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

by Miller, Andy

  So when, years later, I informed my wife Of Human Bondage was rubbish, it was the plain truth as I saw it; and when I decided to stop reading, it was freedom in action. So why did I feel guilty about it?

  I had previous. When Tina and I were in the first flush of our courtship, we did as many young booklovers do and swapped favourite novels. She read mine, Absolute Beginners, from cover to cover. I only read the first three chapters of hers. Then, in a questionnaire in The Bookseller magazine, I went into print with a premature review of it. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ I wrote, ‘that if anyone in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice said what they thought, the whole novel would be over in an instant. I hated it.’ Looking at this now, I cannot believe she married me, not because I disliked Pride and Prejudice – I mean, she was lukewarm on Absolute Beginners – or because I was poking fun at it, but because I did not even do her or Jane Austen the courtesy of finishing the book.

  Returning to Pride and Prejudice after a break of fifteen years, I felt a little warmer towards it. For a start, it was not Of Human Bondage. Compared with some of the huge books I had read recently, it was promisingly slender. And thanks to the TV and film adaptations, it was a known quantity. I was not leaping into the dark; all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other for a few more days. Besides, fifteen years was a long time ago. I was older, wiser. I had just read Moby-Dick and The Sea, The Sea. I had learned my lesson.

  How strange to discover then that after only a few pages, my response to Pride and Prejudice was the same as ever: exasperation and impatience. It was as though I had put the book aside in annoyance and popped out of the room for fifteen years. God, it was irritating. Get on with it! I had expected to come back to Austen with a fresh sensitivity and understanding – a renewed sense and sensibility – but nothing had changed; it seemed like my reaction was almost an allergic one. If you don’t like macaroni cheese, you don’t like macaroni cheese. If eating peanut butter makes you feel sick and wheezy, eating more peanut butter will only make you sicker and wheezier. Regrettably, Austen seemed to act on me like macaroni-cheese-flavoured peanut butter and no amount of persuasion – or indeed, Persuasion – was going to alter that, no matter how delicious, organic or smooth the recipe was supposed to be.

  You cannot like everything. These are the wise words of the critic Dominic Maxwell. However widely-read you may be, however educated and open-minded, you will probably always have intolerances or blind spots – and this is ok. Without them, you have no taste to call your own. This meant I might never get along with Jane Austen – I could accept that. It was not as if she needed my support. Unfortunately, having succumbed to the temptation of leaving Of Human Bondage unfinished, I was now looking at Pride and Prejudice and thinking: why should I finish this one? I knew what was going to happen in it; I knew what I thought about it; and what I said about it publicly would remain the same whether I plodded on to the bitter end or not. What, in other words, would be the difference between saying I had read Pride and Prejudice and actually reading it? Perhaps it would be more honest not to finish it; perhaps there was something noble in running the race and, at the last minute, refusing to cross the line, like Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.7

  But I completed the race and this is why. While such thoughts buzzed distractingly round my brain, I stumbled on. Momentum carried me forward. Beneath the veneer of Pride and Prejudice – the clockwork plot, the rapier wit, sharp to many but dull to me – lay a cold, hard fact of life: it was better to be married than to be poor. Poverty, and the fear of it, shaped the choices faced by Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters. The fate of the entire family was dependent on one or more girl making a ‘good marriage’. Fear of poverty was the engine of the novel because, for millions in the era in which Austen was writing, it was the engine of their precarious lives. This was a truth universally acknowledged by the books I had read in the last few weeks and months – Middlemarch, The Communist Manifesto, even Anna Karenina. And moving into the twentieth century, it was the dread at the heart of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Of Human Bondage: the ruin and degradation of poverty.

  In such a world, books mattered. They were valuable and unique objects, a means of education or consolation or escape. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen shows what books mean to different characters. Elizabeth, as we might expect, loves to read nearly as much as she loves to tramp across fields and make quips. Her father, Mr Bennet, rarely ventures forth from his library; he hides in it to escape from his wife, who seems never to have read a book in her life. The unctuous parson Mr Collins never reads novels, preferring tedious volumes of sermons. Their well-to-do new neighbour Mr Bingley has few books (‘I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more than I ever look into’) and his shallow sister Caroline only reads because Mr Darcy does: ‘At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”’

  It is Darcy, inevitably, who Austen presents as a perfect lover of books. His attitude is one of profound respect; the possession of them is a privilege. Darcy is always buying books and adding to the library at Pemberley, which he describes as ‘the work of many generations’: ‘I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.’ And when we are shown Darcy in the act of reading, he even does this correctly, never allowing himself to be diverted from the task in hand by a Bennet or a Bingley. Nor does he lie about books. Austen leaves us in little doubt that in reading, as in so much else, Mr Darcy has purpose and integrity; he always finishes what he starts.

