Books

At the start of August 2018 (which happened to coincide with my 40^th birthday) I hadn’t completed a full-length work of adult fiction for well over two years. There was one particularly significant reason/excuse for this who came along in June 2016 (no, not Brexit), but that was, in terms of the absence of free time, not worth two years’ worth of excuses, nor did it explain the number of barely started/unfinished novels in the time before.

I had really lost confidence in myself as a reader – self-pitying as that sounds. We all have the experience of reading a few pages into a book then giving up – no harm in that -, but more damaging were the books I felt I’d got past the first hurdle, but still gave up on – 70 pages into Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, 30 pages into The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle, 150 pages into Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (I mean, I expect there are 1000s who’ve got 150 pages into Infinite Jest, but still) … then, perhaps the most damaging blow was the first novel I tried to read post-parenthood, a Christmas present from my mother, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. It’s not an especially long book, and I got nearly halfway through it, terribly slowly, before feeling worn out by the slow plot and the narrator’s thought processes. This isn’t the one I’m coming back with, I said to myself.

I managed a few non-fiction works last year – on pop music, sport, my safe ground. And, of course, I had read an awful lot of words which weren’t novels for adults. I’d read children’s books, poems, plus so many Wikipedia articles, long read pieces, witty twitter threads, funny takes on things, background materials for work. I had become consumed by my need to be on top of what was going on, to be informed and with it. A form of madness.

So much of what I took in I then spat out – I don’t think I’ve written so much as in the last couple of years (clearly giving the lie to the notion that I didn’t have time to read novels). All well and good, there are pieces I’m glad to have written, but also several overwrought attempts to process ephemera, which instantly felt like a gigantic waste of time.

Wasting time/using time, that’s really what I want to write about. Perhaps the turning 40 isn’t entirely coincidental. Perhaps I’m thinking more and more pointedly about how to make sure my time isn’t waste. Endlessly checking to see what self-defeating argument various left-wingers I used to respect are making with each other on twitter is not good time …

I didn’t set out to make reading novels a task, a project, an accomplishment, an exercise in time well spent. I knew I was missing reading books, but I was feeling it was out of my reach, it had become something other people did, and I’d lost the knack for. Fortuitously, my mother was telling me about the English author JL Carr, who she’d been reading about, and, in Waterstones to pick up some full-length works of children’s fiction (of which I have, of course, read vast numbers) I spotted Carr’s most acclaimed book, A Month in the Country, on a table of “Short Classics” (or something). Just over 100 pages, I knew I had a way in. If I finished it, I’d be able to speak to my mother about it – it was a task, an achievable task.

It was a struggle to start with, but it was very readable, an English elegy of sorts which somehow felt timely, and, reader, I read it … talking of which, I’d picked up Wide Sargasso Sea in the same deal, and, high on my own success, I moved straight on. Dense and heady as it is, completing it gave me an even greater sense of accomplishment, and suddenly, the project was on.

I have become project-focused in the last decade or so. It was always in me to be so, but in my childhood and early adulthood, I was disorganised, undermotivated and rarely completed anything. I changed significantly between 2007 and 2009. The nature of my work played its part - the need to organise myself to complete tasks day after day and over long period, but more significant, for some reason, was my first DVT. Almost instantly, my need and ability to organise myself increased vastly. Initially, this applied to necessary changes to lifestyle and fitness. It felt like a must, not an option.

Then came the self-perpetuating writing projects. This blog basically. It began as a one-off thing, 101 lists of songs about things with poems – that took 18 months and I finished it. It was something. A couple of years later, I realised there could be more somethings. I’ve spent a great deal of time on further projects – 200 Greatest British Sportspeople, 40 Sporting Moments, 1001 Songs, An Album a Year, 101 Sporting Haikus etc … I completed them all, and it was the completion that was important to me. What have you done, David? Well, I’ve done these things.

And it could be the same with reading books, I realised. Each one could be an achievement and a tick. It could be a number. Now, one might think that would suck the joy out of reading, that everything should be a task – Done, done and I’m on to the next one … but I think reading a novel is such a necessarily engaging and emotive activity that you simply cannot just tick a book off – you can with albums and, to a lesser extent, films (I have – of course! – also taken this completist approach to both) but you cannot simply pass over the pages of a novel, completely giving up on the idea of understanding.

It turns out that this brutal approach to reading novels is suiting me. I quickly set myself the task of 25 novels in 25 weeks – I was extremely careful at first, making sure that everything was in my range, and failure and discouragement was unlikely. I looked through my shelves, in bookshops and online for short novels. I knew I’d have to get to more challenging works, but they could wait till I had a bit more confidence in my own reading.

