The List of Betterment

Definition of a classic:

2007-09-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

"A book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have." Alan Bennett, 1991

Today is Day 3 of reading: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Sentimental Education: PS

2007-09-13T04:41:00.000-07:00

“Do not read, as children read, to amuse yourself, nor as the ambitious read, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” Gustave Flaubert, 1857

Today is Day 2 of reading: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Book 67: Sentimental Education

2007-09-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

“I am afraid that my background will eat up my foreground: that is the trouble with the historical novel.” Gustave Flaubert

I read Sentimental Education without doing any preparation. The little I know of Flaubert comes from Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, a wonderful novel I’ve read several times, and Madame Bovary, a wonderful novel I read once (in 1991). I wanted to read this book because I felt it was about time I read some more Flaubert. I was expecting a historical novel. And I suspected I knew the ending because Barnes’ narrator discusses it in the course of Flaubert’s Parrot, though actually all I really remembered was a specific ending – I won’t spoil it – which could have come from any of Flaubert’s books. But I went into it in a positive frame of mind. I was expecting to enjoy it.

As it turned out, I did enjoy it but it struck me as an enigmatic, elusive book. Having read the brief introduction, I think I now understand why. The surface of Sentimental Education is an oddly disjointed, though not uninvolving, account of a young man’s infatuation with an older woman through a period of French political and social upheaval. There is clarity in Flaubert’s prose, and a merciless lack of sentiment, which feel contemporary. However, if you are only able to appreciate these elements of the book – like me – you are probably missing out. I constantly felt I was missing something. I was. The book has mighty personal and historical resonances. All the characters have their basis in real people, some famous, some obscure. And all the characters represent historical phenomena, philosophies etc., specific to France in the period 1840 – 1865. Moreover, in its realism, the book was adopted by the Naturalist movement, including our hero Huysmans.

In other words, the book has complex personal, historical, biographical and literary contexts. If one reads it without prior knowledge of these, is one’s reading of the novel necessarily incomplete / inferior? If I felt like I was missing something, is that because I was missing something or because the novel is insufficiently involving? I read, for instance, Beloved and War and Peace without feeling I needed a solid historical grounding in specific incidents of slavery or troop movements; in fact I finished both those novels feeling I had learnt about those incidents. I cannot say I felt the same about Sentimental Education. Many of the historical events take place off-stage and several of the characters seemed like ciphers for ideas which remained opaque throughout – or rather, specific to a time and place.

Do we conclude the novel is flawed, because a 21st century Englishman cannot grasp the finer points? Or do we allow the ingenuity of the book, and an acceptance of its contained 19th century resonance, to suffice for a “masterpiece”?

I chose Sentimental Education for our next book group meeting. Discussions of previous books have tended towards characters’ psychological motivation. If this represents the limit of our discussion of Sentimental Education, we’ll be in trouble.

Today is Day 1 of reading: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Unhelpful

2007-08-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

So here I am reading Sentimental Education, a novel which is slowly and steadily following its own path. I feel I am making good progress. Then I inadvertently read the following in the author biog at the front if the book:

"Sentimental Education (1869), intended as the moral history of his generation, was largely misunderstood by the critics."

"The moral history of his generation"? Sounds good but what the hell does it mean? Anyway, this small phrase made me feel I was entirely missing the point of the book - that the subtext was waaay beyond me and reading it was therefore a somewhat futile exercise. Thanks, anonymous Penguin blurb writer!

Later I was pleased to discover this quote from Flaubert:

"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation-- or, more accurately, the history of their feelings."

Very different thing from the Penguin paraphrase. I think I understand what he means; at least, it complements my reading of the book rather than undermining it. And clearly the blurber was cribbing from the same quote.

Lesson: you can't judge a book by the cover or the blurb, and you shouldn't judge yourself likewise.

Today is Day 3 of reading: Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

Week off

2007-08-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Too much work, family, Sunday at the Reading Festival and the fatal discovery of Battlestar Galactica on DVD meant a Betterment-free week. Since I stopped commuting in and out of London at the start of the year, three hours of the day with nothing to do but sit still and read have proven to be elusive. I find I get jittery if I don't press on with the List though. (As you'll have noticed, no jitters when it comes to not blogging.)

Today is Day 1 of reading: Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

Book 66(6): American Psycho

2007-08-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

“I’ve perfected my fake response to a degree where it’s so natural-sounding that no one notices.” Pg. 150

I am writing this while listening to the 10th anniversary concert recording of Les Misérables I mentioned yesterday.

