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

by Miller, Andy

  ‘Thank you.’

  Fit the Fourth – Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London, March 1998

  The twentieth century is almost over. I am now a commissioning editor; I have also started work on a book of my own. The young editor with whom I share an office tells me that Douglas Adams is giving a lecture on the South Bank this evening. He has a spare ticket. Do I want to go with him?

  Adams now lives in LA, where he is still trying to get a Hitchhiker’s movie off the ground, but he is currently in London to promote his latest project, an interactive CD-Rom video game called Starship Titanic. Onstage, he is full of enthusiasm, not just for the game as it stands, but for its potential in the future, as processing power increases and more people get involved via the Internet, once something called ‘broadband’ really takes off. After the lecture, my colleague and I eschew the queue for signed copies in favour of a drink in the Festival Hall bar. I don’t mind games but I still prefer books.

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not just a multi-brow piece of work; it also pioneered the concept of multi-platform content, back when terms like ‘broadband’ and ‘multi-platform’ were just twinkles in a crossword compiler’s eye. Adams created bespoke variations of Hitchhiker’s for radio, books, TV, audiobook and the theatre; he was still at it twenty years later, producing new drafts of the film script he hoped Disney might option. Starship Titanic had a precursor too; there was a Hitchhiker’s computer game as early as 1984, though back then I lacked a computer to play it on. Some of these versions are more artistically successful than others but Adams was always a confirmed believer in the unique virtues of new media.

  Adams’ last project before he died was a four-part radio series for the BBC entitled, to his slight chagrin, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future. The series was an enquiry into how science might affect our lives in the new millennium. The second programme, first broadcast in April 2001, concerned the likely prospects for books in an electronic age. Adams already sounds excited by ebooks and the implications of epublishing. At about the halfway mark, he offers a typically warm and witty appraisal of the sentimental attachment many of us have – or had – for reconstituted wood-pulp:

  ‘When people talk about their fondness for books, I wonder if they’re really talking about their fondness for reading. It’s rather like confusing the plate for the food. I mean, I like a beautifully printed and bound book as much as anybody else but I don’t need a houseful of them, any more than I need a houseful of beautiful dinner plates. About twelve would do fine; that, and a good recipe book.’

  He was right, of course. And yet I can’t help feeling some food tastes better when eaten off a plate; and that, just because science can give us a whole meal in a tablet, we don’t necessarily have to swallow it. In the future, the beautifully printed and bound book may become an endangered species, like the tiger or the kakapo. Surely that’s not what Douglas would have wanted.

  In the Festival Hall, we finish our drinks and make for the elevators. The lift doors open, we step inside and I find myself once again in the presence of a giant, Adams being no shorter than the last time we met. He smiles, though I am certain he doesn’t recognise me. Why would he? He is talking to someone; I don’t recall what about – perhaps his baby daughter or some mutual acquaintance or a new piece of tech. I do remember he was laughing. We reach the ground floor. As the elevator doors open, I stand aside to let him and his friend past.

  ‘After you,’ I say.

  The last time I see him alive he is walking towards Hungerford Bridge, deep in conversation and still laughing. Our paths will not cross again for thirteen years.

  Fit the Fifth – Hammersmith Apollo, London, Sunday, 11 March 2012

  Douglas Adams may be neither as tall nor alive as he once was but he remains remarkably popular. At his virtual sixtieth birthday party at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, there are towels everywhere. I am in the closing stages of writing my third book. I have taken thousands of baths and eaten many, many sandwiches, as a result of which the book is late to an extent even Adams might find outrageous. This is the first day off I have taken since Christmas.

  The proceeds from this virtual birthday party / fan convention / rock concert will go to Save the Rhino (www.savetherhino.org), the charity of which Adams was a founding patron. Many of his friends and family are here. On stage, a succession of comedians, writers and scientists tell personal stories about Douglas or explain what he meant to their lives and career choices. For some, Hitchhiker’s was the trigger for a lifelong fascination with physics or astronomy. For others, Last Chance to See inspired them to join the cause of conservation. A couple of the original cast members perform a specially written sketch. Terry Jones from Monty Python explains how no one read Douglas’s novels for the plot or the characters but for the ideas. It all feels well-meaning but also listless and unfunny. And I sit there and think: I don’t give a monkey’s about physics or astronomy or, if I am being scrupulously honest, the rhino, though I do put ten pounds in a bucket on the way out. These Douglas Adamses seem to have meant a lot to many of the people here but none of them was my Douglas Adams. As a reader, I loved Adams’ ear for humorous inflection, the rhythm and flow of his sentences, the glorious linguistic precision of his phrasing: ‘mostly harmless’; ‘total perspective vortex’; ‘and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side’; ‘a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea’. I read Adams for the words.

