50 years a reader |
An exploration of half a century of reading. |
BOOKs 34 and 35 A Study in Scarlet This was a bit like a Chinese meal. I read it at the beginning of the month and by half way through, not only had I forgotten what it was about, I’d forgotten I’d even read it. This may be the charm and indeed strength of Sherlock Holmes. They can be read again and again and you still come back for more (or don’t) I remember reading the whole oeuvre in my teens and I suspect I should just have left it at that. I suppose it’s clever in that it is in two distinct parts ‘the study’ the first of which introduces us to the great Detective (and sidekick) and the second of which gives us some background to the story. It was okay for the length of time I was reading it, but it didn’t satisfy me in any real way. Undeterred (and because I’m trying to learn more about early Detective Fiction for a work related project) I moved on to a later story (Wisteria Lodge) Now I’m claiming this as a ‘book’ when in fact it’s only a short story, but believe me, my life is now far too short to go reading a whole volume of short stories by Conan Doyle. For people who like it, I’m sure it’s the kind of thing they like. I’m just not one of them. I just don’t have that much time to kill in pursuit of learning about murder and detection. Interestingly enough, I found something of an answer in a TV programme where Andrew Marr is ‘dissecting’ a selection of popular fiction – detective stories. As he explained the ‘mechanics’ of the genre I realised that this was one big reason I didn’t warm to it. I don’t want to read the same thing interminably with varied plots, nor indeed do I see reading as part of a ‘game’ played between the writer and reader. Some folk obviously like that but that’s not why I read. I read to communicate/connect emotionally with the writer/his world and his created character. It’s quite a different thing from reading to ‘solve a puzzle.’ And I have no interest in police, murder or crime either. So I can say I’ve tried but I really need to give up on this sort of writing Scottish or otherwise. Guess I may not be reading Graeme Macrae Burnet’s ‘His Bloody Project’ any time soon. Not my cup of tea. (and I don’t like tea either by the way!) Moving on from Sherlock Holmes I had only my first FAILURE in this 50 books. I had promised myself to read some Iain M.Banks sci fi. The first book I got from the library was Feersum Endjinn. I tried. I really tried. But 12 pages in I had to give up. Even Andrew Marr’s programme on Fantasy fiction couldn’t get me back to it. (He said a bit about Sci-fi in it) I’ve been remarkably lucky that this TV series has been on as I’ve been trying these genres because it has really helped explain why I can’t come to grips with them. Don’t get me wrong, I loved what they now call ‘fantasy’ in children’s fiction (though a lot of them I don’t think I loved because they were fantasy, I loved them for the version of reality or the subversion of reality they painted) but I’ve never never got to grips with Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. In my teens I explored sci-fi ‘classics’ like John Wyndham, Issac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. I even picked a sci fi book as a prize when I was 14. But I guess I outgrew them too. We all come to find the things we love to read and the things we can’t be bothered with. I think my tastes are pretty eclectic but anyway, I am appreciating more than ever how people have very different tastes and there’s no point trying to persuade someone beyond their own boundaries and preferences. It’s a diverse old world out there and while challenging oneself is good, time is also precious and once you have worked out what you like I don’t think there’s a lot of point trying to force feed yourself a different diet just because it’s fashionable. If you know what you like and you can explain that to yourself (and maybe others) that’s good enough. BOOK 36: Fortunately for me in an otherwise disappointing reading month, I found something remarkable when I opened The Little White Bird by J.M.Barrie. Another one I’ve overlooked and in my exploration to find the origins of the character of Peter Pan this was an absolute goldmine. It’s funny, it’s complex, it’s confusing and it has immense depth both emotional and psychological. Now this IS my kind of fiction. I will be re-reading it again as soon as I can get away with it – for now the relentless goal of the 50 prevents that, but I will be thinking about it for many months to come. Result. After my Little White Bird Experience, I was ready for some more Barrie. I came across an online copy of The Boy Castaways. Can’t claim to have read it because it’s a picture book. But well worth looking at the pictures. Bit of a cheat to count it as one of my 50 though, so I won’t. BOOK 37: The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson. I tend to think of him as one of the contemporary Scottish ‘establishment’ in writing, so yes I was a wee bit prejudiced to begin with. But I like to pride myself on opening a book and bringing an open mind to the page. And I have to say, I quite enjoyed it. The ‘shades’ of James Hogg hung heavy over it in a way, but I like the duplicitous narration thing, and while 10 years ago I would have had no interest in Presbyterian minister turned bad, years of reading Crockett have got me more interested in this part of Scotland’s history. So it was interesting to see another man’s take on the Church of Scotland. There