How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Many people are out there writing blogs about the books they read, and I salute them for their efforts, but it occurred to me a couple of years ago that blogging about all the books I haven’t read yet would be so much easier: there are so many more of them, and they keep on coming…

Yesterday I got hold of Pierre Bayard’s
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Obviously I haven’t read it yet, I’ve barely even skimmed the preface, but it’s good to see someone else trying to break the taboo about not-reading books.

In his enlightening book The Black Swan (which, of course, I haven’t finished reading yet either) Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of how most visitors to Umberto Eco, on seeing his vast library of thirty thousand books, ask him how many of them he has read. They are missing the point, as Taleb puts it: books are a research tool. “Read books,” he says, “are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means [...] allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.”

Indeed they do. I’m surrounded by hundreds of them. It can’t be helped though. It doesn’t matter how many books you do read, the number you discover that you haven’t read will always increase at a much faster rate, it’s inevitable. As Bayard says on page six (yes, I have at least got that far) of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read:

 ”This encounter with the infinity of available books offers a certain encouragement not to read at all. Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?”

A better conclusion, as Bayard explains, is that we must learn to appreciate books even if we haven’t actually read them.

 

Richard & Judy Book Club 2007

The eight titles chosen for this year’s Richard & Judy Book Club have been announced, they are:

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Restless – William Boyd
This Book Will Save Your Life – AM Homes
Love in the Present Tense – Catherine Ryan Hyde
The Girls – Lori Lansens
Semi-Detached – Griff Rhys Jones
The Testament of Gideon Mack – James Robertson
The Interpretation of Murder – Jed Rubenfeld

So that’s eight more books I haven’t read yet.

Predictably, the bookies have made the most famous author (William Boyd) the favourite to win, but my instincts lean towards AM Homes – mainly because of the irresistible title: This Book Will Save Your Life. It’s not the first time I’ve been drawn towards AM Homes work – Jack, one of her earlier novels, has been on my must-read-that-sometime list for several years.

Orange Beauty

It was third time lucky for Zadie Smith yesterday, when she was announced as the winner of The Orange Prize for her third novel On Beauty, which had missed out on the Booker and Whitbread Prizes. No luck about it of course, just talent.

 

Further update:

I still haven’t read it.

(Or last year’s winner.)

(Or the year before’s…)

Orange Prize Shortlist 2006

The shortlist for The Orange Prize was announced yesterday. Inevitably it includes the usual suspects: Ali & Zadie Smith – which reminded me that I still haven’t read On Beauty.

One of Richard & Judy’s Book Club 2006 choices – The History of Love by Nicole Krauss – is also on the list, although the winner – Labyrinth – was not entered as its author Kate Mosse is one of the co-founders of the Orange Prize. The other three contenders are the best-selling novelist Hilary Mantel for Beyond Black, first-timer Carrie Tiffany for Everyman’s Rules For Scientific Living, and Sarah Waters with Night Watch – which is currently being serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime.

Newsnight’s Martha Kearney is chairing the judging panel, which includes the comedienne and novelist Jenny Éclair, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, columnist and novelist India Knight and children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson. The winner will be announced on June 6th.

The six books on the shortlist for the £30,000 Orange Prize are:

Memento Mori

I was listening to the radio this afternoon while taking one last thorough browse round my favourite but, sadly, soon-to-be-closed bargain bookstore (amazingly I did manage to resist the temptation to buy anything) when I heard on the news that Dame Muriel Spark had passed away. I moaned quietly. Well, I hope it was quiet. I knew she was getting on a bit (she was 88) but it’s still sad to hear that one of my favourite living authors is no more.

The bookshop had one of her books in stock – two together in fact: Aiding and Abetting / The Go-Away Bird. I loved Aiding and Abetting – a deliciously witty story (aren’t they all though?) about a psychiatrist who suddenly finds herself consulted by two different patients both claiming to be Lord Lucan. It’s a pity the miseryguts Booker Prize judges didn’t see fit to shortlist it that year (as they had in 1969 and 1981). The Go-Away Bird on the other hand is yet another one of those books-I-haven’t-read. I didn’t buy it though – the bright red cover design would look garish next to my other Muriel Spark books which are orange Penguin paperbacks. I picked most of them up as a job lot in a sale at West Bridgford library a few years ago, and I’ve been looking forward – ok: meaning – to read them ever since.

Coincidentally I’d seen one of them in my local library earlier this morning, it was her first novel:

The Comforters

Although her first break had come six years earlier, in 1951, when she won a short story competition in The Observer. I’d pleased to see that The Observer have republished that story: The Seraph and the Zambesi.