When American Psycho was first published, I was working in a bookshop. It was my first full-time job. I was 23. There was a special staff meeting called by the manager to discuss what “we” should do about the book. It was already famously offensive. Should it be displayed prominently on a front table, where anyone could pick it up, leaf through it, and enjoy the blood-spattered descriptions of rapes, murders, mutilations etc.? Should it be up on a top shelf, with the erotica, where only adults could get at it? Or should it be kept behind the counter, available on request, like Little Black Sambo (a horrifically racist and very popular children’s book)? There may even have been some discussion of whether or not we should stock it, but I can’t believe the manager would seriously countenance not selling a novel which had already received so much free publicity – so if we did talk about this option, it must have been as a sop to the middle-aged Christian bookseller on the team. Anyway, I was 23 and a recent Eng Lit graduate, and so I no doubt held forth on the importance of free speech, artistic expression, all that. The upshot of our discussion: the book was prominently displayed on the new fiction table, along with 1991’s other Important Novels, whatever they were. No customers ever complained.

I half-remembered all this while working my way through some of the more disgusting passages of American Psycho. The 23 year-old me would, I suspect, have decided to tell people he found this stuff clever and hilarious; Bast, 39, on the other hand, read much of it through half-closed fingers/eyes. If we had that staff meeting again, I think I would vote for the top shelf.

There are two reasons for this. One: I am probably more squeamish now than I was then, and I have a child – violence seems rather less amusing. Two: I am not convinced that the artistic merits of American Psycho justify either the novel’s length or the explicitness of its horrors. The combined result seems rather less than the sum of its parts. It’s a fact that, over the last fifteen years, the book has proved perennially popular with those readers who are simply looking for some really good murders and many of whom skip all the “boring” stuff about Ralph Lauren, Huey Lewis etc. Having said that, much of the book is very funny, and it worms its way into the psyche. The repetition of certain phrases, the lists of brand names, the interchangeability of key characters, women, bums etc. – the satirical power of the book is intact and has not dated much (sadly – yuppie-ism now being a general and widespread state of mind rather than being restricted to one societal group.) Yet, although the length and relentlessness of the book has a kind of mesmerising effect, broken by the eruptions of the old ultraviolence*, once that card has been played it’s difficult to see any deeper purpose to these outbreaks of hacking, slashing and imaginative cruelty than to allow the author to display his (if you will) chops – the satire is almost entirely contained elsewhere. The book is framed in its first and last lines (“Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” and “This Is Not An Exit” respectively) as a sealed chamber of horrors or an Inferno, but it sometimes feels static as a result. Or perhaps that’s the point. Either way, I often felt as weary and drained as Patrick Bateman, however energizing the latest dismemberment or killing spree.

* A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, did not provoke this reaction in me. The violent scenes and the over-all intent of the film seemed to be in proportion.

Third cult book in a row, and third portrait of rampant self-interest – not a coincidence. I am wearing black Levis 501s, black M&S socks, the same black M&S cardigan as yesterday, and a blue Mogwai t-shirt which reads: COME ON DIE YOUNG.

Last word to Patrick Bateman: ‘“I think his work … it has a kind of … wonderfully proportioned, purposefully mock-superficial quality.”’ pg. 95

The joy of repetition really is in me

2007-08-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

I am wearing eight hole, ox blood Dr Martens boots, with blue 501 jeans from Levis, a red Golf Punk t-shirt, plus black socks and heavyweight black zip-up cardigan from Marks and Spencer. I have the original double LP of the London cast recording of Les Misérables and the 10th anniversary concert recording on CD. In town this morning, there was a copy of Invisible Touch by Genesis ("the group's undisputed masterpiece") in the window of a charity shop, which made me laugh. But not out loud.

‘"All I can think about is this poster I saw in the subway station the other night before I killed these two black kids – a photo of a baby calf, its head turned toward the camera, it eyes caught wide and staring by the flash, and its body seemed like it was boxed into some kind of crate, and in big, black letters below the photo it read, ‘Question: Why Can’t This Veal Calf Walk?’ Then, ‘Answer: Because It Only Has Two Legs.’ But then I saw another one, the same exact photo, the same exact calf, yet beneath it, this one read, ‘Stay Out Of Publishing.’"’ Pg. 116

Today is Day 7 of reading: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

A bracing difference of opinion!

2007-08-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

A correspondent writes.

"Hi Leonard,

Great to have you back - though the black background colour to your page makes it hard to read without squinting.

Anyway - I'm sure you're absolutely correct about On the Road - it was just too long ago that I read it. Of course I loved it then, but I can't now remember why. I guess I loved its pace and its essential adventure - but I'm positive it would piss the 'uck out of me now. I'm not sure Kerouac was all that pleased with it in the end.

BUT - Denisovich I read very recently and I loved. It was extremely impressed with it. I'm interested in what you write about it's place in Russian propaganda etc, but I'd just read the remarkable On Siberia by Colin Thubron, so to follow with One Day In the Life gave depth and insight to what Thubron was looking at and recording.