were times when I felt it went on a big – I’m loathe to say I found it self-indulgent in places, because someone once accused one of my novels of this, and my response was that they simply couldn’t appreciate the depth. So let’s leave it that I didn’t appreciate the full depths of the book. I mostly enjoyed it, but I did feel I was ploughing through it at times. BOOK 38: But all books aren’t designed to be ‘easy read’ of course. I moved on to some Andrew Lang. I intended to read Modern Mythology because I simply couldn’t bring myself to read Fairy Books and wanted to know what Lang really felt about fairies etc, but on starting it, I realised that I should read at least Custom and Myth before it. However, I also found it a bit heavy going so I’m saving Custom and Myth for later. Lang deals with some interesting things I’ve never really thought about – to whit whether mythology is caused by a ‘diseased language’ or something indigenous in the culture of a people and their thought. We are looking at philology and anthropology here – interesting topics but my brain wasn’t up to it right now. So instead, to make sure I succeeded in reading a Lang this month, I went to The Library reckoning I might feel on safer, more comfortable ground. Not really. Again, I discovered that Lang is not the easiest of reads, but I learned a lot – it was not really what I was expecting – more about book collection and bibliophiles than I anticipated. However it really was interesting (between the lines) because there are all kinds of things to do with book production – binding and the cutting of pages – which are fairly alien to me and which I hadn’t considered as vital to an appreciation of books. Along with the definition and use of libraries in Lang’s time – we are talking of a time when public and ‘circulating’ libraries were in their infancy – I discovered something about myself. Which is that while I would always say I like books, what I really love is reading. It’s something I’ve often thought about. I’m a fan of paperbacks. I know this is scorned by ‘real’ bibliophiles. I’m not a fan of hardbacks in that it seems to me an unnecessary thing to do to a book. Old books, rare books, yes I have quite an interest in them, but primarily for the content. Of course I thrill at a first edition of Wuthering Heights (I own an early American edition with Ellis Bell as the author) but I don’t READ from it. And for me the most important thing about books is the reading not the physical entity. I prefer paperbacks to ebooks simply because I find it easier to read them – ebook readers are too small for me to read at the pace I like to read, especially with the font at a size I can decipher. But screen reading or paper turning is less important to me than the world of the text. The emotional world not the physical entity in my physical world. And in this I think I may be worlds away from Lang’s notion of a bibliophile (but then he says women can’t appreciate books anyway!!!) All of this goes to illustrate just how much has changed in 150 odd years and reminds me that it is important to read from the past, not just what you ‘enjoy’ but work that can give you insights into worlds now long past, that it’s too easy to take for granted our current narrative. Today everyone is caught up in a) the imminent demise of libraries and reading itself and b) whether the ‘real’ book has had its day. These were also concerns in Lang’s time (he saw ‘real’ books as those being well bound of course, I hate to think what he would have made of Penguins, never mind ebooks) But as I head towards what feels like the home straight in my 50 books project, I'm taking a moment to reflect on all that reading means TO ME and remind myself why I do it. There are days when I wonder if anyone else in the world reads for the same reasons I do, and some days when I realise that even if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because my relationship with reading is my own, personal, unique one and I do not need to apologise for it or try to shape it into a more Bell-Curve normal format. I love reading. I love the worlds it takes me to. I love the creative thought it sparks in me. Are these not reasons enough? Oh, and it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble (mostly!) But as to persuading others of my views, I’m becoming less and less comfortable with that as a concept. The question what is a review anyway? Is one that lurks behind all of this reading – and the writing about the reading on this blog. I don’t seek to persuade, simply to bear witness to my own experience of 50 years a reader. There is a quote from Lang which I’d like to leave on: ‘Books change like friends, like ourselves, like everything; but they are most piquant in the contrasts they provoke…. The vanished past returns when we look at the pages… It is because our books are friends that do change, and remind us of change, that we should keep them with us, even at a little inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the world to find a dusty asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all that we have read, to parody the saying of Mr Tennyson’s Ulysses.’ Or as we might say in today's parlance KEEP CALM AND READ A BOOK
1 Comment
bob dornan
11/20/2016 06:51:57 am
that's a lot of reading, Cally. Your comments are well written too. Good luck
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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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