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

by Miller, Andy

  I must add immediately that I am talking about buying books rather than reading them; after War and Peace, Tina has probably read more, and across more genres and subjects, than she did before. She continues to give and receive books as gifts; she brings them home for Alex; she borrows them from friends and from the local library, where she takes Alex on Saturday mornings, as my parents used to take me. But the urge to acquire more books for the sake of it, to own and stockpile them, seems to have left her. I feel much the same. It is as though, having found a book with all other books within it, we looked around and asked ourselves: what do we need with all these other books?

  ‘I think you might have to send these magazines to the dump,’ said Tina a few weeks after we finished War and Peace. We were standing in our garage, looking at the crates of old NMEs and piles of paper that had accompanied us from London when we moved house two years earlier.

  ‘What about the books?’ I asked. There were at least a dozen boxes of books in there that we still hadn’t unpacked. Up in the house, our bookshelves were already crammed; columns of paperbacks gathered dust on the bedroom floor and stood heaped along the newly plastered sitting-room wall.

  ‘Can you remember what’s in any of those boxes?’ Tina asked.

  Suddenly it came to me. ‘My copy of Krautrocksampler,’ I replied. ‘Other than that, no.’

  ‘You have your answer,’ she said.

  So we emptied the boxes in the garage, and the attic, and the kitchen. We emptied the storage unit we were renting and paid it off. Little by little, we decided which books we wanted to keep and which would be going to the charity shops. A few we sold. The rest we offered to the members of our respective book groups, who, true to form, were irritatingly picky. A man came with a van and took most, though not all, of the magazines to the dump. Either a great weight lifted from my shoulders or a chasm opened up inside me that will never be filled. At this stage, it’s hard to say.7

  In this way, we renewed our vow to reading.

  Please don’t misunderstand: we still possess an awful lot of books. Not counting ebooks, we own three different translations of War and Peace alone.8 Extra shelves have been constructed in the bedroom and the sitting room and they are already flush. There are still unopened boxes in the garage and unread cookbooks in the kitchen. But, between us, we are curating a library which we mean to put to good use, which Alex can refer to and be proud of, full of books that either mean something to us or which, one day, we shall have time to read. We think twice before adding to it; we know how fortunate we are to have all these books within our grasp. It is not Yasnaya Polyana but it is ours – if you borrow something, try not to break the spine.

  After War and Peace, there was a week left before the one-year deadline was up. The plan had always been to conclude with Howards End by E.M. Forster, for no reason other than the fact it had ‘end’ in its title. But it also included the character of Leonard Bast, the uncouth suburban clerk who attempts to improve himself with culture, for which impertinence he is symbolically crushed beneath a collapsing bookcase; ‘Leonard Bast’ was the pseudonym under which I had published my failed blog. And at a wedding the previous summer, a man I’d never met insisted to me at inappropriate length, i.e. before, after and even during the speeches, that Howards End is, and I quote, ‘a Bildungsroman about the limits, no, the limitations of art’. But now we had almost reached the limits of the List of Betterment, I decided I would rather place my trust in a higher power.

  ‘You choose the final book,’ I suggested to Tina.

  She thought for a moment. ‘Have you ever read any Wodehouse?’ she asked.

  So this is the way the List of Betterment ends, not with a bang but with a Wooster.

  I knew we had a copy of Code of the Woosters somewhere in the house. Propitiously, it was in the first place I looked: on a shelf next to our bed. We read it over the next few days and both thought it was great. Was it a Bildungsroman about the limits, no, the limitations of art? Not as such. It was more a funny book about a stolen cow creamer. This, I suggested to Tina, meant it was a work of countercontradictatoriality; she pointed out that even a frightful chump like Bertie had passed his driving test. We finished the book and returned it to the shelf. A few days later I handed in my notice. And that, after fifty great books and a year of dangerous reading, was that. It was time to start again.

  Like me, Tina had done much of her reading of War and Peace on the train to and from London. One morning in late October, a couple of weeks in, she had arrived at the office with the great book still in her hand. A colleague, a woman a few years senior, caught sight of it and asked how Tina was getting on. She replied, truthfully, that we had spent much of the previous evening arguing about whether Bolkónsky’s vision of a ‘lofty infinite sky’ represented a proof or a denial of the existence of God, a theological dispute which had grown rather heated, concluding with me sleeping downstairs on the sofa.

  ‘That’s so lovely,’ said her colleague. ‘I can’t imagine having a discussion like that with my husband.’9

  Late in War and Peace, as Andrew Bolkónsky lies mortally wounded, he experiences an epiphany: ‘Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.’ What graceful words these are and what a laudable sentiment. We could take them at face value and stop the book right here – in Bolkónsky’s final utterance, ‘How good it would be!’ However, that is not where Tolstoy leaves it. ‘These thoughts seemed to him comforting,’ he observes a few sentences later. ‘But they were only thoughts.’ This, to me, is the mark of Tolstoy’s genius; he was too committed to telling the truth, as he perceived it, to let even a dying man off the hook. And we are all dying men.