  I was still mulling this over when, without meaning to, I came to the end of Pride and Prejudice and, I suppose, the List of Betterment. I had successfully distracted myself into completing both.

  I had read thirteen books – well, twelve and a half. It had been like a holiday to take one after another and do little more than appreciate them, to silently answer the questions ‘Have you read this? Is it any good?’ with an easy and wholehearted ‘yes’ – because it was the truth. I had rediscovered, or maybe discovered for the first time, the pleasure of sharing enthusiasm for a novel gratuitously, not as an exercise in social standing or a bid to feel part of contemporary opinion. It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies. I bought books I did not read. I started books I never finished. I expressed strong views I had not earned. And this had all become clear to me through the simple process of turning one page after another, faithfully, properly, for a few short weeks. If I kept going, perhaps I could change. But first I had to go back.

  Of Human Bondage was waiting for me under a pile of socks.

  ‘I thought you’d decided to give up on that,’ said Tina.

  ‘It’s my penance,’ I said.

  You cannot like everything. But you owe it to yourself, and Mr Darcy, to try.

  In Of Human Bondage, the young Philip Carey picks up what Maugham calls ‘the most delightful habit in the world’:

  ‘He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.’

  What a miserable sod; a pity he is entirely correct.

  Last night, as usual,
my son Alex went up to bed early so he could read. His love of books is uncomplicated and all-consuming. Should we tell him that, after Captain Underpants, the rest of his life may well prove a bitter disappointment? Should we warn him off reading altogether, or push him outdoors and get him kicking a football about before it’s too late? Or perhaps we should give him his own List of Betterment, the better to prepare him for the awfulness of what awaits him. Ten pages of The Unnamable, son, and then lights out.

  When I was a boy, I loved reading in just the way Alex does now. But life had separated me from that boy; books had got in the way. Because if I had learned one thing from the List of Betterment, it was that a love of reading and a love of books are not necessarily the same thing.

  A few weeks after finally completing Of Human Bondage, I was caught late one night in London. Locking up the office at about nine, I grabbed a couple of manuscripts and my copy of Homer’s Odyssey. In the glow of victory, I had resolved to extend the List from a dozen great books to fifty – to keep moving forward. Betterment was continuing.

  It was raining as I set off for the station. When I arrived at Victoria I discovered that all train services to the coast had been cancelled. Great. I was standing on the concourse, dripping and wondering what to do next when I heard someone calling my name.

  ‘Andy Miller! How are you? Come for a drink!’

  It was an old colleague of mine called Patric. Raincoat, attaché case, rolled-up Sporting Life. Patric seemed rather drunk. I kept him company for an hour, matching his drinks, then caught the last train home. It was several years since we had worked together. A few months earlier, he told me, his partner had died suddenly. Days at the office were bearable but he did not know what to do with the evenings. The prospect of retirement, for which they had both prepared so diligently, now filled him with dread.

  ‘I ought to be angry,’ Patric said. ‘I am angry. But you’ll understand that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You always struck me as a very angry person,’ he said, as we propped up the station bar. ‘I don’t know why. Sooo angry. I think you are one of the angriest men I have ever met.’

  I put him on his train and then, reeling a little from the drink, went to find mine. As we pulled through the usual stops, I could not concentrate on The Odyssey. I was too tired and fuzzy, and Patric’s words kept coming back to me. Angry? Really? I did not think of myself as especially angry, no more than anyone else on the threshold of middle-age. And yet, in recent weeks, whenever I thought about my life and the path it had taken so far, along avenues lined with books, one image kept pushing itself to the front of my mind: John Goodman, rampaging along the hotel corridor in Barton Fink, fire exploding at his back, his face transfigured with outrage, roaring in fury:

  ‘I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!

  I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!

  I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!’

  And I shall.

  II

  ‘The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.’

  George Orwell, ‘Riding Down from Bangor’

  ‘We tried but we didn’t have long.’

  Hot Chip, ‘And I Was A Boy From School’

  It is a Thursday morning in May, a few days before my thirty-ninth birthday. I am on a train to Bournemouth where I shall be attending a conference. I am reading a book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I feel like I am going out of my mind.

  It is four months since I staggered to the end of Of Human Bondage. Since then, I have finished off a dozen more great books of varying lengths and difficulty. Seated in this train carriage on a May morning is someone who has read not only The Master and Margarita, Middlemarch, Post Office, The Communist Manifesto, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, The Sea, The Sea, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Unnamable, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice and Of Human Bondage, but also Catch-22, Lord of the Flies, Frankenstein, The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Unfortunates, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Everyman and Absolute Beginners. When I shut my eyes, this list scrolls across the inside of my eyelids like the Times Square news ticker. I shut my eyes a lot. I am exhausted.

