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

by Miller, Andy

  ‘All right then,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  Tina studied her windblown face in the rear-view mirror. ‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Farmer f**king Giles.’

  ‘Farmer who?’ asked Alex, who had just woken up.

  ‘Farmer funky Giles,’ Tina replied. ‘He’s like a farmer, but he’s a funky farmer. On his farm, he’s got a disco. After tea, all the animals go to the barn and play party games and have a disco.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘He’s really funky!’

  At moments such as these, service droids stick together.

  As we turned out of the car park and into the lane that leads back to the main road, I glanced over at the square-topped towers of the monastery, silhouetted against the bay and the lowering sky. ‘From the water they are a moving sight on the brink of the bleak promontory,’ remarks the Pevsner guide to North East and East Kent. ‘It is a disgrace that the inland road approaches through the vulgarest caravan site in the county.’ It is this kind of interjection that gives the Buildings of England series its inimitable character. The guide will be calmly listing the architectural properties of a building, its apsidal chancel or pilaster buttresses, and then, all of a sudden, explode with rage or incredulity at whatever monstrosity has just offended the compiler’s eye: a particularly hideous office block or leisure centre, a caravan site which is not merely vulgar but the vulgarest in the county.

  Many of my favourite books mimic the Pevsner guides in this respect, as though the narrator and their subject have become locked in an increasingly ill-tempered tussle for control of the text: Pale Fire by Nabokov, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, most of B.S. Johnson’s novels, even Roger Lewis’s cantankerous The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. I suppose The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the prototype in fiction; and, although it was not my intention at the outset, it seems to be how The Year of Reading Dangerously has turned out. At every turn, the author’s attempts to dictate their terms are frustrated and contradicted by the book they find themselves writing or the circumstances in which they are trying to write it; hence the term contradictatorial, which I have just come up with despite the hellish drilling and banging of the workmen doing up the property next door.4

  Like many women, I suspect, Tina does not have much time for the Contradictatorial School. It does seem to be a style of writing that is practised and enjoyed almost exclusively by men, a fact which disappoints me. For a previous birthday, I had bought her Ian MacDonald’s scintillating Revolution in the Head which, as a huge Beatles fan, I thought she would love; one of the talents that first attracted me was her ability to recite The Beatles’ Christmas 1964 fan-club flexidisc in its entirety. But she could not get along with it. Maybe there is something intrinsically blokeish about a book which takes The Beatles’ recorded legacy, lays it out in precise chronological order, weighs and measures it, and then complains vehemently about the parts it doesn’t like. And it is this in-built, ineluctable blokeishness I find disconcerting. I have spent most of my adult life trying not to act like a typically male man, so to discover one’s predilection for a book, or particular style of book, may well be governed not by taste or choice but by an arbitrary allocation of chromosomes and gametes, feels like an own goal, as though one had been compelled to conclude a thematically important paragraph with a cliché drawn from a sphere of activity one professed to despise; balls to that.

  Most straight men are an embarrassment; that much is clear. They enjoy porn, Sky Sports, racing cars, barbecues and gadgets; they stink of Lynx deodorant. Though they mostly prefer the company of other men, they are scared stiff of being mistaken for women or homosexuals. In general, as we have seen, they perceive reading as a feminised activity and, although they do read books, these tend to be about either Joe Strummer or the Mafia, or have some rigid practical application, e.g. How to Cook Great Barbecue Food without Looking Too Gay. According to a survey from the National Literacy Trust, four out of five fathers have never read a bedtime story to their children, either because they see it as the mother’s job or because We’re Going on a Bear Hunt doesn’t have enough lesbians in it. Four out of five! I have to share toilet facilities with these losers. In the words of Eeyore the Donkey, which four out of five men may never know the joy of sharing: ‘“Pathetic,” he said. “That’s what it is. Pathetic.”’

  Fig. 15: ‘Down Hole’, David Shrigley, 2007.

  (© David Shrigley)

  Tina has always said she could never have married a man who did not love books. Was she aware how reckless she had been? At a stroke, she was reducing the field of potential life-partners by up to 80 per cent. Take into account the 10 per cent of men who are gay and that leaves a shallow breeding pool consisting mostly of the myopic, weak-chested or lame. Really, as I never tire of reminding her, she was lucky to have found me. So what if I had never learned to drive? I had all my own teeth and would rather the cost of a Sky Sports subscription be spent on fresh flowers and tickets to West End musicals – and books, of course.

  I strive not to behave like a manly man. Likewise Tina, though unquestionably a womanly woman, is by no stretch of the imagination a girly girl. She does not totter round the place on high heels, spend weekends being pampered with her girlfriends at a luxury spa hotel, or even possess a red lipstick (‘tarty’, apparently). She did confess to a little crush on David Tennant when he was Doctor Who but then so did I. In fact, when we discuss our relationship, we often conclude it is more like a double act than the traditional union of husband and wife: R2-D2 and C-3PO, Bob Ferris and Terry Collier from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Blanche and Baby Jane Hudson, even Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip, driving around the English countryside, bickering and trying to make one another laugh. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not us.