Its extraordinary readability, its humanity, its warmth in the depths of human cruelty and depravity. The sense that just one day in a 10 year stretch, 8 years in, that just could be increased to 25 years left a panicky feeling in my stomach. That Ivan found small ways each day to make sense of his days, and to survive. Terrifying and beautiful - and there's a rich history of fiction that's based on experience - this wasn't journalism, it's a novelisation - a clever device for describing his time."

Thank you for your email, anonymous contributor - let's call you 'Squinty'. I was not as struck as you clearly were by what we might call the book's 'essential' qualities - its terror and beauty, and its readability - which is not to say I thought it was a bad book. I didn't. But I did feel that much of its power must have derived from its status as a front-line report, rather than its artistic qualities. But what am I saying? If one really likes the book, it is therefore art (and if not, it's only journalism)? Hmm...

Squinty, you are on to something. Extra rations for you.

Today is Day 2 of reading: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Book 65: On the Road

2007-08-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

“'It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!’ I told him. ‘Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be.’” Pg. 201

One of the recurring themes of the List of Betterment has been that thing we call the ‘cult book’. As you may have noticed, I am back in the cult ghetto at the moment. I have just finished On the Road and before that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Now I’m reading American Psycho. This morning I watched the film of A Clockwork Orange for the very first time. “You’ve never seen A Clockwork Orange?!” And so on. I am methodically corrupting myself, twenty years late.

As I’ve written here before, there is a whole pile of teenage books I never bothered with when I was a teenager because they seemed too OBVIOUS and too prescribed. This would include a lot of American writing eg. Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, and especially Kerouac. What did these famous junkies, drunks and Americans have to say to painfully straight and English me? Not much, I suspected. On the evidence of On the Road, I was right. It started off OK but after Day 1, the Road got steep.

This is a portrait of colossal selfishness and male ego, shot through with petulance, self-pity, and a love of cars / fear of women which would shame Jeremy Clarkson. Some nice passages of maybe-spontaneous prose and a few good riffs but mostly just a lot of sweating and driving and drinking and repetition – Dean Moriarty moves around a room “like Groucho Marx” about half a dozen times, not once to illuminating or amusing effect. In the course of the novel, he finds time to sire four children and marry three women, and every one of these broken lives supposedly represents a defeat for poor old Dean, who only ever wants to be free, man, yass, yass, yass.

Now you may say Leonard, of course you didn’t like On the Road, you’re 39 years old. Well, I can state with some confidence I wouldn’t have liked it when I was 17 either. To borrow another bought-in US hipsterism, it would have made me a phoney (thank you Holden Caulfield).

The publishers of my copy of On the Road have stuck an (intentionally?) accurate William Burroughs quote on the back cover: “On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines … the alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.” Which doesn’t read like a ringing endorsement to me.

Essentially, all this book seems to do is substitute one myth of American freedom for another. Just as punk quickly ceased to be about self-expression and became a Johnny Rotten dressing-up contest, so all the newly groovy hipsters easily ignored the alienation, the restlessness and the dissatisfaction in this book and bought themselves Levis and espresso machines anyway, and became the beat generation i.e. a new generation of good consumers, ready to take over from their frustratingly thrifty parents, who had had to combat a real economic depression and a real war, rather than choose to impose those conditions on themselves for ‘kicks’.

There was a documentary on TV a few years ago about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work can be seen as a provocatively fey and genuinely rebellious response to the suffocating expressionist conformity of the art scene of the 1950s, the sweaty, grunting muscularity of Pollock, Johns etc. Art need not be torn from the soul or the hetero libido; art can be merely pretty, or mass-produced, or happily cheap and shallow. It need not be a monument to its maker’s ego. On the Road is the literary equivalent of the stuff Warhol was trying to get away from. Anyone know of a credible, preferably mass-produced, literary rejoinder (other than Capote)?

As noted by one visitor here, the titles of the two previous posts were the first two lines of Stuck Between Stations by the cheapo E-Street Band de nos jours, the Hold Steady – the first two lines of their last album, in fact, Boys and Girls in America. I don’t much like the Hold Steady really. 50 years down the Road and they just seem to be the latest bunch of orthodox outsiders with something to sell to kids who don’t know any better. (They have studied the master well). Anyway, let me conclude with a few lines from another Hold Steady song which seem to sum it all up real neato:

“All your favorite books / They wouldn't seem so well written if you were just a little bit more well read / Jack Kerouac is dead / He drank himself to death”

Happy birthday Sal, you not so beautiful loser.

PS. But I loved A Clockwork Orange.

Today is Day 1 of reading: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together

2007-08-09T05:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, it’s tough having all that opportunity and not knowing how best to squander it.