  For this and other reasons, I am finding it hard to concentrate on One Hundred Years of Solitude. I resent having to spend a night away from home on a junket. I am listening to The Warning by Hot Chip and while it is a really good record, it is also distracting me from Márquez. I have not been to Bournemouth since I was a teenager, on a short family holiday, and I am apprehensive about the feelings that might be dredged up by returning there. The train does not smell like my train. Also, the book is terrible.

  A week ago, I re-read Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. For many years, this was my favourite book; it was disconcerting, in the midst of Betterment, to realise it still might be. It spoke to me when I was sixteen, seventeen, twenty-five. Somehow, it speaks to me now, urgently and without apology. This cannot be right.

  Anyway, it has been a heavy anti-climax to turn back to Literature. I am finding it tough to establish common ground with One Hundred Years . . . When it first appeared in English, thirty years ago, this novel was hailed as revolutionary, romantic, a firework display of the imagination – but this is not how it strikes me. To me it seems like one initially amusing trick repeated again and again, a chimp in a small room riding a tricycle, puffing on the stub of a cigar, going round and round in circles. I don’t want to feel like this about One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I know is special to readers around the world – I am trying not to have these unworthy, chimpish thoughts – but I cannot help it. The trouble with magical realism for me, as I suggested earlier, is that it is neither realistic nor magical. I press on, uptight and bored.

  The best track on Hot Chip’s The Warning is called ‘And I Was A Boy From School’. It is an electronic lament, full of yearning for something just out of the singer’s grasp. ‘And I was a boy from school, helplessly helping all the rules . . .’ It seems to be a very nostalgic song, or maybe it is about nostalgia? Either way, with its bubbling analogue keyboards, it speaks to me. I especially like the song’s gorgeous middle eight, where, to an accompaniment of celestial electric harps and Casiotones, Alexis and Joe, Hot Chip’s two singers, absent-mindedly squabble with each other.

  Joe (mournfully): I got, I got lost . . .

  Alexis (sweetly): You said this was the way back . . .

  The train pulls into Bournemouth station and I pick up a taxi to drive me to the hotel. From the back of the cab, parts of the town seem briefly familiar but then fall away. It has been twenty-five years. Mum and Dad and I stayed here for a week in successive Easter holidays, 1983 and 1984. Every single day I walked the length and breadth of the town, combing the shops for interesting paper and vinyl: a tie-in novelisation of The Beatles’ film Help! by someone called Al Hine,1 two early issues of The Face magazine, (Keep Feeling) Fascination by the Human League. I still think about those two weeks often, on my own at childhood’s end. I have probably never been happier.

  After checking in at the hotel, I am supposed to make my way to the conference centre and attend a keynote speech or breakout working party or some piece of nonsense, but instead I skive off. I lie on the bed and finish reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. I watch the chimp ride the trike round the room until the chimp and I have both had enough. And then the chimp grows magical wings and flies away, like his father, and his father’s father before him. Meanwhile, I make a cup of tea and eat a shortbread finger and think: that’s that. At this moment, I cannot conceive of picking up another book. Betterment is over.

  It is fo
ur o’clock, too late to join my fellow delegates, but not too late for a melancholy stroll. So I leave my room and go down into the streets and sure enough break my heart, as I always knew I would, trying and failing to find the boy from school who came here with his mum and dad, a lifetime ago.

  (Let’s pretend that I left One Hundred Years of Solitude lying open on the bedside table, and that you, like a camera, have panned from the closing door to the table, and that, as my retreating footsteps echo down the stairs, you focus on these words . . . )

  ‘Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment . . . [He] wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past.’

  One evening at bedtime, Alex and I were reading The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

  ‘Hey!’ I said, surprised. ‘That’s where I grew up!’

  We were looking at a double-page illustration of Mummy and Daddy and Sophie walking along the street in the early evening. ‘So they went out in the dark,’ ran the text in the bottom left-hand corner, ‘and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café.’ The street was somewhere in London; a 72 bus is pulling away in the background, its conductor perching on the rear platform, peering into the oncoming traffic. A blue car drives past – a Ford Escort? A Morris Marina? Across the road, an older woman is walking a white dog. Nearby, a couple seem to be turning into a restaurant called H. Pether. Other businesses line the street: Harding, a florist; Rudman, a fishmonger; TOY SHOP; a children’s outfitters called Melinda. The shops are shut, but above several of them, lights in the flats are on and curtains pulled. The street lamps glow yellow in the dusk.