  So instead, let me suggest an alternative coda from elsewhere in the book:

  ‘In the midst of nature’s savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.’

  This is where the List of Betterment had led me, back to a small oasis governed by love and shared subjectivity; I was glad to be home.

  A few days later I did read Howards End. Is it truly an enquiry into the limits, no, the limitations of art? Actually it is. Did I like it? Sorry, that’s none of your business. The Countess agrees. Don’t you know he’s got a book to write, she says. Now clear off.

  But our business here is not quite concluded. A moment ago, I wrote of Tolstoy’s commitment to telling the truth in his work. I feel I must do the same.

  First, that quote from War and Peace about small oases ‘governed by love and shared subjectivity’? I’m afraid it may not actually be from War and Peace. It may not even be Tolstoy. When I said ‘elsewhere in the book’, I actually meant this book, the one you are currently reading. What happened was, at some stage during the List of Betterment, I scribbled that quote on a piece of paper but failed to make a note of which of the books it was from; and now I can’t remember. I have searched several times but I haven’t been able to find it again. Sorry about that.

  Of course, it ought not to make any difference where those lines come from or who wrote them; I stand by every word. They may well have been penned by Tolstoy – given I read two of his books, the odds are immediately halved. And they do have a certain Tolstoyian ring to them. But the longer I gaze upon them, the less certain I am. Perhaps they come from Middlemarch or Everyman or I Capture the Castle; all feasible sources. How about The Communist Manifesto or Pevsner? Or maybe they’re from The Diary of a Nobody; that would be neat. I doubt they are from Moby-Dick or Gilgamesh and the sentiment seems a bit chirpy for Houellebecq; but then again, ‘nature’s savagery’. . . Place speech marks around it and that quotation could be ascribed to almost anyone: Morrison, Bukowski, Kerouac, Brontë. It sounds like the sort of pompous statement Ignatius J. Reilly might spit between mouthfuls of weenie, pushing his hot dog cart up the sidewalk. Or Behemoth, the infernal jabbering cat from The Master and Margarita; o
r the Devil himself for that matter. Or Sir Jamie Teabag or whatever his name is from The Da Vinci Code, silhouetted in a cloister in the Vatican or something, shortly after giving his albino killer monk the order to assassinate Tom Hanks . . .

  Hmm. Maybe it does make a difference.

  Houellebecq is fond of quoting Schopenhauer, and I have grown fond of quoting them both, so it seems right to turn the matter over to them:

  Schopenhauer: ‘We remember our lives a little less well than a novel we once read.’

  Houellebecq: ‘The fact is, in the end, we forget even our own books. And I don’t know why, but this morning, I find that really comforting.’

  Second and finally, you may well be asking, what about the other book? I get that The Da Vinci Code was the first not-so-great book but the subtitle mentions Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones); where the heck is the second one? Ok, I’ll confess: I was going to buy another novel by Dan Brown, skim it à la Tolstoy and then come up with a constructive, feel-good reading to bookend the narrative. But when the moment came, I just couldn’t face it. Sorry, everyone. If it really bothers you, you have my permission to get a pen, scratch out the word Two on the title page and replace it, neatly, with One. Not that you need my permission; it’s your book.

  I realise this may appear like the insolent gesture of defiance I promised earlier I was not about to make; yet with the finish line in sight, here I stand, hands on hips, looking you straight in the eye. Don’t you see, though? The race is over and we have just breasted the tape together. I might have pretended that, after fifty great books and a year of Betterment, I ended up a nicer guy and a more forgiving reader, gentler, less scornful; but that would be a fairytale and a lie.

  I am myself again. But I no longer tell lies about books.

  ‘And now I take leave of that young man sitting alone upstairs in the lugubrious parlor reading the Classics. What a dismal picture! What could he have done with the Classics, had he succeeded in swallowing them? The Classics. Slowly, slowly, I am coming to them – not by reading them, but by making them.’

  Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

  ‘Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill-fitting. Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were inkstained; tiny voices chattered insanely . . .

  “Ford,” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”’

  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  ‘What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn’t there.’

  Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

  Epilogue

  This morning before starting work, after bringing my wife her cup of tea in bed, making my son his breakfast and washing down the customary vitamin pills with the customary Svepa of orange juice, I logged on to the Internet and illegally downloaded a torrent containing 4001 ebooks. The folder occupies a little less than two gigabytes of memory, approximately the size of a family photo album or a couple of movies. At a steady rate of two titles a week, and allowing for fluctuations in technologies and eyesight, it should take me about forty years to read everything inside that folder – enough reading matter, in all likelihood, to see me out. This does not take into account any new or attention-grabbing books that might be published between now and my demise, of course. But if I live that long, I shall be eighty-five and am unlikely to be concerned with whatever passes for ‘an important new voice in fiction’ in the year 2054. Surely I will have read enough.

