1001 Books

What’s the worst thing that could happen to someone struggling with an ever-increasing pile of books waiting to be read? Someone else publishing a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die that’s what! Thanks Peter Boxall – that’s just what I needed! Another list of books I will be unable to resist looking through and, inevitably, even more books I will want to read, but probably never get round to. As if there haven’t been enough of these lists already:

The BBC’s Big Read
The Channel 4 / Waterstone’s Books of the Century
Anthony Burgess’s 99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939
The Modern Library Top 100 best English language novels of the 20th century
etc. etc.

According to the review in tomorrow morning’s Observer, those 1,001 books you must read before you kick the bucket include ELEVEN by J.M. Coetzee. Now I’m an admirer of Coetzee – have been ever since I read his memoir Boyhood with which I felt a tremendous affinity – but eleven? That’s going too far; and judging by the review there is a faint, fusty, male smell about the list as well. (Although I wouldn’t go as far as Tim on Intersecting Lines who thinks “it sounds like meretricious crap“.) Even so, I look forward to skimming through it, and the UK edition does have a superb cover…

…borrowing from the iconic Penguin cover design for Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
Mind you, at 960 pages, it must be the size of a cow!
(Tra-la-laa, Tra-la-la-laaa… )

So why 1,001?
“Because of its Scheherazadian connotations” the author says.
Which reminded me of another book I still haven’t read:

Arabian Nights:
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

Maybe I should get it down off the shelf and fall asleep reading one of Scheherazade’s tales tonight. Then again, if I’m ever going to get all these books read I’m going to have to stop sleeping at all.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is published by
Cassell Illustrated on March 9th.

At Swim

According to the Guardian today Flann O’Brien’s surreal novel The Third Policeman has become a best-seller in America after it appeared briefly on screen in the TV show Lost. It seems fans of the show are desperate for clues as to what the hell it’s all about. I’m glad I didn’t get into it – I just wasn’t impressed by the ten minutes I saw: the bits of the crashed plane all landing together on the beach rather than being scattered; the engine still running; the survivors walking around in their only-slightly ripped clothes; the all-American hero doctor rushing around saving lives left, right and centre…I laughed, threw things at the screen and switched over. If I wanted to be baffled by a great TV show I would buy The Prisoner DVD box set. (Or I would if I could afford it.)

But back to the book – apparently one of the publishers who rejected it said this: “We realise the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic; in this new novel he is more so.”

How’s that for a rejection slip? Being told your novel is too fantastic!

Anyway, I did get round to reading The Third Policeman back in May 2004, and although I struggled to get my head round it – who wouldn’t? – it was certainly memorable. (If it does represent a clue to unravelling Lost I can only think that the show’s producer has been bashed on the head while trying to murder television and the whole shebang will end the way it started. Maybe it’s just his revenge on society after he never got the bicycle he wanted for Christmas when he was seven.) However, it’s Flann O’Brien’s second best known novel At Swim Two Birds that I haven’t got round to reading yet, and the plan was to read that before I tackled this:

At Swim Two Boys

by Jamie O’Neill

It was because of my interest in this book that I first heard of Flann O’Brien, what with the title of O’Neill’s book being un homage to O’Brien, so I thought I ought to read At Swim Two Birds first, but I haven’t…yet. One thing leads to another, and sometimes not-doing one thing leads to not-doing another. Kierkegaard would have understood.

Rabbit, Run

Open Book reminded me of another classic book-I-haven’t-read-yet a few weeks ago. A listener rang the show wanting to have some romantic comedy novels recommended to her, and Mariella asked Tim Lott for suggestions. Now I have a lot of time for Tim Lott (if you’ll ignore the pun) because I really enjoyed Rumours of a Hurricane and his latest book The Seymour Tapes. (Although I’ve never been able to face The Scent of Dried Roses – another candidate for this blog someday? Maybe.) Anyway, he stretched the definition of romantic comedy quite some way because one of the books he recommended was:

Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

I’ve read enough of it to know what a great writer Updike is – although that’s not saying much: it only takes a few sentences. Less, maybe…

“Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.”

I used that in a literary opening lines quiz I compiled for Quizardry.com. As John Carey put it: “He has the kind of prose style that unzips the loose covers from words, so that they pop out sharp and shiny…”

There’s no doubt I’m missing out here. Updike not only created a memorable character in Rabbit Angstrom, but chronicled his life story through the last half of the Twentieth Century in four novels: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit At Rest (1990) – the last two winning Pulitzer Prizes.