  In his introduction to Sunset at Blandings, P.G. Wodehouse’s final, unfinished novel, Adams hails Wodehouse’s comic style as ‘pure word music . . . He is the greatest musician of the English language.’ He writes of Wodehouse’s ‘dazzling images and conceits’ and his ‘pure, creative playfulness’, comparing him to Mozart, Einstein and Louis Armstrong. This is how I feel about Adams. He may have been inspired by big ideas and scientific concepts but he played like Louis Armstrong, bending the lyrics and the melody to express the joy of playing itself. I did not bump into this Douglas Adams at his birthday party. Nor, in retrospect, did I ever meet him in person. He rarely ventured out in public, sending forth a tall man called Douglas Adams to speak on his behalf: this was the Adams I encountered over the years and who passed away in 2001. The Douglas Adams who really mattered to me lived – and lives – in those inimitable cascades of pure word music.

  The following morning before starting work, after attending to the needs of my wife and son in the customary manner, I logged on to the Internet and illegally downloaded a torrent containing sixty computer games from the 1980s and the software with which to play them. The vintage game I was searching for – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – is available to play legally and for free at douglasadams.com, the BBC website and other locations on the web. But bad habits die hard. I installed the software, loaded the game and was rather startled to discover, there in front of me, the late Douglas Adams, alive and well. There was nothing on the screen save for a few brief sentences and a flashing cursor but as I gradually navigated my way through the opening scenes, I felt the unmistakable thrill of hearing Adams’ voice after a long absence – there were whole passages of original material, unfamiliar and impeccable jokes, wonderful strings of textual DNA; the stuff of life itself. It was great to hear from him again.

  Interactive Literature, Adams called it, a form of authorship which played to the strengths of the medium for which it was created, allowing the reader to decide the outcome of the story. He was delighted with the new possibilities it offered him and writers like him; equally, he never underestimated the centuries-old power of words on a page, arranged in set, unchanging lines. He was a man who loved Wodehouse, Dickens and Austen. He never lost his faith in the realignment of the synapses that occurs every time we pick up a good book and start reading, find something that interests us or makes us turn to the next page, so much so that when we look up, the world has changed.

  This is the abiding miracle of the book. We choos
e what happens next.

  Appendix One

  The List of Betterment

  (‘Asterisks denote the easiest to get into if you are starting from scratch . . . And if I missed your favourite one out, well excuse me.’ Julian Cope, Krautrocksampler.)

  The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov*

  Middlemarch – George Eliot

  Post Office – Charles Bukowski

  The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and 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

  Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

  Lord of the Flies – William Golding

  Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

  The Odyssey – Homer

  Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The Unfortunates – B.S. Johnson

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson

  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

  Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë*

  Everyman – Philip Roth

  Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes*

  One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

  Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

  Beyond Black – Hilary Mantel

  The Diary of a Nobody – George and Weedon Grossmith

  The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens

  The Aerodrome – Rex Warner

  I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith*

  The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry

  Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

  On the Road – Jack Kerouac

  Paradise Lost – John Milton

  American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

  The Dice Man – Luke Rhinehart

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

  Krautrocksampler – Julian Cope*

  Beloved – Toni Morrison*

  Against Nature – Joris-Karl Huysmans*

  Atomised – Michel Houellebecq*

  The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

  The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James

  Beowulf – translated by Seamus Heaney

  War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

  The Code of the Woosters – P.G. Wodehouse

  Appendix Two

  The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most

  Both this and Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read were inspired by equivalent appendixes in Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life. Asterisks denote authors whose work I have read extensively or in full.

