Thursday 21st February – The Listy Type Blog

I’m only starting this to put off thinking about Shakespeare or cleaning the bathrooms, or thinking about Shakespeare whilst cleaning the bathrooms (more fun would be cleaning Shakespeare whilst thinking about the bathrooms, much more hygienic).  I’ve got a free morning and I would really quite like to go back to bed, but as I will undoubtedly fill up with snot as soon as my head hits the pillow it is probably best to remain upright, mobile and a lot less sticky.

I’m right in the middle of a book I could probably finish as well, which is a bit of a temptation, although I’ve already read the end, so it’s not quite so pressing now (The Rose of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon).  I have  that ‘When Harry Met Sally’ thing going on.  No.  Not the having to sleep with all the men who are your friends (Yuk! Say I.) The having to read the end of a book first thing. 

I always, always read the end of the book after I’ve read the first few chapters.  That way I can almost guarantee that I will never die disappointed because I didn’t know what the end of the book was before I pegged it.  My friends all think I’m mad to do this, and ask me if it doesn’t ruin the book for me, but to be honest it doesn’t a bit.  Can you tell that I’m a bit of a control freak?  You wouldn’t honestly think so today if you were to look at my hair.  I look like I’ve rubbed up against a thousand balloons in the night, and I can’t do a thing with it, except contemplate a career as a Kate Bush impersonator.  Either that or I could be an understudy in The Lion King.

I never feel cheated by knowing what’s going to happen in a book.  I read really, really quickly, and if I know the end it means I slow down a little, which gives me time to savour the book more.  It also means that I am in the privileged position of picking up threads and hints in the book which would otherwise be lost on me.  I’m not a great one for re-reading things anymore, so if I don’t pick it up the first time I never will, unless it’s a book I’m going on to study.  I simply don’t have the time, as I have about a billion unread books clamouring for my attention.  I read books like I eat cake, quickly and with a poverty mentality.  More is most definitely more in these situations.

I have friends who reread and reread their favourite books over and over again.  I have one acquaintance who only reads books by authors she likes.  I find this odd, as how can she know she likes someone until she’s read the book?  She has never adequately explained this to me.  It’s probably very quantum and my failure to understand it is just me being incredibly dense.  It’s usually the case.

She can quote huge sections of books to me, and knows the characters like they are people she is related to.  One of her favourite books is Lord of The Rings, which I think is unmanageable and vastly over-rated.  I loved The Hobbit, and felt that if LOTR was about the same length it would have been a corker of a book.  As it is, it is flabby with too much poetry.  I know, I know, it’s a bit of pots and kettles here, coming from the world’s most long winded blogger, but what can you do?  We’ve already clearly established that I have terrible double standards.

She is so knowledgeable about LOTR that once when we were playing LOTR Top Trumps with the kids she went mental because they’d got some of the character’s ages wrong, and the horse that Gandalf rides wasn’t accurately represented!  Now that’s dedication to the cause.  My memory is just not that good.  Even with books I’ve read over and over my memory is appalling.  For one reason and another I must have read Wuthering Heights at least six or seven times in my life, and I’d still be hard pushed to tell you in any great detail what happens, and I’ve seen the films (all of which were shit by the way).  I’ve even written essay questions on it for the good lord’s sake. 

My memory is absolutely shocking, and I don’t even have the excuse of a life of drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to blame for it.  I do wonder if too much chocolate fudge cake can have the same deleterious effect however.  It might be worth testing the hypothesis.  I am willing to put myself forward for the clinical trials, as long as I don’t get the placebo and end up with carob cake.  I’d only be doing it for the greater good, naturally.  A life of sacrifice, that’s me all over!

I can kind of see the attraction in this reading your favourite books over and over, rather like having a very good comfort blanket, but for me there is just a world of new things out there waiting to be explored that I can’t wait to get my teeth into.  My one regret is that I will die not having read every book on the planet!  Jason is hysterical with my attempts to even try.  He doesn’t mind me reading them, it’s the buying he’s not so keen on.  After the buying it’s the storing books he gets hysterical about.  As he so rightly says, books create a lot of dust, and when we move house they up or removal bills considerably.  When I get my own personal library though all will be well.  Jason says we will have spent all the money on books and won’t be able to afford to build our own library.  I’m thinking we could build it from books and thus be very energy efficient and recycly.

