50 years a reader |
An exploration of half a century of reading. |
This month looked like being another mad scramble to get reading time. Don’t get me wrong, I spend plenty of time reading, but the reading for this ‘challenge’ of 50 Scottish books in a year (for pleasure). By the second week of the month I had still to open a page! BOOK 15: I started on Mr Mee, with high expectation after the incredible experience of The Secret Knowledge. All I can say is that I’m glad I read The Secret Knowledge first. I much preferred it. Mr Mee was, a lot of the time, like wading through treacle. I guess the main issue I had was that I really didn’t engage with any of the characters. And because I was reading ‘bittily’ and the book jumps around in time, it was hard to keep up with who was who, or the clever, subtle things the book was aiming at. So I’m prepared to accept I was at fault. It’s a shame, there were some things I am really interested in (thematically) in the book – it deals with identity and reality – but I found the ‘modern’ characters of Mr Mee and the academic (whose name I can’t even remember now) to be obnoxious and in the case of Mr Mee – completely unbelievable. Maybe that was the point? Mr Mee and his sexual awakening (if awakening it can be called) I just found pretty distasteful. There was a humour in it, but it seemed like a kind of sneering, arch, clever -clever humour which I do not respond well to. It just spoiled the rest of the book for me. The characters who may or may not be Minard and Ferrand were like a poor version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – and yes, I guess I felt that so much of this book was referencing other things. I learned stuff about Rousseau I would rather not have known – though of course now I have a passing desire to find out how much of what was suggested is ‘true. But all in all, while I would read another Crumey novel, because The Secret Knowledge left such an impact, Mr Mee didn’t do it for me. I’d be more than happy to give the book away to anyone who would appreciate it. It’s not one I will ever look into again. BOOK 16: Next I read ‘This Time its Personal’ , a collection of short stories by Brendan Gisby. With characteristic braveness, he brought them out to mark the first anniversary of the death of his beloved wife Alison, and so I read them on that day. I had read most if not all of them before, but it was quite an experience to just sit down and read the whole collection in one sitting. Gisby writes with such heart, such humour and such keen observation – one truly feels one is sharing his world when one reads his work. The central story ‘Man Up’ made me cry. Again. The outpouring of grief, honest, raw and heartfelt is just the best thing I’ve read about loss. Were I the sort of person who ever thought the word ‘humble’ a good one to use, I’d say it was ‘humbling.’ But I don’t like that word. It sounds so hierarchical – a sort of passive patronising word – so instead I will say it hit me with the force of a reality we don’t often get to see, and many people don’t ever admit exists. Not sentiment (though there’s nothing wrong with that) but emotion. Emotion is an overused word these days also – people say ‘it was emotional’ as if there is only one emotion and to ‘be’ it is in some way a weakness, unless justified. To understand a range of emotions and how they are lived in reality, in a quiet way, you should read Gisby. ‘The Bookie’s Runner’ is a tour de force in this respect, and ‘Man Up’ packs just as heavy a punch to the guts and the heart – the two places we feel most strongly. Brendan’s writing is fantastic when it isn’t about grief and loss, but he has certainly a talent for being able to write the parts others of us shy away from when it comes to grief. I salute him for that. With ‘This Time it’s Personal’ the reading flood gates opened again for me. While ‘Mr Mee’ had me wondering at times whether I even enjoyed reading for pleasure, ‘This Time it’s Personal’ reminded me of the power of the written word. BOOKS 17,18 and 19.Ally with that the fact that I finally got the Grampian Quartet in paperback from the Library and then that the immediate post Brexit event in our house was a thunder storm that took out the phone line (and thus all internet access) I found my self with more time to read than I’d anticipated. So I finished off The Quarrywood. I enjoyed it. I wished I had read it when I was younger. It was one of those books that as a teenager I would have underlined the ‘profound’ bits to think about – about how I could relate to them – but in my fifties I look back on it with some nostalgia (I suppose the word is) and reflect on the nature of young women – something I rarely do. I went straight away on to the next in the Quartet (not, I believe written as such but simply ‘packaged’ that way) ‘The Weatherhouse’ I didn’t enjoy as much. I think there were just too many women in it. Again there was a sense (for me) of the D.H.Lawrence and I’m sure that had I read it around the same time I first read ‘The Rainbow’ I would have appreciated it even more – and had a greater respect for Scots female writers – indeed I might have thought there was a chance I could become one – in a way it made me want to re-read The Rainbow and see how my attitudes to that have changed. There is the same internal conflict, the same struggle with personal identity, but reading it in my fifties, I was left a little bit cold with this – or if not cold – reflecting with an element of distance about the foibles of youth. Though most of the characters were older women – why, I wonder, did I not find anything to connect me to them? Maybe my reading perspective is still slightly out of kilter with my own perceived personal identity? And with time on my side, I was able to get into ‘A Pass in the Grampians.’ I have to say I was expecting it to be ‘more of the same’ and to feel the same ‘distance.’ But I was more than pleasantly surprised. Now this is my kind of book. Whereas in the first one we looked pretty much from the perspective of one young girl, in the second we looked at the community of women (left behind during the war) in this one we had the interplay of the sexes across the community. It was worth reading the others just to get to this one, equally, if I was going to read one Nan Shepherd book, this would be it. I have always been a reader who ‘works my way through’ a writers entire collection once I’ve discovered them, but I sense a change here. Doing that was a lot about ‘understanding’ the writer and their context, but now I feel like I want to read for pleasure, I’m a bit more selective –reading for the story rather than to ‘learn’ about either the author or their context in the history of fiction. It may just be that with 50 years reading under my belt, I know I don’t have another 50 years ahead of me – and time is always at a premium. That’s a lesson that’s worth learning as a writer I suspect – that one can’t expect readers to love all of your work (or even any of it) and that reader choice is the prime thing – we should all be seeking out writing we enjoy and reading it. Sharing about it is worthwhile insofar as getting decent recommendations can help point the way in the individual search – but one’s expectations shouldn’t go further than that – reading is a unique, individual experience and we need to learn to know our own tastes and how to find things that will match them – and not get bothered when a) others don’t share these tastes or b) there’s a lot of books one just doesn’t want to read. There’s something out there for everyone – finding it – that’s the skill. That’s why this year I’ve shifted from a reviewing mentality to a more reflective one – I’m charting my own journey rather than seeking to influence anyone else’s. Comments are closed.
|
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
December 2016
Categories
All
|