In all there are ten of her books sitting on my shelves, most of them still waiting to be read:

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
*The Public Image (1968)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
*Loitering With Intent (1981)

*shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

I will treat myself to one of them tomorrow; and, I suppose in the circumstances, I really must get hold of her 1959 book: Memento Mori…

Island

The next book-I-haven’t-read-yet was chosen by chance. I just opened The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction at random and the first name I saw was: Gary Indiana. Nope, never heard of him; but on the opposite page was a picture of a book I did know, one I was very keen to get hold of a few years ago, and eventually did…and yet I still haven’t read it. This is the picture…

Island

by Aldous Huxley

I found my copy of Island in the pile next to my printer rather than in its place on the shelf, which means it is probably within twenty or thirty places of the front of my to-be-read queue. Coincidentally, I came across a perceptive reference to Huxley’s Brave New World while I was reading Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You For Not Reading last week (I went back to the library and got it out after all) and she quotes this passage from Neil Postman’s Foreword to his book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

When I read I Brave New World I was astounded at how it seemed to be getting more and more relevant every day. I’ve always felt that Orwell was too pessimistic in his view of humanity: oppressive regimes are always overthrown eventually. It’s not the boot stamping on the face forever that we have to fear, it’s the laziness in the face of an information overload, the shhh-Corrie’s-on I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it attitude, the lure of blissful ignorance and of soma.

But going back to Island, or “Huxley’s Utopia” as the blurb describes it, the quote on the cover describes it thus:

“Huxley’s last novel in which the horrors of Brave New World melt into the vision of an eastern state governed by reason and love.”

Fascinating. I really must read it…someday.

There’s an Island Foundation devoted to “creating a more sensible society as inspired by the ideas of Aldous Huxley.” Good luck to them. Their website is here.

Roadside Picnic

Hearing of the death of Stanislaw Lem reminded me of another book-I-haven’t-read-yet, although it’s not one of his. Lem was most famous for writing Solaris which was made into a classic Russian science-fiction film in 1971, and a not-so classic American science-fiction film, starring George Clooney, in 2002. I haven’t seen the Clooney version, and the only thing I remember about the Russian film was a sleep-inducing sequence in which someone was driving along a motorway at night for ages and ages. However, another film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky made a haunting impression on me, and that film – Stalker – was based on a book I haven’t read yet because it’s so rare that I’ve never come across a copy:

Roadside Picnic

by

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Ragged Trousered Pessimist

I made the mistake of browsing round another charity shop today, but it was an Oxfam shop so there was no danger of me buying anything: the prices they charge you would have thought poverty was history already! One book that caught my eye was The Perpetual Pessimist (An Everlasting Calendar of Gloom and Almanac of Woe) by Sagittarius? and Daniel George. Just my kind of thing – a book full of miserable, fatalistic, quotations. Anyway I decided to try and find out more about The Perpetual Pessimist tonight, and a bit of googling led me to the fascinating alphaDictionary.com. Nothing to do with the book though – it just so happens that in their list of the 100 Funniest Words in English, at number 87, is the fabulous word smellfungus which they define as “a perpetual pessimist”. Apparently Smellfungus was a character created by Tristram Shandy author Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey (another book I haven’t read) as a satirical parody of Tobias Smollett.

alphaDictionary’s list also includes abibliophobia: the fear of running out of reading material – something I certainly don’t suffer from, and never will: my shelves already have more than enough books to see me out.

Meanwhile, Oxfam also had a copy of another book I haven’t read yet but really should have…

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

by Robert Tressell

…a realistic depiction of working class life a hundred years ago, an indictment of capitalism, a socialist classic, and a book that has changed lives. But not mine because I still haven’t read it yet.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Unread books creep up and bite me whatever I do and wherever I look. It’s not even safe to watch dumb TV. I caught some of Through The Keyhole on BBC2 this afternoon, and there in Lisa I’Anson’s pad was a copy of a book-I-haven’t-read-yet which has been waiting patiently on my shelf for so many years that I’d forgotten all about it.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Sogyal Rinpoche

It came recommended by the John Cleese, who called it one of the most helpful books he’d ever read, and The Observer, who said it was for “readers of all religions and readers of none” – but is that a reader of no religion, or a reader of no books? I suppose I qualify either way. Just my luck if I get reincarnated as a bookworm. Instant karma’s gonna get ya…

Thank You For Not Reading

I was in the library today – looking for 1001 Books – and one title caught my eye, it said:

Thank You for Not Reading

Essays on literary trivia

by Dubravka Ugresic

I picked it up, had a quick shufty, and then put it back on the shelf, unread.

You’re welcome, Dubravka.

Julian Evans in The Guardian calls it a book to be treasured, and it is “enjoyable, biting and funny” according to Mark Thwaite on readysteadybook.com, who also recommends The Uses of Slime Mould by Nicholas Mosley. Tch, so that’s two more books to feel guilty about not-reading…