I read a lot, I can’t put it down –
Nick Lowe
Sometimes it’s easier to retreat into yourself, to shut up shop, “shut out that stealing moon” – as Thomas Hardy described it – and simply exist in a penumbra of your life. When I sense I’m becoming maudlin and self-absorbed or over-burdened with worries, both real and imagined, I read. Reading gets me out of the shadows and helps me re-engage with the world. I have always at least 2 or 3 books on the go but when I get into one of my prolonged dark moods I seek out an extra level of compensation from the written word. Years of reading has helped me to help myself when it comes to choosing a book or an author to revive a part of me that feels undernourished, overlooked or sadly lacking in vitality.
For example I’ve been reading classic Westerns by writers like Zane Grey, Larry McMurtry and Louis L’Amour. Their books help me escape from an insistent gut feeling that I’m chronically (as well as chronologically) out of step with the modern world and should simply accept it rather than fight it. There’s something liberating about imagining yourself as a cowboy or a rancher facing his inner and outer demons in difficult environments devoid of the technologies and support systems that we now take for granted. Like the great hard-boiled crime fiction writers these authors of the Old West knew how to look both at and beyond outward appearances, how to judge a man’s character and worth in the blink of an eye and then across hundreds of pages test their protagonist’s mettle both at pace and with panache. It’s satisfying to read simple morality tales in complex story-lines. I come away from a book like The Riders of The Purple Sage feeling more straightforward and less abstruse. It’s as if a super-efficient librarian has been in my head to rearrange the cluttered shelves crammed to bursting point with my negative thoughts and protracted problems and has date-stamped them all as ‘Returns’.
I like to think I’m a well educated chap. However as I get older I feel increasingly more stupid and ignorant about pretty much anything and everything. My mental pick-me-up is the Socratic Paradox: the only thing I truly know is that I know nothing. A philosophical bumper-sticker takes the edge off for a short while but I still retain a compulsive urge to exercise my brain’s intellectual abilities lest it decides to permanently shut down dormant nodes and put up notices of eviction along my frontal lobe. Hours can go by where I sense my brain’s gone on an extended holiday and has left its lowly stem in charge, an underling working far above his pay grade whose only meaningful task is to turn the lights out at the end of the working day. To put myself in a position where I’m being intellectually challenged is a conscious choice, one that I’ve never shied away from and one that year on year feels increasingly like an act of self-preservation rather than self-improvement.
To aid me in this endeavour I’ve been reading books from the revived Pelican imprint “for those topics you are interested in, but feel you don’t know enough about”. I’m half-way through Tim Lewins’ The Meaning of Science, an enjoyably provocative and enlightening personal perspective on the subject. The book focuses on the philosophy of science – the why of it all – and in doing so Lewins reminds me once again how the concept of science is only a couple of hundred years old, a by-product of the Age of Enlightenment and, in some ways, an extended postscript to an intensely fertile period of human intellect, ingenuity and creativity, a time when highly curious men and women with great and open minds were at their happiest and at their most productive by working as polymaths across many disciplines rather than as specialists in one field. What have we lost by limiting the scope of our minds through the imposition of labels such as “artist” and “scientist”? In a day-to-day world where so many people depend on me for answers it’s affirming to be reminded that knowing the question rather than the answer is usually the greater personal reward.
If this all sounds a bit too cerebral and worthy I do also seek out levity and jollity. A book I’ve enjoyed dipping in and out of recently is Kevin Jackson’s Carnal To the Point of Scandal, a collection of this pataphysician’s essays and musings down the years. As a writer he is simultaneously amusing and informative, revelatory and celebratory in equal measure. He writes extensively with wit and wisdom and without cynicism or contempt (either for his subjects or his readers). He casts his net wide and playfully: encounters with Genesis P Orridge and Sir Christopher Frayling, new perspectives on old films like Kind Hearts and Coronets, vampires. Japanese writers, Italian eroticism and John Ruskin. If there is a theme to Jackson’s writing it’s the entertaining way he repositions arcane footnotes from art and culture as the main event; like Stoppard did with the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Never has marginalia been so funny and stimulating and the lines between highbrow and lowbrow become so convincingly blurred as to not matter. With one eye on your funny bone and the other on your streak of curiosity Jackson may very well be the ultimate Afterword contributor!
To aid me in my quest for literary sustenance I took out a subscription to The Literary Review last year. It was partly a desire to keep pace with new releases and new books but it was also a begrudging acknowledgement that there simply was not enough time to read everything on my wishlist and that my literary magpie tendencies were no longer sustainable with all my other commitments and responsibilities. I decided that instead I would vicariously enjoy books that I will never find the time to read by reading the reviews of them by critics and writers who, more often than not, have as deep a knowledge of the subject matter of the books they review as the authors themselves. This month alone I have been enlightened by snippets of knowledge concerning 19th Century Australian miners eating sandwiches filled with £10 notes, that Jonathan Swift imagined Lilliput was in the general vicinity of Tasmania, that the seven condemned signatories of the famous Proclamation of the [Irish] Republic and instigators of the 1916 Easter Uprising would, in all likelihood, have ended up as political and even military enemies if they’d avoided the firing squad and how Hitler’s hatred and fear of being ridiculed fuelled his hatred and fear of Jews.
So many books and so little time. It’s the act of reading though that helps me come to to terms with whatever is impeding my way, physically or mentally. Reading takes me far away from myself without ever really leaving and it’s in that exploratory hinterland between my physical world and my imaginary world that I find, if not the answer to the problem, then at least a better question with which to address it and, in the asking of it, something to help me dismantle the barriers I’ve constructed around the problem. An apple a day may well keep the doctor away but it’s books that keep me away from the black dog and from the self doubts that insist on trying to become permanent fixtures in my life.
Nice piece again Bisto. How do you find the time to write what are to my mind very long essays – I rely on the short snappy rejoinders which amuse myself if no-one else – when you spend so much time reading?
Your comment on TLR reminds me of my recently deceased father who was a regular contributor, although to my shame I never read his stuff. I imagined it was filled with dry, donnish material and not zippy enough for my seemingly decreasing attention span.
I love a good read and in fact have just been on a little reading binge, but never except possibly during early childhood, can’t really remember, have I become or particularly identified myself with a character in the fiction I’m reading. I sort of become blank when fully absorbed in a story. Just a disembodied observer, I suppose.
To zero in on one little point in that excellent post, if you have an interest in the history of science, you could do a lot worse than read John Gribbin’s Science: A History. It does what it says on the tin (albeit from a very Western post-Renaissance starting point), and is full of engaging biographical details of the men and women who helped drive the engine of knowledge forward through the centuries
A wonderful, lovely post with some excellent ideas to reignite my moribund mind. Thank you Bisto!
tl;dr
Ouch. That’s hit home for many reasons.
“tl”? You’re probably right.
Or at least just right enough for me to call it a day. Straw, camel, back etc.
It’s there in the OP, about time and life being too short.
This post hopefully just short enough for you to “r”.
But if you “dr” once again I’m sure someone else will let you know I’m “adbb”
Pretty sure this was a joke 🙂
And I had to google tl/dr, so at least I’ve learnt something.
or: alils
me too
Heavens! Yes – it was a joke.
JR, DR(C)
Just right, did read, chapeau
Nice piece, thank you for burning up the brain cells – it’s made the blog a better thing.
(I’m always reading. Kindle-aholic. Right noe it’s the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child, which aren’t particularly great. I don’t read for greatness, though. I read for entertainment.)
Talking of not reading for greatness, I’ve just started the Hepworth 1971 tome, and am up to, er 1971.
A great piece Bisto, but I’m intrigued that you turn to reading when you find yourself becoming ‘self absorbed or overburdened with worries’. That’s the time when I can least focus on reading as the nagging problems, real or imagined, intrude into every sentence and the focus and ability to concentrate take flight. I have a house full of books, in every conceivable shelf and cupboard. The sense that the remaining time to read them all is now completely insufficient, coupled with the competing priorities of life and all its worries have conspired to make me a slower reader than I have ever been.
Very good, Bisto.
I try to read as much as I can and one of the many things that annoys me about my stupid rat-racing schedule is that I don’t get to do it as much as I should. When I was a kid I couldn’t be prised away from books.
Like HP I don’t read for literary excellence but for entertainment and interest. Saying that, my line of work and my degree subject etc means that I’m really intolerant of properly trashy writing – though many people whose plots get them accused of trash are actually incredible writers. Stephen King at the top of his game is the best example for me: once written off as a “mere” genre writer, at least he’s now recognised as being bloody good when he’s good. A bit too prolific for me, but there.
Books are the absolute shiznit. I need to make more time for them.
Very good Bisto. I like what you say about reading taking you away from yourself without really leaving. I read all the time, to learn about stuff, to have my prejudices reinforced, for wisdom or for chuckles. I like to read reviews, but oddly after I have read the book and I wonder whether I’ve been reading the same book at all. It’s an entertaining exercise and helps me to trust or ignore certain reviewers in the future. There are times though when I have to take a break, and allow my mind to take a rest and just wander. I tend to read just about everywhere and I am going to start reading my book walking along the street aping the smart phone readers who can’t seem to make it from home to the tube without checking on god knows what.
Smashing post.
Like many AWers I always have at least one a book on the go & am bereft without reading material.
The Kindle has been a major boon for ensuring plenty of stuff can always be at hand, enabling a stack of pulp to be alongside more erudite or challenging stuff but taking up no room.
I default to fiction, but find collections of essays to be the ideal material to help ‘plug those gaps’ about topics I sometimes feel I should give time to but quite likely won’t.
Something in my middle aged brain resists buying whole books on one non fiction topic ( the exception is history/war but that’s another issue) as I’ve found myself increasingly abandoning them way before the end. This has often been accompanied by a sense of inner resentment at missing out on a great story by my alloted reading time being used up in an attempt to ‘master’ a worthwhile but possibly dry topic.
These days I’ve opted for a policy of ‘ quality bog books’ or essays etc. that can be digested in chunks – giving food for thought but not ruining the appetite for having a novel on the go.
David Foster Wallace essays are good, & I’ve also got a lot out of Neal Stephenson’s ‘Some Remarks’ , Clive James’ ‘ Cultural Amnesia’ & the always engaging Geoff Dyer – starting with ‘Working The Room’ & moving out from there.
Enough sparks to stimulate the grey matter & keep my decidely middlebrow mindset at least alive.
To use the shorthand beloved of some Afterworders: ‘This’ (or, indeed, ‘that’).
Great piece, Bisto.
My wife was an avid speed reader of science fantasy to the extent I would have to buy new releases in Manchester on the day a book came out, often queuing for the signature of a Pratchett or whoever without having a clue who they were. I would probably read one book in a year, an autobiography, as well as whatever music magazine was available.
To the amazement of my kids and myself my house is filling up with books. Connolly, Patterson, Child, Ludlum, etc. to the extent I carry a list with me of books I am after to complete a series when I am scouring the charity shops for “stuff”. Pure escapism at bedtime to drown out the day that was. The added bonus for me is finding the occasional book signed by the author in amongst the bags filled with goodies. My holy grail is the quest to find the autobiography of Don Estelle, Thoughts Of A Gemini, which is why you will always find me in the charity shops scanning the spines with my head at the usual angle of 45 degrees.
Another avid reader. I’m fortunate to live near a good library with a huge collection of old books. I go every Thursday evening and borrow four or five books and get through most of them by the following Thursday. I thought this was normal until I mentioned this to friends at work who made a big song and dance about Reading A Book. I dread the day when libraries are shit down (as they no doubt will be by cash starved councils, to be replaced by e-readers dispensed from a service desk). I like browsing the aisles and finding books by chance.
If it wasn’t for libraries I would be permanently skint.