By then I will probably be blind and have to listen to everything on book tape.  This, by the way is my idea of hell.  I don’t mind audio books, but what I do mind is abridged audio books.  If an author has written the words, the reader should read them, and that’s that.  Listening to abridged books is like buying The Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, heresy, that’s what it is.  That’s what would be in my Room 101, along with Anthea Turner.

My gran was registered blind towards the end of her life, and her big gripe about audio books was Kenneth Branagh.  There was a phase when our Ken made a fortune from narrating audio books, seemingly the type of books that my gran listened to, i.e. Douglas Reeman and Dick Francis presumably.  She hated Ken’s voice and was driven to despair by the fact that if she wanted to hear the latest book, she would have to be read to by Ken’s dulcet tones.  I’m sure that’s why she was an insomniac.  He just wasn’t soothing to her.  I don’t have that much of a problem with him, so I shall be fine, although I’m not keen on Douglas Reeman.  I’ve decided that by the time I’m on audio only I shall be so rich that I shall be able to pay my favourite voices to come and read to me, the unabridged versions naturally.  It will be my great indulgence (along with all the others…)

When I was a kid I used to read and reread, but I had a lot more time then.  I also read a lot of new things.  I was forever trying something odd.  My parents are big readers, so there was always stuff to get my teeth into.  We went to the library at least once a week, and when I was nine I borrowed The Castle by Kafka, because I thought it looked ‘interesting’!  I never made it past the first fifty pages.  I just found the whole experience completely overwhelming.  I’ve never managed to finish it since either, although it’s on my list of things to do.  I did manage to finish The Trial, which was horrible, which is probably why I’ve never made it past listing The Castle on my to do list and not actually read it.

I’m not a book snob.  I don’t really care what I read, as long as I can read.  I read across every genre and am equally happy with non-fiction, although I do think it’s a lot harder to write decent non-fiction.  With fiction you’ve always got the narrative thread to help you out if you get stuck.  It’s a bit like a bannister on the stairs.  Generally it’s quite useful to stop you falling down.  Non-fiction doesn’t always have that bannister, and so if it’s crap it is quite often unreadable.  I find it a lot easier to put down non-fiction to come back to ‘later’, i.e. never.

I’m in a bit of a listy mood today, so I will be a Nick Hornby mini-me and list some of my top books that every fule no, should be read immediately if not before.  In no particular order, because I keep changing my mind:

1. Skellig by David Almond
2. Northern Lights Trilogy by Philip Pullman
3. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
4. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
5. Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer
6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
7. Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
8. Three Men in A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
9. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
10. Justine by Lawrence Durrell
11. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
12. Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich
13. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
14. Smiling in Slow Motion by Derek Jarman
15. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
16. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
17. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
18. A Summer Book and A Winter Book by Tove Jansson
19. Thank You Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
20. 1066 and All That by W. C. Sellar & R. J. Yeatman
21. A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
22. The Collector by John Fowles
23. On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill
24. The Complete Saki by Saki
25. The Falls by Ian Rankin
26. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
27. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
28. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
29. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
30. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
31. The Plague by Albert Camus
32. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
33. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
34. Across The Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn
35. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

There.  That should keep you busy for a while.  Read, inwardly digest and then come round for tea and buns and we’ll chat.  Of course, that’s a very abbreviated list which doesn’t include poetry (try Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, Brian Patten, Roger McGough, John Hegley and Neil Rollinson for starters), or much non-fiction (the OUP Very Short Introduction To, series are usually excellent), or the ancient classics (Suetonius, Herodotus and for more up to date stuff Robert Graves), or the more up to date classics (Trollope, Austen etc).

In fact I could easily compile a top one hundred.  I won’t however, as I’m sure you’re already bored to tears.  I will, just for the hell of it, compile a list of books and/or authors I wish I had never read, but feel vindicated that I have tried, much like trying local cheeses, which you know you should like, but feel that on balance you’d like to spit into your hanky with a kind of ‘Gaaaahhh’! sound.  Again in no particular order:

1. Anything by Jeffrey Archer
2. Anything by Catherine Cookson
3. Anything by Jackie Collins
4. Anything by Stephen King
5. The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
6. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust
7. Ulysses by James Joyce
8. Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan
9. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
10. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

So.  That’s it today.  No laughs, just lists.  No mention of Celine, although her autobiography was on sale for fifty pence in the library last night, and I was sorely tempted.  I decided against it because I thought it would spoil the surprise.  As it is now, we have years of mutual discovery ahead of us.