  Throughout the year of Betterment, Tina had supported and helped me. During the week, I could get most of the reading done on the way to or from the office. But on a Saturday or Sunday, with food to gather in and – yuck – ‘play-dates’ to organise, she had only occasionally grudged me the space I needed to accomplish that day’s fifty pages. I would disappear to the town library or the shelter on the seafront, maybe bringing back a pint of milk and some Jaffa Cakes when I had finished, while Alex and one of his small-but-devastatingly-effective chums laid waste to the house.5 I knew I was behaving like the crap dads and cowardly blokes I disliked so much – those garden-shed poltroons – but Tina seemed to realise that this was not an attempt to escape my responsibilities but to come to terms with them; and when I told her I wanted to leave a steady job and, worse than that, put the whole family through the wringer of writing another book, her response was sanguine.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said later that evening. ‘Besides, I don’t want Alex growing up with a dad who is angry the whole time.’

  I kissed her.

  ‘Wait right there,’ I said. ‘I still haven’t wrapped up your present.’

  I had been reading alone for much of that year; my excursions into the real world – the book group, the blog – had been distractions. However, as War and Peace grew closer, I thought how good it might be to finish this journey in the company of someone I liked and whose opinions I respected even when I did not agree with them. At no point did I give serious consideration to how long War and Peace is, how drawn-out and complex, how dauntingly vast; nor did I contemplate how time-consuming such a book might be for two working people with a young child. I was thinking only of the haunting radiance of Anna Karenina, its colour and light, and also the relish with which Tina had demolished Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad – as I have said, not a girly girl. I was confident she would find War and Peace irresistible, so confident that I had bought two copies and thrown away the receipt.

  And so it proved. Together, we completed War and Peace in about five weeks. Tina adored it. I suppose I could tell you
that we had to support one another in this endeavour, that we assisted one another through the tough patches, that one or both of us had a crisis of confidence and needed to draw on the other’s strength in order to put one foot in front of the other until we both arrived at the same summit and beheld the wide plain where our persistent selves had been. But I can’t tell you that because that’s not how it happened. This is going to sound smug but here it is: War and Peace was easy.

  Middlemarch is a difficult novel. Moby-Dick, The Unnamable, Under the Volcano: all hard work. The Dice Man is a fiendishly difficult read, in so far as one’s eyes are constantly rebelling against the preposterous badness of what they are being asked to look at. War and Peace, in contrast, is merely very, very, very long. Fortunately, it is also every bit as good.

  Here is Tina’s five-point plan for anyone thinking of taking on, in her words, ‘the only book you will ever need’:

  Read fifty pages a day.

  Utilise the list of principal characters at the front.

  Pay attention! Soon you’ll discover that Tolstoy is doing the heavy lifting for you.

  Don’t fret if you are not enjoying the Peace, there will be a bit of War along shortly.

  When you get to the end, read it again.

  Hang on a moment, Tina, you may be thinking. I haven’t got time to read effing War and Peace, I need to pick the kids up from swimming and then take this top to the dry cleaners. Besides, I haven’t even read We Need to Talk about Kevin yet, and Gok Wan says it’s amazing. Furthermore, I am actually a man, which may come as a surprise, so just the idea of reading serious fiction makes me nervous; I don’t want other lads to laugh at me and call me a puff. I tell you what, I’ll wait for the app. Ok?

  We all lead busy lives, replies Tina. Make room for War and Peace; you will be grateful you did. Fifty pages a day – that’s like two episodes of Flog It! or one of How to Look Good Naked, which you can always watch on catch-up later; if We Need to Talk about Kevin is as important as everyone says, people will still be reading it a hundred and fifty years from now. Ignore those other boys, they are idiots. And that top just needs a dab of Vanish.

  But Tina, you snivel, why should I read War and Peace? It is such a long book and my time is so precious. Why should I ever do anything difficult ever?

  Because you don’t have to be a lightweight your whole life, she says. Before Andy and I became parents, we were booklovers. War and Peace showed us we could be both. That’s all. I no longer wish to discuss the matter.

  Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana lies a hundred miles or so south of Moscow. Pilgrims to the Tolstoy house have been known to remark on its unlikely similarity to Graceland. Everything has been preserved largely as it was when the sitting tenant died; and the rooms of the mansion are surprisingly poky. How could this little realm have enclosed a king?

  Tolstoy’s library at Yasnaya Polyana contains more than 22,000 books and periodicals, covering all manner of disciplines. There is literature from around the globe, signed and dedicated to Tolstoy by the great writers of the day: Gorky, Galsworthy, Stead, Bernard Shaw and many others. There are also numerous volumes of philosophy, religion, the history of art, science, geography and education. ‘There is something almost bohemian about all these books in this cosy house with its creaking wooden floors,’ observed one visitor in 2010, the centenary of Tolstoy’s death. There are even books about jujitsu and the clandestine influence of extraterrestrials in human development, so Elvis would have felt at home here.