  My Book About Me – Dr Seuss*

  Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner – A.A. Milne

  The Adventures of Tintin: The Crab with the Golden Claws – Hergé*

  Asterix and the Cauldron – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo*

  Moominpappa at Sea – Tove Jansson*

  Good Grief, Charlie Brown! – Charles M. Schulz*

  The Eighteenth Emergency – Betsy Byars

  Black Jack – Leon Garfield

  Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius – Terrance Dicks*

  Ludo and the Star Horse – Mary Stewart

  How to be Topp – Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle*

  The People’s Almanac, 1st edition – David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace

  Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot – Robert Arthur*

  The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok – Monty Python*

  The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams*

  The Death of Reginald Perrin – David Nobbs*

  The Return of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle*

  The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

  Coming Up for Air – George Orwell*

  The Beatles: the Authorised Biography – Hunter Davies

  From Fringe to Flying Circus – Roger Wilmut

  The Bible (‘Good News’ edition) – various authors

  Hamlet – William Shakespeare*

  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

  Cult Movies: the Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful – Danny Peary

  On Broadway – Damon Runyan

  Brighton Rock – Graham Greene*

  The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald*

  Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes*

  The Annotated Alice – Lewis Carroll, ed. Martin Gardner

  Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story – Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga

  The Complete Plays – Joe Orton

  Stanley Spencer R.A. – ed. Richard Carline, Andrew Causey, Keith Bell

  The End of the Affair – Graham Greene*

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne

  Dialectic of Enlightenment – Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer

  To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf*

  New Grub Street – George Gissing

  V for Vendetta – Alan Moore* and David Lloyd

  The Life of the Automobile – Ilya Ehrenburg

  Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes*

  Lyrics 1962–1985 – Bob Dylan

  Collected Poems 1909–62 – T.S. Eliot*

  Collected Poems – Philip Larkin*

  Bleak House – Charles Dickens*

  The Child in Time – Ian McEwan*

  Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov*

  The Diaries of Franz Kafka – Franz Kafka*

  Ulysses – James Joyce*

  In Search of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

  The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri

  London Fields – Martin Amis*

  Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

  The Lost Continent – Bill Bryson*

  Work is Hell – Matt Groening*

  A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick*

  Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis

  Rabbit, Run – John Updike*

  U & I: A True Story – Nicholson Baker*

  Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung – Lester Bangs

  Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

  London A–Z Street Atlas – Geographers A–Z Map Company Ltd

  Alma Cogan – Gordon Burn

  Uncle Vanya – Anton Chekhov*

  The Secret History – Donna Tartt

  Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

  Mon propre rôle – Serge Gainsbourg

  The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 – John Carey

  Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby*

  Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh*

  The Life and Death of Peter Sellers – Roger Lewis

  A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd edition – David Thomson

  Writing Home – Alan Bennett*

  How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain de Botton

  Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties – Ian MacDonald*

  Sword of Honour – Evelyn Waugh*

  Why We Got the Sack from the Museum – David Shrigley*

  Anthropology – Dan Rhodes*

  Boring Postcards – ed. Martin Parr*

  The Buildings of England: Surrey (2nd edition) – Nikolaus Pevsner, Ian Nairn, Bridget Cherry*

  The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald*

  The Kingdom by the Sea – Paul Theroux

  Harry Potter a
nd the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling*

  The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket*

  The Human Stain – Philip Roth*

  The Future of Nostalgia – Svetlana Boym

  Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories – Anton Chekhov*

  The Complete Peanuts: 1950–1952 – Charles M. Schulz*

  Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography – Jimmy McDonough

  Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson – Jonathan Coe*

  The People’s Act of Love – James Meek

  All the Devils are Here – David Seabrook

  The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories – H.P. Lovecraft

  Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall – Luke Haines

  Howards End – E.M. Forster*

  The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes*

  Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

  We Are in a Book! – Mo Willems*

  In addition, though they were published after the period covered by this book, I must mention Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany – Betterment aside, the two books to have given me the most pleasure in the century so far.

  Appendix Three

  Books I Still Intend to Read

  I intend to read these books and also write about them. Please visit mill-i-am.com for updates.

  The remainder of Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

  Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

  The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

  Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford

  A House for Mr Biswas – V.S. Naipaul

  Naked Lunch – William Burroughs

  The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

  White Teeth – Zadie Smith

  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers