The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (41 page)

2
At the performance I attended of
Sunday in the Park with George
, we sat behind the novelist and intellectual Andrew O'Hagan, who bought an ice cream during the interval and appeared to enjoy the show. In 2010, O'Hagan published the novel
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe
, the narrator of which is a talking dog. Having proved he too could give voice to a notorious hound, O'Hagan's next project was ghost-writing the ‘unauthorised autobiography' of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. They say Sondheim has been approached to work on a musical adaptation.

1
In his article on Patrick Hamilton, Dan Rhodes calls
The Midnight Bell
‘a cover version' of
Of Human Bondage
.

2
‘All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well-supported in logic and argument than others.' Douglas Adams, interview with
The American Atheist
.

3
One former marketing director of the book chain Waterstones once told me that he got round the problem of constantly being asked ‘Have you read X or Y?' with the foolproof response: ‘Not personally', a formulation I have utilised many times since.

4
For more on this topic, Pierre Bayard's
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
(Granta), is warmly recommended. NB. I have not read it.

5
There are, of course, exceptions. You will have had the experience of asking for a widely-reviewed title by someone you consider a well-known author, only to be met with a blank stare or a request to spell ‘Brown'. Fortunately, you have the humility to acknowledge that you are not the world – nor are you the sort to enjoy lording it over a poorly-paid shop worker. If only all customers were as patient and wise as you are.

I once worked alongside someone who, by her own admission, knew next to nothing about literature. She once asked me to recommend a book by Graham Greene. ‘Why don't you try
The End of the Affair
?' I suggested. ‘What, just the end? Not the whole thing?' she replied. But she was cheerful and well-spoken and many of the regular customers came to ask for her by name, and were sorry when she left to set up her own catering business. She is now a millionaire.

6
NB. One might swap round the names ‘Tolstoy' and ‘Titchmarsh' here without altering the thrust of the argument. If I loved the novels of Alan Titchmarsh but people insisted on buying that bloody
War and Peace
all the time, it would be equally infuriating.

7
I know the character's name is Smith and not Tom Courtenay. I am deliberately referring to the 1962 film adaptation rather than Alan Sillitoe's original novella because I have seen the former but not read the latter. So piss off.

1
I still have Al Hine's book
The Beatles in Help!
. I can see it on the shelf from here. Of course, I have never read it.

2
Daddy has not had time to get changed out of his office clothes: pork-pie hat, brown brogues, blue tartan suit, bright red tie and socks. In fact, Judith Kerr never actually tells us that Daddy goes to an office, only that he is out for much of the day and he would never knock because he's ‘got his key'. Dressed like that, I think Daddy is either a small-time gangster or working the halls.

3
For lots more in-depth analysis of
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
by frustrated English graduates with too much time on their hands, check the numerous discussion threads archived at Mumsnet.

4
For U.S. readers, Croydon is a suburb of South London, synonymous with much that is perceived to be drab and depressing about British suburbia. In 1999, the rock star David Bowie said in an interview, ‘It represented everything I didn't want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it's the most derogatory thing I can say about somebody or something: “God, it's so f**king Croydon!”'. As will become apparent in this section, this is not a point of view I share with Mr ‘Stardust' (sic.), who grew up not on the planet Mars, as he would have you believe, but in the neighbouring suburb of Bromley.

5
The Moon's a Balloon
is terrific, obviously, but
The People's Almanac
(1975) is an extraordinary 1500pp repository of whatever information its compilers found colourful, revelatory or entertaining, the useful and useless side-by-side – the Wikipedia of its day. It was with
The People's Almanac
that I first scared myself stupid with the doomsday prophecies of Nostradamus, studied the inconsistencies of the Warren Report into the assassination of President Kennedy and, at the age of twelve, convinced myself that I had somehow contracted syphilis. What a book.

6
Eleanor Hibbert, 1906–1993, sold more than 100 million books in her lifetime. Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were just two of her bestseller
noms de plume
.

7
‘Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little
fed up
with the world.' Michel Houellebecq,
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.

8
A certain sort of reader might expect me to renounce Croydon, Smiths and even book tokens but I won't do it. I loved all three. The same reader might expect me to report that my love of books was nurtured by an independent children's bookshop, a magical cavern of storytelling, etc. etc. etc., but it wasn't, because there wasn't one. We can't all live in Muswell Hill.

9
An unfulfilled hankering for Sea Monkeys and Twinkies stayed with me for years. In 1998, I begged the author Shawn Levy, visiting the UK to publicise his new book, to bring with him a box or a packet or a bag of Twinkies, however they damn came, so I could finally discover what the legendary enchanted sweetbreads tasted like. When Shawn told his two young boys what the Englishman wanted, they looked at him in amazement. ‘But Dad,' they said. ‘
Why??
' And with good reason, as it turned out. Twinkies are horrible. (I note this more in sadness than anger. At the time of writing, Hostess has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.)

10
The Puffin Club was an offshoot of Puffin Books, the UK's leading publisher of books for children, itself part of Penguin Books Ltd. It was the brainchild of Puffin's inspirational editor-in-chief Kaye Webb.

11
Fantagraphics Books' ongoing publication of every
Peanuts
strip cartoon in attractive hardback volumes, with introductions by fans like Matt Groening and Jonathan Franzen, is one of the most welcome publishing programmes of recent times. It is to be hoped that the project, which commenced in 2004, reaches completion before printed, hardbound books become obsolete – I fear it will be a race to the finish.

