

  Let’s say I was wrong about Cakes and Ale, which I wasn’t, and they were wrong about Beyond Black, which they were. What had either party gained from having their enjoyment in these books challenged? An argument and a sleepless night. Worse, the pleasure each had taken in their book had been diminished by the experience of discussing it with people who didn’t enjoy it – in the case of Beyond Black, for months to come. No committee was going to change that.

  When it came down to it, where was our common ground? We were not academics. We were not friends. Our jobs allowed occasional professional insights into the books – our group was especially adept at psychological profiling – but these were usually more anecdotal than illuminating. Where we came together was in how the books made us feel, which characters we identified with, and so on: the feminised middlebrow in action. But I did not join a book group to talk about my feelings. I wanted to talk about books: how they fit together, why they worked, the occasional miracle of fiction. This is not the perspective of an emotionally-repressed male. I love talking about my feelings, as my wife will wearily attest. However, I did not require a book group to help me do it, even one with three psychotherapists in it.

  I came to the conclusion that I was probably not cut out for the reading group experience. It was not the fault of the solicitor, the creative-writing student, the carpenter, the singing teacher or any of the three psychotherapists, not even the Jungian. It was me. As an editor and writer, I was overqualified.

  I did not reach this conclusion immediately and it may surprise the reader to learn that I remained a proud Spartan for almost three years, longer than some marriages, though no less bloody. There were happy times. There were bad patches. I learned to spot the types of story each member liked and tried to tailor my views so as to cause the minimum of offence. When the break came, we remained on good terms. I enjoyed hanging out with them. They became my friends, dammit. But the truth is I never once changed my mind about a book because of anything said in one of our meetings. I looked at Cakes and Ale again before writing this chapter. I still think it’s rotten.

  On a sunny day in Broadstairs, however, I saw no shadow of a parting. At the Charles Dickens, I finished my drink, shouldered my bag and stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. The Dickensians had fanned out through the town and were standing on corners or promenading by the bandstand. Up ahead, Mister Micawber had fainted in the heat and was being attended at the roadside by the paramedics. I wonder how my lot would get on with Edwin Drood, I thought, as I climbed the hill back to the railway station. A novel without an ending; that could be fun.

  So when my turn came around again, I nominated The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And although there was a smaller turnout than usual, the singing teacher was there and the carpenter and one of the psychotherapists, and they had all managed to finish the book just as much as its author had. We interrogated Drood’s unexplained disappearance, the true nature of John Jasper’s guilt, the incongruousness of Dick Datchery’s mismatched white hair and black eyebrows. We marvelled at Dickens’ spectacular, grandiloquent sentences and opioid, elephantine imagery – ‘white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants’. We speculated as to the identity of the murderer, or if a murder had even been committed. We found little or nothing we could relate to our day-to-day lives, which was fine. We drank a lot and we laughed a lot. We had a great time. All we talked about was the book.

  The following day, head still pounding, I wrote it all up on my new blog. The blog was partly a rolling progress report on the List of Betterment and partly, like the book group, an attempt to be outward-looking, contemporary and sociable – communal reading with people I did not know and planned never to meet. If all went well, I thought, my diary might become as widely read and admired as that of my suburban ancestor – Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!

  Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.

  CHARLES POOTER

  Th
e Laurels,

  Brickfield Terrace,

  Holloway.

  Books 41 and 42

  The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Buscema

  Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik – 1968 Onwards by Julian Cope

  ‘AND YET . . . WHAT IS THAT . . . AHEAD OF ME . . ? . . . WHAT FANTASTIC RELIC OF A BYGONE AGE HAVE I STUMBLED ONTO?’

  The Silver Surfer #1

  ‘“Father Cannot Yell” was a fascinating and fruitful exercise that T.S. Eliot would have been proud of. In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, Eliot chided the establishment for always seeing similarities between artists as negative. Why, he asked, was it not possible to return to the ancient bardic perspective that happily accepted the apprentice’s use of his master’s blueprint? Only in acceptance of what had gone before could he himself truly move on. Can certainly proved this on Monster Movie.’

  Krautrocksampler

  The summer passed in a haze of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, On the Road, American Psycho, Under the Volcano, The Epic of Gilgamesh . . . I persevered and as I persevered, I blogged. I showered some books with superlatives and others with brickbats. Occasionally, someone out there would respond to one of my posts with a superlative or brickbat of their own. I would try to reply in an easy, chatty manner but my heart wasn’t in it. The more time I spent writing the blog, the less there was for reading. Also, I wasn’t being paid.

  In early September, shortly after summarising Paradise Lost in two words which weren’t even mine – ‘mostly harmless’ – I came across the worst sentence from the worst paragraph from the worst great 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 book was The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Why, I asked myself, was I stopping to gawp at the phrase I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts? What was the purpose of interrogating the total ugliness of this sentence publicly? It was transparently, self-evidently terrible. Just reading it made me feel as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the brain with a gratuitously offensive and ineptly articulated metaphor. It would be better to turn the page and hurry swiftly along – nothing to see here. So I suspended the blog.1

  Maybe for some readers keeping a blog expedited the thought process. I’m sorry to say I found it a distraction and, as time went on, a chore. Once again, it was something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike reading. You stayed alert for the dominant themes, the telling phrases, about which you could opine wittily but, once you’d found the hook, engagement with the text went no further than it needed to in order to produce copy on time and in good order. Take American Psycho, for example. It occurred to me quite early on that it could be read as a critique of the type of alt. consumerism I had enjoyed pinning on On the Road a few weeks earlier. As a result, I focused not on the book as a whole but on applying my initial conception of American Psycho to what remained, i.e. the bulk of it, and on how best to make this observation on the blog. But the pleasure lay in the thought rather than the expression. Also – and this bears repeating – I wasn’t being paid.

