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

by Miller, Andy

7 From ‘On Reading and Books’. Though it was written a hundred and fifty years ago, this essay by Schopenhaeur still has much to tell us. Also, for nineteenth-century German philosophy, it is significantly funnier than you might expect.

  8 Not the sort of comparison F.R. Leavis would make, eh readers? Actually, Frank much preferred Nemesis™ at Alton Towers, which he described in a letter to friends as both ‘physically and conceptually rigorous in the Greek classical tradition’ and ‘wicked – I totally spilt my drink and crisps’.

  9 ‘I made the mistake of going on a TV quiz show and admitting that I’d never read Middlemarch . . . and I don’t think I’ll ever live it down. When I saw I was in trouble I went out and bought it, and I’m planning to read it. I hear it’s good.’ Salman Rushdie to John Haffenden, 1983.

  10 An echo of Roger Hargreaves here. I am thinking particularly of the words with which he draws Mr Strong to its droll yet satisfying conclusion – ‘Ice cream! Ha ha!’

  1 This is a headache. I have divided the books along these lines but a similar exercise using the writers’ nationalities would produce a markedly different result. Post Office, for example, is a distinctively American novel by an author who was, strictly speaking, German. Somerset Maugham, whose stories are synonymous with England and Englishness, was born, passed much of his life in and died in France. The Communist Manifesto is the work of a couple of Prussians. Murdoch, Tressell and Beckett were native Dubliners, but would one categorise The Sea, The Sea or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as Irish novels? I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. No doubt someone from the TLS will be in touch.

  2 ‘Uncle Vanya, we must go on. We’ve no choice! All we can do is go on living . . . all through the endless days and evenings . . . we will get through them . . . whatever fate brings. We’ll work for others until we’re old, there’ll be no rest for us till we die. And when the time comes, we’ll go without complaining and we’ll remember that we wept, and that we suffered, and that life was bitter, but God will take pity on us! . . .’ Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Act 4.

  I always wanted to copy out this speech in the ‘Further Comments’ box of my annual appraisal form.

  3 In fact, the TUC now owns the original handwritten manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It can be browsed in its entirety at www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php.

  4 In the late 1960s, the film director Jean-Luc Godard denounced the French film industry as inherently bourgeois and announced that henceforth he would only produce work which conformed to his increasingly Maoist political beliefs. This resulted in several short films that whatever one’s opinion of them as cinematic art – and I think they are pretty wonderful – are unambiguously terrible propaganda. British Sounds, which Godard made around this time for (of all people) London Weekend Television, consists of uninterrupted footage of the deafening production line at Ford’s plant in Dagenham, Essex, a naked woman wandering up and down stairs in a flat, interviews with a group of Ford employees, a generic bunch of hirsute students sitting around and chatting and, finally, a montage sequence of clenched fists punching through paper Union Jack flags. It is laughably pretentious and woefully inscrutable. Had the director been bold enough to screen this for the workers at Dagenham, they would have been more likely to rise up and seize Jean-Luc Godard than the means of production. British Sounds was never broadcast by LWT, but these days you can find most of it on YouTube.

  1 Morrissey bought two copies of a book by Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums) of The Jam about what a bastard Paul Weller had been to them by splitting the group and abandoning them to fend for themselves. ‘That’s not supposed to be very good,’ I said. ‘Mm,’ smiled Moz, ‘but they’re not for me.’ Do you think they were intended for Morrissey’s estranged Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke (the bass guitar) and Mike Joyce (the drums)? I do.

  Princess Diana, in the period when she was separated from Prince Charles and trying to assert her independence by making tentative outings to McDonald’s, Harvey Nichols, etc., chose something from the psychology section about the effects of bad fathering on children with eating disorders. The manager of the shop immediately forbade any of us from contacting a tabloid newspaper with this scoop, though I am revealing it here for posterity. Towards the end of the transaction, a paparazzo ran into the shop and tried to snap Diana and, to a far lesser extent, me. The next morning, the manager wrote to Kensington Palace to assure them that this breach of privacy had nothing to do with us and the Princess should feel confident that she could return to our portals whenever she wished, discretion was our watchword, etc., etc. It was that sort of shop.