Europa

Open Book on BBC Radio 4 often adds to the ever-expanding list of books-I-haven’t-read. On this week’s edition, Mariella Frostrup was talking to Tim Parks about his new novel Cleaver, which sounds interesting (so that’s another one on the to-be-read list) but she also mentioned one of his previous books: one which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997 and which I haven’t read because I found it unreadable…

Europa

by Tim Parks

I started reading it, but didn’t get very far because a few pages in there is one of the longest and most convoluted sentences I have ever read. I say read, I recognised all the words as they passed in front of my eyes but it was like being given a long, winding set of directions: subclause after subclause, it twisted and turned, deviated and digressed – in the end I completely lost track of what had been going on when the sentence started. But then maybe my memory is playing tricks on me; maybe I gave up too easily. Maybe I will give Europa another try one day…or maybe not. To be honest I would much rather re-read Once In Europa by one of my favourite writers: John Berger. Perhaps I will give Tim Parks another chance and read his new book – although, come to think of it, I said that about his last one (Judge Savage) and I never got round to reading that either.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Richard & Judy’s book club is in its third bookboosting year, and today they were discussing another book I haven’t read yet:

 

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

by

Eva Rice

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t not-read-it because it’s such a girly-looking book, or for any snobby reasons - I’ve been impressed by the quality of the books chosen for the show each year (although there are always one or two books that no bloke would ever read, given the choice) - I just haven’t managed to nab a copy from any of the local libraries I haunt.

 

Of the ten books on this year’s list I have actually read three of them already. Yes, really. Three! I bet you thought I spent all my time blogging and not-reading didn’t you?

 

I enjoyed The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. At times it reminded me of one of my favourite books of the last ten years: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, as well as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Impressively, The History of Love came recommended not just by Richard and Judy, but by two of my favourite writers: JM Coetzee (who described it as “charming, tender and wholly original”) and Ali Smith (“a beauty of a book, totally alive…”) It certainly is a beautiful book, in a similar vein to The Shadow of the Wind from last year’s list – not as atmospheric, but certainly more poignant. How can we not take Leo Gursky to our hearts when presented with such a lonely existence: “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen,” he says.

 

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes was on the Booker Prize shortlist last year and the real life events it depicts were the subject of a recent BBC2 documentary. To be honest, I think anyone who saw that documentary will be frustrated by the slowness of the book. Fascinating as the story is, for me it fell rather flat compared to his previous work. But I’ll come back to Barnes when I discuss not-having-yet-read A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Meanwhile, in its characters’ quest for a long-missing stuffed bird, The Conjuror’s Bird by Martin Davies has echoes of Barnes’ classic Flaubert’s Parrot, but is much more in the page-turner mould of a Robert Goddard thriller. On the literary spectrum it lies somewhere between AS Byatt’s Possession and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. But then, what doesn’t? And talk of The Da Vinci Code brings me to Kate Mosse ’s Labyrinth – another book involving a quest for the Holy Grail – which shifted 52,000 copies the week after it was featured (with Richard being particularly enthusiastic).

 

It’s usually good fun to try and predict the winner of these literary contests, but this year it looks like a foregone conclusion. Even before the first book was opened (by the readers or the bookies) Labyrinth was the obvious front-runner. Maybe it will be my featured book-I-haven’t-read-yet when it is announced as the winner on Saturday April 1st – or maybe I will actually read that one as well!

 

The ten books featured on Richard & Judy’s Book Club 2006 are:

 

Travels With My Aunt

Another thing you shouldn’t do if you’ve already got far too many books to read is to sign up to a mailing list like the ones run by Suzanne at dearreader.com

I got an email from her yesterday with a sample of this month’s Penguin classic:

Travels With My Aunt
by
Graham Greene

It’s another book I have never gotten round to reading, despite Graham Greene being one of my favourite authors. An incredibly laconic writer, he could create an ominous atmosphere with almost no words at all. He was also a master of all genres – as well as all those gripping thrillers like Brighton Rock, Stamboul Train, A Gun For Saleand, my favourite, The Ministry of Fear- with its bizarrely sinister opening at a church fête; he also wrote comedy, most notably Our Man In Havana- his story of a vacuum cleaner turned spy, as well as one of the best tear-jerkers ever in The End of the Affair.

Better still he took his readers all round the world, to:

Argentina – The Honorary Consul
Austria – The Third Man
Congo – A Burnt-out Case
Cuba – Our Man In Havana
Germany – No Man’s Land
Haiti – The Comedians
Mexico – The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory
Panama – The Captain and the Enemy
Sierra Leone – The Heart of the Matter
South Africa – The Human Factor
Spain – Monsignor Quixote
Switzerland – Dr. Fischer of Geneva
and Vietnam – The Quiet American

and probably a few more besides. I don’t know where he travelled with his aunt though – because that’s one of the few Greene books I haven’t read…yet.