I had some demons to slay first. After Wide Sargasso Sea, I turned to The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, which I’d carried with me, forlornly, time after time, as I’d travelled up to London and back over the last year, without getting past the first couple of pages. Pausing only to demolish The Old Man and the Sea (the recollection that some classics of literature can be ingested as swiftly as a Peter Jackson film was a great boon), I then returned to Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, picking up where I’d left off. This time, the reading was so much easier and more enjoyable. Under less pressure, the book opened up to me, and had such a glorious kick on the last page, it really brought my previous struggles with the narrator’s inner monologue into perspective.

Mainly, as I said, I’ve been reading short books, though my ambitions have increased. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing was almost 300 pages, and then came Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, which packs so much into its 220 pages, so much complexity, intrigue, history, good and evil, I felt like reading it was a real accomplishment.

I mean to read some longer books, though, in truth, I haven’t ever read all that many novels over 600 pages. I managed The Corrections (which, though I can barely remember a detail of it, I was sure was the best novel I’d read when I completed it, in around 2003), Alan Hollingsworth’s The Stranger’s Child, and, ludicrously, Lord of the Rings, twice. I’m sure there have been others, but I think a weighty tome has always scared me a little.

Maybe I’ll return to Infinite Jest – I do remember I was quite enjoying it, I just think I probably saw a sports biography I quite fancied reading in media res, and then couldn’t bring myself go back to it. I guess there are folk who’ve read one or all of Ulysses, À la recherche du temps perdu and Infinite Jest, and, having been nearby to friends when they’ve been working their way through the two former and being in no way attracted to that worthy torture, I guess Infinite Jest is my best shot.

But. Is. Life. Too. Short? It’s a (slightly) serious question. Time well spent becomes more of an obsession as I get older, as seems inevitable. One of the pangs during my long exile from literature was a sense of despair and reproach at all the time I wasted when I was young. Why, when there was no twitter feed, no sky sports, no internet, no rocking child to sleep, no this, no that, did I not then read all the books I could? What was I doing that was more worthwhile?

There are some decent answers … I was playing football and cricket, I was in pubs, I was cultivating a backstory to rail against, but, you know, I never read enough. And I did have the chance. I’m probably less well-read than I seem. I’ve loved the oblivion of watching sport (and TV in general) too much. It’s always been a bit sporadic – two or three novels on the bounce then a few months off etc … perhaps finally I’ve had the wake-up call about the need … the need to read. The stories to be told.

But, yes, it matters how long some novels are. I’ll read Middlemarch, I think … how long … fuck …

 will reading Infinite Jest really be time better spent than, say, Scoop, Under the Net and Normal People (not chosen at random but staring at me right now …)? Come on, I haven’t got all day.

Will reading a short novel be a better use of time than, say, watching Killing Eve… oh, all those TV series, why did I not watch all the TV series when I had the time?

You can be as philosophical as you like about time until it comes to fitting worthwhile stuff in. I mean, why in the name of shit am I writing this? Time’s a wastin’ …

… I return to this two months later! I literally stopped in the middle of a sentence, thinking why am I complaining about time while writing a fairly meaningless blog?

So, the good news is I’ve carried on reading. I’ve completed 30 novels/novellas in less than 4 months, which is pretty good going. I’ve slowed down a bit though.

I have about 30 more lined up – I think they might take me a bit more than 30 weeks, but I think I’ll keep reading.

I’m not sure it’s done the job of removing me from twitter and facebook as much as I’d like, but so be it.

Here is the list of books I’ve read so far … none of them has been a waste of time, and that’s good enough for me

Reading novels is good time … or at least it’s not really bad time … any well-chosen, well-written book is worth at least something.

05/05/23 - i've been seized by the urge to give each of these books a score. I might delete later. It's an obscene thing to do, but it's kind of a test of how well i remember my experience of them ...