  Dustin Hoffman, though thoroughly amiable, said and did nothing worth noting nor did he buy a book. This should in no way be taken as an implicit criticism of him. One well-known actress, a local resident of the shop, pulled lots of memorable stunts which would probably amuse and enthral you but even twenty years later I am reluctant to publish them and give this individual the slightest whiff of publicity, even though she is no longer with us. It was not unknown for the entire staff to hide in the stockroom rather than deal with her petulant, ill-mannered demands. She was one of the rudest human beings it has ever been my misfortune to encounter but I am not going to reveal her identity here. Let’s just say it’s a pity her character doesn’t get stabbed through the throat with a camera tripod specially adapted for the purpose at the climax of [NAME OF FILM REDACTED BUT IF YOU’VE GOT ANYTHING ABOUT YOU, YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT IS] and leave it at that.

  2 Though the event was held at the behest of Booker, Dame Iris may have chosen to read from her most recent novel The Green Knight, rather than The Sea, The Sea, and I am writing about the wrong book. Thank you, the then-future Mrs Miller, for the declarification.

  3 This has an unhappy resonance with the domestic arrangements of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who would invite guests to dinner at their Islington bedsitter and treat them to a National Assistance feast of rice and sardines, with differently-cooked rice and golden syrup for pudding. ‘One of the most bizarre and terrible meals I’ve ever eaten.’ Charles Monteith, former chairman of Faber & Faber.

  1 Turn to Appendix One: The List of Betterment, for additional examples of American cult writing, some of which we shall return to later, e.g. 37, On the Road; 39, American Psycho; 40, The Dice Man. I never got round to Naked Lunch or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both of which may be found in Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read.

  2 One evening, on a late shift at the shop, I was standing alone at the ground-floor till. That afternoon, I had been to a funeral. I had come straight to work and so had not had a chance to change out of the black suit, white shirt and black tie I had worn to the service. I was feeling tired and sad.

  Customer: (STARTLED) Mr Pink! Er, has anyone said to you . . . ? Me: Yes, they have. Can I help you?

  Customer: It’s amazing! Let’s go to work! Would you mind if I ran and got a couple of mates?

  Me: Actually, I have just been to a funeral today, so I’m not really . . .

  Customer: Oh yeah, of course. Sorry. (PAUSE.) Can I bring them in tomorrow to have a look at you?

  That night, I shaved off the beard.

  3 One of the groups I used to go and see at the Garage, Subterania, ULU, etc. was the Auteurs, led by the dyspeptic Luke Haines, a man whose demeanour, onstage and off, is more Ignatius J. Reilly than Iggy Pop. See his hilariously splenetic memoirs Bad Vibes and Post Everything (both Heinemann) for proof. Haines’ album 21st Century Man contains a song called ‘Love Letter to London’ which eloquently addresses those of us who have chosen to leave the city behind. ‘They said that they loved you / But they used you as a playground / When they were young,’ he hisses.

  4 This is a statement of fact. On our line, people read newspapers, or work documents, or watched portable DVD players, or played on games consoles, or played with their phones, or nodded off. Books were relatively thin on the ground. In a year, I never saw one other person
with their nose in what might be termed a ‘classic’. In London, on the other hand, I frequently witnessed people on the bus or Tube engrossed in Hardy, Lessing, Flaubert, Einstein, the Koran and, on one occasion, Hitler. Does reading Mein Kampf make you a better person than the one playing Angry Birds? Certainly not! But it does make you more interesting. Don’t shoot the messenger.

  5 I did not realise Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky was a trilogy until I started it, otherwise I could have claimed it as three novels rather than one. Conversely, The Unnamable is the final part of a trilogy, also comprising Molloy and Malone Dies. I knew this in advance and chose to ignore it. Why? Probably because I guessed Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and The Unnamable were better-known quantities, and sounded more impressive, than The Plains of Cement and The Samuel Beckett Trilogy. Again, don’t shoot the messenger, even though, in this case, the messenger and the message are one and the same.