12
I did say arguably. There are still many fantastic programmes being made for children in the UK but few of them are based on books, and definitely not vintage books. Classic children's drama of this sort has almost entirely vanished from the schedules, except at Christmas when the BBC or ITV will dramatise
The Borrowers
for the umpteenth time. The spirit of
Jackanory
survives more in the bedtime story on CBeebies, or Stephen Fry's readings of
Harry Potter
, than it does in the current incarnation of
Jackanory
itself,
Jackanory Junior
, which treats its young viewers as though every single one of them is suffering from chronic attention deficit disorder, such is the bombardment of sound effects, animated inserts and green-screen overload. These days, decent adaptations of English literature, classic or contemporary, are more likely to come to us via Hollywood, e.g.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Nanny McPhee, The Secret Garden
and the
Harry Potter
movies, often made in the UK with American money.

13
Pedants, I know Marni Nixon replaced Audrey Hepburn's vocal tracks on the
My Fair Lady
soundtrack, and CinemaScope movies were only ever shown pan-and-scan on television. Have a heart! In fact, technically speaking none of these films qualifies as true 'Scope:
Oliver!
is Panavision,
My Fair Lady
is Super Panavision 70 and
Kiss Me Kate
, though announced as CinemaScope, was filmed and released in 3-D.

14
Again, I am well aware Marlon Brando was not in the original Broadway cast of
Guys and Dolls
and that he only played Sky Masterson in the movie. There was no commercial release of the film soundtrack available at this time, owing to a contractual dispute about which record company owned the rights to Frank Sinatra's vocal performances. I merely wished to make a cheap jibe at the expense of the late Marlon Brando, while drawing your attention to my own bell-like singing voice. Don't miss the audiobook! P.S.
Guys and Dolls
was shot in CinemaScope.

15
Paul Weller, like Morrissey, is someone with a single-minded loyalty to his teenage self. When he appeared on
Desert Island Discs
in 2007, aged 49, he chose
Absolute Beginners
as the book he would take with him to the desert island.

16
A British teenager's reading list in 1984 might typically consist of Orwell,
Brighton Rock, Brave New World
and the plays of Joe Orton, as well as the unofficial American set texts like
Catcher in the Rye, On the Road
and
Catch-22
.

17
Unbeknownst to Alex's grandmother, the rejuvenated Puffin Club was being operated by the Penguin Group, who had quietly outsourced it to the mail-order company The Book People on a three-year contract. In late 2012, this arrangement was abruptly terminated, with the result that the Puffin Club is once again on ‘indefinite hiatus' while Penguin decides what to do with it. I tried to explain to a heartbroken Alex that the reason he wouldn't be receiving any more special bookplates, Puffin Posts or new books was because of the differing financial aims and expectations of the various parties involved in running the Puffin Club franchise in a rapidly-evolving marketplace. But he cried anyway.

1
‘The Dickensian thing is to us what the Western is to America. Just as it's their brave new frontier which defines America culturally, for England it's the Victorian era. And since that time we've been kind of relegated and degraded and decaying.' Russell Brand, interview, Daily Telegraph.

2
The BBC finally produced a solid adaptation of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
in 2012 to mark the bicentenary of Dickens' birth.

3
J.-K. Huysmans,
Against Nature
.

4
The Diary of a Nobody
is generally thought to have been written by George Grossmith alone, with his brother contributing ideas and the illustrations.

5
This distinction may be demonstrated by two differing adaptations of
The Diary of a Nobody
. The 2007 BBC TV series is a definite case of ‘laughing at' the character: Hugh Bonneville's Pooter comes across as vulgar and risible. Compare this with the sublime reading given by Arthur Lowe for BBC radio in the 1970s. His Pooter is pompous, hilarious and a recognisable human being to boot. We may recall that Arthur Lowe was not only famous for playing the Pooterish – excuse me – Captain Mainwaring in
Dad's Army
but also worked with left-ish filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson (
The White Bus, If . . . , O Lucky Man!
) and Peter Medak (
The Ruling Class
).

6
Clever wording, cheers. I think I may have stolen this phrase from Simon Munnery's comedy sloganeer Alan Parker, Urban Warrior; he intended it as satire. Perhaps we should move to reclaim the word Pooter from the anti-suburban haters. Might it be possible for sneered-at suburbanites to start referring to themselves with pride as ‘Pootaz With Attitude'?
Straight Outta Croydon
, it takes a handful of people to hold us back, etc.

7
From ‘Middlebrow',
The Death of the Moth
(Hogarth Press, 1947).

8
Why do so many men yearn to spend time with one another exclusively – lads' nights, down the pub, up the steam-baths? When I look back on my life, I wish I had spent more time in the company of women, not less.

9
Driscoll cites several examples of the ‘gendered ridicule' of book groups, from the nineteenth century through to
Desperate Housewives: ‘The reading practices of contemporary reading groups are particularly susceptible to characterization as middlebrow. Book clubs are middle-class institutions, part of the middle-class package of values that includes education and self-improvement . . . These members are overwhelmingly women
.' (
‘Not the normal kind of chicklit'? Richard & Judy and the Feminized Middlebrow
by Beth Driscoll, in
The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader
edited by Jenni Ramone and Helen Cousins.) It should be noted that although the word ‘middlebrow' retains many of its pejorative connotations in everyday usage, it is a respectable term in the groves of academia. Please see the rather marvellous Middlebrow Network (www.middlebrow-network.com) for numerous examples from across the spectrum of opinion, not least this 1925 definition of the term from
Punch
magazine, home of Mr Pooter: ‘
The BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the “middlebrow”. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like
.'

10
Spectator, Independent, Observer
and
Time Out
.

1
Edited highlights of this blog are available to read via my website at mill-i-am.com or as ‘bonus content' in the ebook edition of
The Year of Reading Dangerously
. I am told my thoughts on
The Epic of Gilgamesh
represent a strong ‘incentive to purchase'. Hmm.