1. A Month in the Country – JL Carr 9
2. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys 7
3. The Noise of Time – Julian Barnes 7
4. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway 7
5. The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright 6
6. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut 7
7. Nutshell – Ian McEwan 6
8. From a Calm and Narrow Sea – Donal Ryan 7
9. The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes 8
10. Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward 6
11. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd 8
12. Midwinter Break – Bernard MacLaverty 7
13. The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler 7
14. The Gathering – Anne Enright 8
15. Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh 7
16. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch 8
17. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn 6
18. Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney 7
19. Sula – Toni Morrison 8
20. The Quiet American – Graham Greene 7
21. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo 6
22. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan 7
23. The Beginning of Spring – Penelope Fitzgerald 7
24. Normal People – Sally Rooney 9
25. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro 8
26. Hot Milk – Deborah Levy 7
27. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene 7
28. Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss 7
29. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 7
30. Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively 7
31. In a Free State - VS Naipaul 6
32. Heartburn - Nora Ephron 6
33. Autumn - Ali Smith 9
34. Grief is a Thing with Feathers - Max Porter 6
35. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin 8
36. The End We Start From - Megan Hunter 7
37. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow 6
38. Quartet in Autumn - Barbara Pym 7
39. 13 Ways of Looking - Colum McCann 7
40. Winter  - Ali Smith 8
41. The Fall - Albert Camus 5
42. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark 9
43. The Vegetarian - Han Kang 7
44. Regeneration - Pat Barker 7
45. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon 4
46. Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner 8
47. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain 7
48. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 7
49. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 7
50. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor 8
51. The Ghost Road - Pat Barker 7
52. Spring - Ali Smith 7
53. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 7
54. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford 9
55. Tin Man - Sarah Winman 6
56. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh 6
57. Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh 8
58. Oranges are not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson 6
59. Stay With Me - Ayobami Adebayo 7
60. Swimming Home - Deborah Levy 7
61. The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth 6
62. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston 7
63. Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie 8
64. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson 7
65. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch 7
66. In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne 7
67. I Heard the Owl Call My Name - Margaret Craven 8
68. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse 7
69. Home - Toni Morrison 6
70. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid 7
71. Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban 10
72. History of Wolves - Emily Fridlund 7
73. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov 8
74. Everything Under - Daisy Johnson 7
75. A Room With a View - EM Forster 7
76. The Man Who Saw Everything - Deborah Levy 7
77. Days Without End - Sebastian Barry 9
78. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton 8
79. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka 7
80. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8
81. My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite 7
82. Heatwave - Penelope Lively 6
83. So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell 7
84. The Wall - John Lanchester 8
85. How to be Both - Ali Smith 7
86. The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard 6
87. An American Marriage - Tayari Jones 6
88. Girl - Edna O'Brien 7
89. Rabbit, Run - John Updike 7
90. The Green Road - Anne Enright 10
91. Songdogs - Colum McCann 7
92. The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch 7
93. I Who Have Never Known Men- Jacqueline Harpman 8
94. Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers - Ryan O'Neill 10
95. ness - Robert MacFarlane and Stanley Donwood 4
96. Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams 6
97. Actress - Anne Enright 8
98. The Awakening - Kate Chopin 7
99. Weather - Jenny Offill 6
100. Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie 8
101. The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead 8
102. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 7
103. A Whole Life - Robert Seethaler 7
104. The Cockroach - Ian McEwan 5
105. Sweet Sorrow - David Nicholls 8
106. Summer - Ali Smith 7
107. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens 6
108. Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald 7
109. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie 7
110. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong 8
111. Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes 7
112. Summerwater - Sarah Moss 6
113. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver 8
114. Fighter - Andy Lee 7
115. Small Town Talk - Barney Hoskyns 7
116. Face It - Debbie Harry 7
117. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro 7
118. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward 8
119. The Country Girls - Edna O'Brien 7
120. Apeirogon - Colum McCann 8
121. The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon 8
122. The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett 7
123. Beautiful World, Where Are You? - Sally Rooney 5
124. Lanny - Max Porter 9
125. Everyman - Philip Roth 7
126. The Lonely Girl - Edna O'Brien 7
127. Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell 6
128. Open Water - Caleb Azumah Nelson 6
129. Lessons - Ian McEwan 7
130. Snow - John Banville 7
131. Assembly - Natasha Brown 7
132. Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan 7
133. The Book of the Gaels - James Yorkston 7
134. The Death of Francis Bacon - Max Porter 5
135. The Winter Garden - Nicola Cornick 5
136. The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen 8
137. The Ice Palace - Tarjei Vesaas 8
138. Second Place - Rachel Cusk 7
139. Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan 8
140. The Fell - Sarah Moss 8
141. Treacle Walker - Alan Garner 7
142. A Far Cry from Kensington - Muriel Spark 7
143. That Old Country Music - Kevin Barry 8
144. A Different Drummer - William Melvin Kelley 8
145. Burnt Sugar - Avni Doshi 6
146. The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark 10
147. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison 7
148. Cove - Cynan Jones 7
149. No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood 8
150. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge 7
151. The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark 8
152. Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members - Ray Padgett 9
153. George's Marvellous Medicine - Roald Dahl 6
154. August is a Wicked Month - Edna O'Brien 7
155. Journey into Fear - Eric Ambler 7
156. The Twits - Roald Dahl 5
157. Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry 9
158. The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright 7
159. Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead 9
160. Western Lane - Chetna Maroo 8
161. Antarctica - Claire Keegan 8
162. Girls in Their Married Bliss - Edna O'Brien 7
163. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 9
164. World Within a Song - Jeff Tweedy 7
165. James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl 6
166. Everything in this Country Must - Colum McCann 7
167. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein 2 (well, in this whole experience, this is the first book I hated)
168. Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alan 8 (I also somewhat hated this, but it was well done)
169. Danny the Champion of the World - Roald Dahl 9
170. Excellent Women - Barbara Pym 8
171. If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin 8
172. Latecomers - Anita Brookner