  Here amongst the 4001 ebooks are Against Nature and One Hundred Years of Solitude and the complete works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. Here is The Master and Margarita; here is Dan Brown. But which titles from the List of Betterment are missing? I asked myself. Rather than doing any proper work, I set myself the challenge of hunting them down on the web and, to make it more interesting, threw in every book I really loved as a child as well. By lunchtime, I had succeeded; there were dozens of new books on my laptop, either as Kindle-ready AZW files or in the easily-converted EPUB or MOBI formats. The good news is that I only had to pay for one of them; but as that was Absolute Beginners, I didn’t really mind. And then, because what I had done was illegal and infringed the copyright holders’ exclusive rights, I deleted the morning’s spoils from my hard drive except those books that came from Project Gutenberg, and Absolute Beginners. So don’t be sending me any cease-and-desist letters.

  While I was writing this book, the world changed. The digital revolution had been under way for some time, of course, but the aggressive marketing of hand-held electronic readers had not begun in earnest. Consumers in the West who had been groomed to form emotional attachments with their phones and cameras responded eagerly to the idea of a device that could galvanise the outmoded pastime of reading. In the future, no one will read Pride and Prejudice from cover to cover, said the head of the UK’s oldest paperback publisher recently; they will just tap the screen of their phone or tablet computer and find out more about the bits that interest them, the costumes or the recipes.10 In the same period, so-called ‘dead-tree’ books continued their retreat from society, like Napoleon’s defeated army of stragglers hobbling away from Moscow to perish in wintry and hostile terrain. Library closures continued apace. Booksellers went to the wall in ever greater numbers, chain stores and cosy independents alike; soon the only place to find printed books on the high street may well be charity shops. Where they are available to buy, books have never been cheaper or worth less. The most popular titles can be purchased at large discounts online and in big-box stores; on World Book Night, millions of them are given away for free. And of course, if you know where to look, you need never pay for a book again – though once again, I must remind you that this practice is morally reprehensible and a crime against humanity, like smoking in a crèche, or letting your dog foul the public footpath, then bagging the result and suspending it from the branch of a nearby tree.

  Yet at the same time, the public’s appetite for book-blah seems insatiable. Book clubs thrive in living rooms and online; literary festivals draw ever more appreciative audiences; television and radio teem with celebrity booklovers; social networks buzz with instant comment and opinion. People love talking about books or listening to other people talk about them. And for those who want to try their hand at writing one, it has never been easier to get your magnum opus out into the world; with the aid of the web and tools like Calibre or Mobipocket, anyone can be a self-published Marx or Melville. Bestsellers have been created which previously would have been overlooked by mainstream publishing, such as Amanda Hocking’s Trylle Trilogy or Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James.11 Glad tidings for freelancers: decent editors are suddenly much in demand.

  In short, we have the chance to decide for ourselves how and what we read – and whether to pay for it. We need no longer rely on traditional brokers of culture and taste: agents, publishing houses, critics, booksellers, librarians. We can roam through space and history, choosing only what we know we like and ignoring all the chatter that seems irrelevant to us. If nothing takes our fancy, we can make our own books and launch them into the void. We can sell our work for peanuts or even give it away; having cut the ties to overheads such as production and distribution, we become our own typesetter, agent and publicity machine.

  And what of printed books themselves? If we are bold and far-sighted enough, we can free ourselves from the burden of them – nasty, dusty things. According to some experts, they, like us, will be extinct in a generation. Hoarding boxes of books will seem like the symptom of a deeper malaise in a far-off historical epoch, quaint at best, like clot
s on the lungs of a Victorian consumptive. To own printed books, to value or prize them, this too may pass; it is happening already. We shall glide unencumbered through a future of clean, white lines and empty spaces, electronic, interconnected . . .

  ‘“I know,” said Marvin, “you keep going on about it. It sounds awful.”’

  It may not surprise the reader to learn that I held back from buying an ereader. I was already in a lifelong, if somewhat abusive, relationship with books; I did not need to dally with a gadget. When ebook enthusiasts said there was none of the effort or inconvenience one associated with the bulk or weight of a printed book, I dismissed them. What were they talking about? Never in my entire life, not once, had I felt myself inconvenienced by having to use either hand, or both simultaneously, to hold a book; on the contrary, holding on to books would count as one of the top five uses to which my hands have been put over the years, maybe top three.12 Each time someone breathlessly informed me they would never have read, say, A Confederacy of Dunces if it weren’t for their new Kindle or Nook, all they were telling me was that they were a fully paid-up confederate dunce. Was this kind? Was it fair? No, and nor is life; for if it were, our towns and cities would still boast well-stocked libraries and bookshops, and the trees would be festooned with leaves and not bags of dog-shit. But I bow to the will of the people.

  Therefore, with the motivational Cope–Jung axioms from page 227 still ringing in my ears, I decided I must face up to the future and acquire a Kindle;13 I did not want to be the man who shrinks back from the new and strange.14 Within a few weeks, the conclusion I reached was this: if you like reading, this is the object, unbeknownst to you, you have been waiting for; but if you love reading as I do, you may struggle to comprehend what all the fuss is about. Did it make reading better? Of course not. It’s a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it. I take the Kindle with me wherever I go. But I also take a good book.