  1 This was the gist, at any rate. I don’t watch Loose Women with a Dictaphone running.

  2 The Wikipedia page devoted to inaccuracies in The Da Vinci Code lists dozens of specific mis-statements and errors.

  3 ‘The worst kind of arse gravy’ is a tautology, unless Stephen Fry’s books represent the best kind.

  1 The extracts here are taken from Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation of Anna Karenina, which was approved by Tolstoy himself: ‘Better translators . . . could not be invented.’ I cannot vouch for its fidelity to the cadences of the original Russian but it is a lyrical read and full of personality – though whether it is the author’s is a moot point. Translation is a tricky and competitive business, partly because of the personalities of those involved. There can never be a right answer, yet academics and publishers are always pushing for fresh, ‘definitive’ editions. In recent years, another crack husband and wife team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, have cornered the market in crisp new versions of works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol et al. Their Anna was selected as an Oprah Book Club choice and sold several hundred thousand copies. ‘Tolstoy is not reader-friendly,’ Pevear told the New Yorker in 2005. ‘Tolstoy’s style is the least interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar.’ So perhaps the lyricism I detected in Anna Karenina was the Maudes’ and not Tolstoy’s after all. But wait! Pevear ‘has never mastered conversational Russian’, notes the New Yorker, and it is his wife who actually speaks the language. I tell you, it’s a hall of mirrors. Fundamentally, there is probably no substitute for the original Russian; but unless we accept a substitute we don’t get to read Tolstoy at all.

  2 At the performance I attended of Sunday in the Park with George, we sat behind the novelist and intellectual Andrew O’Hagan, who bought an ice cream during the interval and appeared to enjoy the show. In 2010, O’Hagan published the novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, the narrator of which is a talking dog. Having proved he too could give voice to a notorious hound, O’Hagan’s next project was ghost-writing the ‘unauthorised autobiography’ of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. They say Sondheim has been approached to work on a musical adaptation.

  1 In his article on Patrick Hamilton, Dan Rhodes calls The Midnight Bell ‘a cover version’ of Of Human Bondage.

  2 ‘All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well-supported in logic and argument than others.’ Douglas Adams, interview with The American Atheist.

  3 One former marketing director of the book chain Waterstones once told me that he got round the problem of constantly being asked ‘Have you read X or Y?’ with the foolproof response: ‘Not personally’, a formulation I have utilised many times since.

  4 For more on this topic, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Granta), is warmly recommended. NB. I have not read it.

  5 There are, of course, exceptions. You will have had the experience of asking for a widely-reviewed title by someone you consider a well-known author, only to be met with a blank stare or a request to spell ‘Brown’. Fortunately, you have the humility to acknowledge that you are not the world – nor are you the sort to enjoy lording it over a poorly-paid shop worker. If only all customers were as patient and wise as you are.

  I once worked alongside someone who, by her own admission, knew next to nothing about literature. She once asked me to recommend a book by Graham Greene. ‘Why don’t you try The End of the Affair?’ I suggested. ‘What, just the end? Not the whole thing?’ she replied. But she was cheerful and well-spoken and many of the regular customers came to ask for her by name, and were sorry when she left to set up her own catering business. She is now a millionaire.

  6 NB. One might swap round the names ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Titchmarsh’ here without altering the thrust of the argument. If I loved the novels of Alan Titchmarsh but people insisted on buying that bloody War and Peace all the time, it would be equally infuriating.

  7 I know the character’s name is Smith and not Tom Courtenay. I am deliberately referring to the 1962 film adaptation rather than Alan Sillitoe’s original novella because I have seen the former but not read the latter. So piss off.

  1 I still have Al Hine’s book The Beatles in Help!. I can see it on the shelf from here. Of course, I have never read it.