Sex

I saw the new Madonna video on Top of the Pops tonight (good to see Nizlopi on there as well – the BBC really pissed me off by not having them on the Christmas show) and I was thinking: there is going to be quite a scene in the Ritchie household in a few years when Lourdes starts taking an interest in boys and going out clubbing…

Madonna: You are not going out wearing that.
Guy: You’re not kidding – I’ve seen more material in one of my old screenplays.
Lourdes: Oh come on. Anyone would think I was cavorting round in my underwear like Mum does in her videos.

Which reminded me of another book I never did get round to ‘reading’…

Sex
by
Madonna

…but then I’m told it’s quite hard to come across a copy.

The Magus

From one metafictional book to another.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
by
John Fowles

has been described as a metafictional deconstruction of a Victorian novel and is, needless to say, another book I haven’t read yet. I very nearly started reading it after he died in November, and then again when it was the BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial in January. Almost, but not quite: the story of my life.

I have read his first novel The Collector though, and was a bit shocked by it – a young man wins the pools and buys a remote house with a cellar wherein he can keep the object of his desires: the girl he admires from afar after he kidnaps her. Would that get published nowadays, or would it be too politically incorrect?

But the John Fowles book I really should have read a long time ago is:

The Magus

I found a copy several summers ago in what used to be my favourite charity shop – in West Bridgford (down the road from my second home: Trent Bridge cricket ground) – a shop in which, as if by magic, obscure old books I was searching for kept appearing. (Used to be because ever since they had a swanky refit a couple of years ago they’ve been charging Oxfam prices for books.) The old lady behind the counter did rather put me off though when she wished me luck with it: telling me she hadn’t made head nor tail of it! Mind you, at least she’d had a go – what am I like?

Tristram Shandy

Another bad idea for someone who already has too many books waiting to be read is to subscribe to the Review-A-Day email from Powells, but as a book addict (hello, my name is Phillip and I’m a biblioholic) I did. Today’s review is of a book called Things in the Night by the Estonian writer Mati Unt, which the reviewer describes as “scatterbrained” – prompting a comparison with one of those classic books I’ve been meaning to get round to for years…

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by
Laurence Sterne

Sometimes these unread books keep popping up everywhere I look. While I was not reading How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World a few days ago, I noticed that the ‘P.S.’ section at the back lists Francis Wheen’s Top Ten books (of which I’ve managed to not read eight) and he names Tristram Shandy as his favourite. It is “the greatest fun fair of all novels” according to the South African writer André Brink, while Tom Paulin described it as “one of the funniest, most playful classics in the language.” Sounds irresistable – and also, despite being one of the most patently unfilmable books ever written, it is currently in the cinemas as A Cock and Bull Story starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. The film looks hilarious, but I’ll wait for it to turn up on TV – that will give me more time to get round to reading the book first. I understand that, while telling his life story, Tristram takes a long time to get round to being born – so I’m sure he would understand my own cunctatiousness.

Things of Darkness

BBC Radio 4 has a lot to answer for, and listening to A Good Read is particularly dangerous if you’re trying to avoid adding to your ‘must read’ pile – and so it was today. I had picked up a copy of one of the books under discussion a few months ago, but I put it back down on the shelf again. I had decided I didn’t really want to read it. The life story of a homeless, criminal drug addict, told backwards from his suicide sounded too harrowing. It keeps winning awards though; and hearing Sue McGregor, Sir Christopher Frayling and Jon Snow talking about it today has put it back on my ever-expanding ‘must read’ list. It is

Stuart: A Life Backwards
by
Alexander Masters

Meanwhile, the book currently being serialised on Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime is one of the many that sit staring at me from the shelves – although by slouching down in my chair I can hide behind my monitor from it’s brooding presence.

This Thing of Darkness
by
Harry Thompson

I first heard of This Thing of Darkness when it was included on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize last year. Now any book featuring Charles Darwin is bound to get my attention, and with its echoes of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers – a rowlocking good read from a few years back – it went straight into the queue for the attention of my tired eyes. (My eyes would like me to read less and listen to the radio more to give them a rest – but there’s the rub: listening to the radio just leaves me with more books to read.)

Sadly, Harry Thompson died of lung cancer last November, aged 45, having worked for the BBC as a producer of some of the very best comedy shows of the last ten years. As well as being a co-creator of Have I Got News For You and They Think It’s All Over, he was also one of the writers on Monkey Dust, so he gave me a lot of laughter over the years. And Stuart Shorter was only 32 years old when he jumped in front of a train. The least I can do is get round to reading their books – but I haven’t…yet.