50 years a reader |
An exploration of half a century of reading. |
By the skin of my teeth and reader interrupted… BOOK 11: I’ve got a confession to make. I honestly didn’t think I’d make my quota of books this month. It was busy, busy, busy (but that’s usual) and then, I confess, I went off piste and read a couple of books (for pleasure) that were not on my ‘list’. The first I can’t even remember now – something about a teacher and a crime and… it was compelling but in the kind of way that I imagine gaming is addictive. It made me realise why people read these kind of books and confirmed that I wouldn’t be reading any more of them. It’s perfectly good, but not what I want out of fiction. I was reading it as fast as I could to get to the end to find out what happened, knowing that the ‘red herring’ was taunting me all along. It didn’t have the appeal of ‘The Secret Knowledge.’ Or of another book – the one that saved my bacon this month – more of that later. I then remained off piste and not purely for pleasure (and there was no pleasure in it at all) read a non fiction book about refugees. This is really for research and so I shouldn’t be putting it in here at all, except to explain my distractions. It’s not that I’m not reading (I’m up at 5.30am each day doing so to get some extra time!) it’s just that I’m not getting time to read for pleasure to the tune of a book a week. May went by really quickly and I have a feeling I may have read a book at the beginning of the month that I have totally forgotten about – that uneasy feeling that the pace of life is just too fast. So we’ll ignore that and say that I was ‘tag team’ reading a couple of books. The first was ‘The Lost Glen’ by Neill Gunn – following on from last month’s Highland River –and at the same time I was embarking upon the first of Nan Shepherd’s ‘Grampian Quartet.’ BOOK 12: I got the ebook out of the library. It’s a beast of a book and pretty cheap to buy as an ebook, but I prefer paperback –I ordered that from the library but there’s a queue so I got the ebook while I was waiting. But what with life, and reading it in tandem with ‘The Lost Glen’ all too quickly I found that my 3 week download had GONE and I wasn’t even fully through the first book. Which is annoying. Now I’ll probably have to go back to the beginning and start again when I finally get a hard copy of the book. It’s an interesting thing comparative (or tag team) reading and these two books lent themselves to it quite well. The central characters might well have been right for each other which in itself was entertaining enough. But by the time I had my Nan Shepherd privileges withdrawn I have to say I was kind of overloaded on the sort of modernist Scottish fiction I tend to shy away from. I like the natural description and I liked the sort of Lawrencian aspect to Nan’s heroine (whose name now eludes me!) but I am getting increasingly more resistant to symbolic use of language and natural description – I like my nature to be described just as real nature not as something symbolic. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I really got something out of the ‘levels’ on which symbolism worked but these days I just like to ‘see’ the nature not to have to wonder what it all means. It just reminds me that re-reading books is a valuable thing to do every decade or so, because it shows you how much you have changed if nothing else. Well, with Nan Shepherd only scratched I can’t claim that as a full book read – but the interruption wasn’t really my fault so I won’t feel too bad. But it meant that I had some catching up to do. BOOK 13: My saviour was the Great Gisby. Brendan Gisby finally brought out his new novel (one might say novella actually- I’m not sure how many words you need to call something a novel these days, but it’s Great Gatsby length so it may more accurately be a novella if you want to split hairs) I’m lucky, I’ve been reading drafts of this along the way and it was with great pleasure that I sat down to read the whole thing a couple of days before it was finally published. Not just because it helped me approach my self imposed target, but because I really, really wanted to read it in its entirety. And I was not disappointed. I fully intended to sit and read it in one mammoth session BUT as I got half way through I stopped – I was enjoying it so much I didn’t want it to end and I decided to pace myself and consume it over two sittings. Which I did. Now when I say enjoy I don’t want you to think it’s an ‘enjoyable’ sort of book. It isn’t. What it is, is a book that tells it like it is. Brutal honesty about a bunch of very unpleasant people. And I’ll say people not characters because the lines are clearly blurred. This is fiction but it’s based on fact – and put both together and you are left with a very queasy feeling in your stomach about the way the world is. Brendan Gisby is one of my favourite modern Scots writers – and has become a close virtual friend (because of that) – there’s a directness in with a subtlety and an overall honesty which appeals to me. I can connect to his writing in a way that I can’t to the intellectual symbolic stuff of modernist Scots literature. The Percentages Men is a really cracking story – a car crash of a story – and puts me in mind of The Great Gatsby on more than one level. It’s a story of ‘careless’ people and the devastating effect they have on the lives of others. You know, you could take up the tag team challenge and read The Percentages Men alongside The Great Gatsby and see if you can work out what I mean. This is my version of comparative analysis of text. BOOK 14: With Gisby out of the way I took a quick trip down memory lane to make my total 3 ½ (or is it 4 ½) Scots books in May – I re-read ‘One Man’s Meat’ by Mark Frankland. I first read Mark’s Foot and Mouth book ‘The Cull’ in 2002 and met Mark first that same year. I read ‘One Man’s Meat’ straight after ‘The Cull’ and enjoyed it. Sitting down this month and re-reading it, I felt like I was reading a different book – not that I didn’t enjoy it, I really did, but I didn’t remember it at all like that. Another reason to re-read books – one’s memory can play tricks. Add to this that I’ve read so many of Mark’s other books now over the years (I won’t say all, but definitely most) and it was interesting to see this, his first novel and think about how his style has changed (developed?) over the years. ‘One Man’s Meat’ definitely stands up against all his other work. For me, this time through, I opened it and it seemed like I was reading Ian Fleming mixed up with John Le Carre (now it’s a long time since I read any John Le Carre so I may be off kilter here a bit). I’m still trying to work out what I think has changed in Mark’s writing over the years - I shall need to re-read some more- I want to say maybe he’s gained in confidence in his own voice – certainly the Great Dumfries Food Bank Seige (which is well worth a read) stands out as a man who is no longer giving a damn about ‘how’ he should write a book and it absolutely rocks. I suppose I applaud the fact that as the years have gone on Mark has just kept writing and in the process stopped worrying about whether his books are ‘good enough’ – they are more than good enough – and just got the stories out. And maybe it shows. Or maybe I’m just analysing something that isn’t there. The point of all of the above is to show that when I read there is so much more to it that just enjoying (or not) a story with (or without) a decent plot and some nice imagery and compelling characters. I’m sure some people just plough through books (like the off piste one I read which I can’t even remember the name of – I saw it recommended on ‘Meet the Author’ by the way ) and that’s enough for them. For me there is so much more. Books and reading are a form of communication and a form of inspiration for thought about deep issues and questions about life and our place in our world. I love to see into another person’s mind and heart and think about how they connect to the world. I like to compare people and times and styles and what writers think they are doing (or what I think they think they are doing) as well as just enjoying – or being moved by – the stories. I don’t know if that makes me unusual, but it seems to me there’s so much more to fiction than simple stuffing your face with a story, or cramming plots galore into your brain. There’s a much more active involvement. Maybe that’s why I’m not so keen on the symbolism novels any more – I can make my own connections. In my twenties I was still trying to understand how the world was, now I pretty much know what I think about a lot of things and what I like is to see how other people see them. So. I can make some recommendations of books I’ve read this month. But the above doesn’t constitute any kind of ‘review’ because that’s another animal entirely. And my jury is out on exactly what the nature and purpose of reviewing is these days. That’s my own personal journey though… for the moment I’m just happy to be preparing for another month of Scots books in my 50 Years a Reader project. And still amazed how significant books are to my life. |
AuthorIn 2016 I will have been reading for 50 years. I'm going to celebrate this by reading even more and sharing what I'm reading. Archives
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