  It is said that Tolstoy had a prodigious memory for what he read. Did he work his way through all 22,000 books on his shelves from cover to cover? Of course not; Tolstoy preferred to skim each volume, establishing if it was worthy of his full attention, perhaps marking the passages that might prove useful to him later on. Did he acquire more books than he could ever hope to read? Certainly; Tolstoy spoke fifteen languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, but his library holds entries in a further twenty-five: Swahili, Sanskrit, Esperanto. After Tolstoy’s death, a secretary called Bulgakov – not the same one, sadly – began the process of cataloguing this huge and historically significant collection; so enormous was the task that, a century later, his successors are still at it, editing ‘Periodicals in Foreign Languages’ and ‘Music and Manuscripts’, volumes four and five, respectively, of the massive Biblioteka L. N. Tolstogo v Yasnoi Polyana; books about books about books.

  It is from his library that Tolstoy drew the learning and strength, over six gruelling years, to compose War and Peace. Often he felt uninspired and unsettled, but his passion for reading drove him on, as did his wife Sofya. ‘He is full of ideas but when will he ever write them all down?’ she noted testily in her diary – shades of Casaubon and Dorothea.6 Tolstoy ransacked his shelves for the social and historical background of the book, drawing on memoirs, histories and biographies, as well as his own letters and diaries, particularly those which recorded his experiences in the Crimean War, during which he had served as second lieutenant in an artillery regiment. But the one book which most affected the final shape of War and Peace was Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation; the German philosopher’s most renowned work. ‘Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before,’ wrote Tolstoy to a friend while he drafted the closing sections of his book; he openly acknowledged that the philosophical conclusions of War and Peace, especially the long passages concerning history and the will of the individual – the actions of so-called ‘great men’ and those of the multitude of people – derived from Schopenhauer. The general gives the order to attack but the outcome of the battle is determined by forces over which the general has little control: this is how to understand history. In our day and age, entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates seek to impose their will upon the world for reasons of personal ambition, financial gain, ‘the vision thing’ and so forth; but the changes in society brought about by the widespread adoption of their technologies are the result of the actions of millions of people, not one or two. Tolstoy made history when he wrote War and Peace; history is rewritten, just a little, every time one of us reads it.

  Though we enjoyed War and Peace together, we found different things to admire in it. Tina, who had never read Tolstoy before, was bowled over by his broad apprehension of human nature and the astonishing verisimilitude with which he depicted all the stages of life, just as I had been at Christmas when I read Anna Karenina. ‘It is extremely comforting to know that these are universal human struggles and universal human resolutions,’ she declared in an email at the time, an assertion she refused to retract when I suggested, by return, that this was precisely the sort of thing people said about How to Look Good Naked. She considers the epic scenes at the battle of Austerlitz, during which Andrew Bolkónsky is badly injured (see the extract at the head of this chapter), to be amongst the most stirring and profound she has ever read. You go, girlfriend!

  For my part, I became fascinated with the tension in War and Peace between the stories Tolstoy had committed himself to telling – the saga of the fictitious Rostóv, Bolkónsky and Bezúkhov families; an accurate account of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1805–1812; a history of all classes of the Russian people during this same period – and his growing impatience with the form in which he was attempting to tell them, i.e. a novel. For, as he wrote War and Peace, Tolstoy became increasingly disenchanted with fiction itself. By the time he completed the book, he was sick of fiction; all he wanted to talk about were philosophical ideas inspired by Schopenhauer. His disruptions to the narrative grew more frequent until finally, in a fit of authorial intemperance, he brought the interweaving stories to a conclusion – magnificently – and rewarded himself, if not the reader, with a protracted epilogue in which he pedantically rehearsed his philosophies of history and free will. All of which, in my eyes, made War and Peace a contr
adictatorial masterpiece.

  The question of whether, technically speaking, War and Peace is a novel at all is one which has vexed scholars ever since the book first appeared in print; it certainly vexed Tolstoy, who found it easier to define what it was not; ‘not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle’, he stated unhelpfully. A few years later, he returned to War and Peace and dramatically revised it, taking out the second epilogue and all the later philosophical passages, with the intention of publishing them as a standalone volume. Shortly after completing Anna Karenina in 1877 – ‘my first novel’, as he liked to call it – Tolstoy underwent the conversion to ascetic Christianity which led him to establish his own religious sect, declare himself its head – Farmer funky Leo, the Oligarch-drude – and renounce all fiction except that which contained a strong moral purpose. In 1886, Sofya, who by now was acting as her husband’s editor, literary executor and representative on Planet Earth, restored War and Peace to its original form because, significantly, it was this less streamlined, more didactic version of the book that the public wanted to read. The general had issued his orders to no avail; the multitude defied him.

  There is plenty of fiction in War and Peace but there is also history, folklore, philosophy, poetry, politics: the contents of the extraordinary library at Yasnaya Polyana. This may be why it is often said of War and Peace that it is the book that contains all other books and the reason its devotees, who count Tina amongst their number, come back to it again and again; to them, it is indeed ‘the only book you will ever need’. The List of Betterment had changed my life, gradually, slowly, through the turning of a year; book by book, the process itself had shown me another route to follow, a way forward. But here is the last-minute twist. A single book changed my wife’s life decisively and forever. Almost overnight, War and Peace cured her of books. She has scarcely bought a new one from that day to this.