  2 Daddy has not had time to get changed out of his office clothes: pork-pie hat, brown brogues, blue tartan suit, bright red tie and socks. In fact, Judith Kerr never actually tells us that Daddy goes to an office, only that he is out for much of the day and he would never knock because he’s ‘got his key’. Dressed like that, I think Daddy is either a small-time gangster or working the halls.

  3 For lots more in-depth analysis of The Tiger Who Came to Tea by frustrated English graduates with too much time on their hands, check the numerous discussion threads archived at Mumsnet.

  4 For U.S. readers, Croydon is a suburb of South London, synonymous with much that is perceived to be drab and depressing about British suburbia. In 1999, the rock star David Bowie said in an interview, ‘It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about somebody or something: “God, it’s so f**king Croydon!”’. As will become apparent in this section, this is not a point of view I share with Mr ‘Stardust’ (sic.), who grew up not on the planet Mars, as he would have you believe, but in the neighbouring suburb of Bromley.

  5 The Moon’s a Balloon is terrific, obviously, but The People’s Almanac (1975) is an extraordinary 1500pp repository of whatever information its compilers found colourful, revelatory or entertaining, the useful and useless side-by-side – the Wikipedia of its day. It was with The People’s Almanac that I first scared myself stupid with the doomsday prophecies of Nostradamus, studied the inconsistencies of the Warren Report into the assassination of President Kennedy and, at the age of twelve, convinced myself that I had somehow contracted syphilis. What a book.

  6 Eleanor Hibbert, 1906–1993, sold more than 100 million books in her lifetime. Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were just two of her bestseller noms de plume.

  7 ‘Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.’ Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.

  8 A certain sort of reader might expect me to renounce Croydon, Smiths and even book tokens but I won’t do it. I loved all three. The same reader might expect me to report that my love of books was nurtured by an independent children’s bookshop, a magical cavern of storytelling, etc. etc. etc., but it wasn’t, because there wasn’t one. We can’t all live in Muswell Hill.

  9 An unfulfilled hankering for Sea Monkeys and Twinkies stayed with me for years. In 1998, I begged the author Shawn Levy, visiting the UK to publicise his new book, to bring with him a box or a packet or a bag of Twinkies, however they damn came, so I could finally discover wh
at the legendary enchanted sweetbreads tasted like. When Shawn told his two young boys what the Englishman wanted, they looked at him in amazement. ‘But Dad,’ they said. ‘Why??’ And with good reason, as it turned out. Twinkies are horrible. (I note this more in sadness than anger. At the time of writing, Hostess has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.)

  10 The Puffin Club was an offshoot of Puffin Books, the UK’s leading publisher of books for children, itself part of Penguin Books Ltd. It was the brainchild of Puffin’s inspirational editor-in-chief Kaye Webb.

  11 Fantagraphics Books’ ongoing publication of every Peanuts strip cartoon in attractive hardback volumes, with introductions by fans like Matt Groening and Jonathan Franzen, is one of the most welcome publishing programmes of recent times. It is to be hoped that the project, which commenced in 2004, reaches completion before printed, hardbound books become obsolete – I fear it will be a race to the finish.

  12 I did say arguably. There are still many fantastic programmes being made for children in the UK but few of them are based on books, and definitely not vintage books. Classic children’s drama of this sort has almost entirely vanished from the schedules, except at Christmas when the BBC or ITV will dramatise The Borrowers for the umpteenth time. The spirit of Jackanory survives more in the bedtime story on CBeebies, or Stephen Fry’s readings of Harry Potter, than it does in the current incarnation of Jackanory itself, Jackanory Junior, which treats its young viewers as though every single one of them is suffering from chronic attention deficit disorder, such is the bombardment of sound effects, animated inserts and green-screen overload. These days, decent adaptations of English literature, classic or contemporary, are more likely to come to us via Hollywood, e.g. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Nanny McPhee, The Secret Garden and the Harry Potter movies, often made in the UK with American money.