  No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, said Doctor Johnson, and for centuries this held true. But in the Internet age, where comment is free and everyone is entitled to a wrong opinion, blockheads write zealously, copiously and for nothing. They have a platform unprecedented in human history. The problem faced by ‘old media’, and professional critics in particular, with their years of experience and their skill in fine phrase-making, is that their opinions now carry little more worth than those of the individual with a laptop who has never read any books and who would not recognise a pleasing and insightful cadence if it half-slammed, half-caressed them in the belly with a slippery bagful – well, you know how it goes by now.

  You might think I would be happy at the rise of bloggers, non-professional critics beholden to no one. But haven’t you got it yet? I’m never happy. Somebody once described the Internet as a library where all the books have been taken off the shelves and dumped in the middle of the floor. Disorganisation, however, is not the issue. The Internet is the greatest library in the universe; unfortunately someone has removed all the ‘no talking’ signs.

  Happily, the next title on the List was The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1. With the blog on hold, here was a book I could enjoy without having to worry about what I might write about it later or what anybody else might think. There were lots of exciting pictures to look at too. The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 was a compilation of issues #1 to #18 of the 1960s Marvel comic. Bibliographically, it qualified as a graphic novel, in as much as it told an evolving story and was bound between paper covers, but like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 was a novel without a conclusion – Marvel had abruptly cancelled the comic after issue #18.

  The Silver Surfer has all the hallmarks of the so-called ‘Silver Age’ of comic-books with which Marvel is synonymous: iconic heroes and villains, spectacular draughtsmanship, dynamic story-telling. As a child, I had always liked the character of the Surfer. With his cosmic powers (aka the Power Cosmic), his sleek, space-age appearance and his zippy, surfboard-like mode of transportation, the Silver Surfer – SKY-RIDER OF THE SPACEWAYS! – was a regular guest in other Marvel titles like The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four. I had a few of the original Silver Surfer comics in my collection but I had never had an opportunity to enjoy an uninterrupted run of his solo adventures until now.

  As a book, however, The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 proved a bit of a letdown. It was printed in cheapo black and white when the original artwork had been in colour; and the vintage advertisements had been left out, so there were no Hostess Twinkies, Sea Monkeys or pictorials for BB rifles ‘just like Dad’s’. Also, read as chapters in a book, one after another in quick succession, the underlying formula of The Silver Surfer comics showed through rather too plainly. Norrin Radd, aka the Silver Surfer, has been exiled to Earth by his former master and creator Galactus.2 He zooms around feeling sorry for himself on a flying surfboard powered by cosmic self-pity. Sometimes he tries, and fails, to break through the invisible barrier Galactus has placed around the Earth. Typically, he encounters some big-headed maniac who intends to destroy the planet. The Surfer battles and defeats them, often at considerable risk to his own life, but is mankind grateful? It is not. Mankind makes existence yet more intolerable for our argentine hero by shooting at him with rifles, missiles, etc. Cue much soliloquising from the Surfer, who at such moments likes to refer to himself in the third person and shunt his verbs to the end of each clause, about how much happier on his home world Zenn-La would the Silver Surfer be, how much his girlfriend Shalla Bal the Silver Surfer misses, and generally how by no one is the Silver Surfer understood. With the benefit of hindsight, the Silver Surfer was less a sky-rider of the spaceways and more a syntactically-confused adolescent with a martyr complex, which is probably exactly why he so strongly to the young Andy Miller appealed.

  Fig. 13: The wrong type of Silver Surfer.

  (© SueC/Shutterstock)

  As Norrin Radd rediscovered in every issue of The Silver Surfer, you can’t go home again. Reading these comics as an adult was an act of nostalgia. They were overwrought to the point of kitsch. And yet, and yet . . . there was still something magical about them. The kinetic artwork had lost none of its impact and the stories were ambitious to a fault. Across forty hand-inked, incident-filled pages, plus ads, they dealt with topics such as the arms race, the black power struggle, the fundamentals of metaphysics and the descent of man. On several occasions, the Surfer is pitched against Satan himself (e.g. issue #9, October 1969, TO STEAL THE SURFER’S SOUL!), although for reasons of religious sensitivity and copyright-infringement, Satan goes by
the name Mephisto, Monarch of Evil. It was a pop-art Paradise Lost.3

  Perhaps because I could still relate to the character of a troubled loner with special powers, I was able to forgive The Silver Surfer a lot. He could be mawkish and gauche, and clumsily did the Surfer himself express, but this was how I’d felt as a child and occasionally still felt as an adult. Whatever their flaws, I had found the comics at the right moment in life and they had stayed with me, in the same way Absolute Beginners had. Perhaps if I had encountered Dean Moriarty – another restless wanderer with grammar issues – at an impressionable age I could have been more forgiving of On the Road. But that moment was long gone and, with no choice but to read On the Road as a grown-up, with a grown-up’s fears and preoccupations, Kerouac was not selling the kind of trip I could use. I needed a new beat, not the old ones.

  There were relatively few books on the List left for me to read, but the answer I was looking for, the answer to life, the universe and everything, still seemed remote and unknowable. I was not even sure what the question was. I had to believe that the next book might tell me but, with the best will in the world, it looked rather improbable.