Today is Day 2 of reading: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right

2007-08-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

From one highly autobiographical cult novel to another. On the Road has long been on my longlist but I queue-jumped it because this week is the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s first publication. Fifty years of daddio! I think I read that there is a new anniversary edition where the actual names have been put back in e.g. Neal Cassady for Dean Moriaty, Kerouac for Paradise etc. Once again, doesn’t this just move Kerouac’s prose closer to journalism? (see yesterday) One of the reasons I don’t like the Beats is they always seem a little too in thrall to their own legend. This would seem like a good example.

Anyway, I read fifty pages of On the Road today. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Also, possible to see how many popular culture archetypes stem from just one book i.e. most of them – at least, most of the male ones.

I’m hip to it. Etc.

Today is Day 1 of reading: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Book 64: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

2007-08-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have now finished this, perplexed. Why was this a cult novel for a generation of readers? It’s a magnificent piece of journalism, derived from suffering, but journalism isn’t fiction (not always). What did people get from this book that they could not read in a newspaper? Was it mostly the shock of an eyewitness report of the institutionalised atrocity of labour camps? The book seems to flirt with subtext but that’s all – in fact, it seems deliberately to shy away from metaphor, poetry etc. for fear of diluting the cold truth of the facts as Solzhenitsyn presents them.

“'Yes, but art isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it.'” (Pg. 70)

But if you do it by rejecting the characteristics of art, what distinguishes the end result from journalism? Intent? Is that enough?

(And another thing - surely a large part of this novel’s power comes from our knowledge of its basis in fact? That the author was an inmate?)

Did students read this book beneath their Anton Corbijn Joy Division posters? Snow, suffering & no jokes. And nothing else?

EDIT, Aug 15th: According to Anne Applebaum in her history of the camps, Gulag, the book's impact was greatly increased by Kruschev's belief that widespread publication of Denisovich would aid, not hinder, his planned reforms of the Soviet Union. The author only became persona non grata - a 'dissident' - once the hardline Brezhnev seized power. Interestingly, while many contemporary Soviet readers recognised and responded to the descriptions of hardships in the camps as corresponding to their own experience, others considered the portrait to be a slur on the rectitude of hard-working camp inmates - the redeeming power of labour was an essential part of the Communist creed, whereas Denisovich and his compatriots find work pointless and are always seeking to lessen or avoid it. In this way, the book could be seen as a portrait of selfishness, just as On the Road is a hymn to the self. In the west, meanwhile, whatever its undeniable literary qualities, Ivan Denisovich must have been a useful bit of propaganda for capitalist governments, just as Kruschev hoped it would be for him. Does the book's status as art guarantee, therefore, that Solzhenitsyn was not a patsy - a patsy simultaneously for two competing ideologies? Possibly. But only if you believe in art...

Today is Day 4 of reading: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Back to the gulag

2007-07-25T07:46:00.001-07:00

Approximately how it feels to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich so soon after Harry Potters 6 & 7. What they need is a game of labour camp quidditch, that’ll warm them up. The rules are the same, except after you’ve caught the snitch, you beat him up in the latrines.

Today is Day 2 of reading: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Buying Harry Potter

2007-07-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

I worked in the book trade from 1990 until last year, first as a bookseller then as a publisher. I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets / Philosopher's Stone in, I think, 1999 – early enough for it to be a genuine word-of-mouth recommendation rather than a bit of hype. I read the first couple of books and loved them and told other people about them. I remember buying book 3 on the first day it was in the shops – and book 3 was the first book where the great Potter bandwagon started to roll. This is my memory of it. I would have to check dates to be certain.

I self-consciously bought book 5 in an independent children’s book shop shortly after our son was born; book 6 in our local Tesco for £10 approx. and felt vaguely queasy about it; book 7, Tesco, £5 as part of our weekly shop on Saturday. The books were piled up on a pallet just inside the front entrance, unloved, deliterated (if such a word exists) – by which I mean, robbed of nearly all the context which normally surrounds books. There was only one special thing about these books – their cheapness. Cheapness = Tesco. In all other respects, this was a dismal offer. I think I agree with those people who think that such an exercise devalues reading itself. You could argue that it’s exciting for a mere book to be competing for housekeeping budget with small electricals, DVDs, newspapers and – yes – tins of baked beans. But it didn’t feel exciting. It felt cheap. I told myself HP7 was a mass-market product and that buying it from a mass-market outlet was therefore perfectly appropriate, the place where most people would buy it. It still felt cheap.

I have it on good authority that Tesco’s market share on a recent major literary novel, The Accidental by Ali Smith, was 40% i.e. 40% of all copies sold were through Tesco, a massive proportion for any one retailer to have sold, but especially a grocer. We may like to think we shop at a local independent bookshop for our discerning choices – and sometimes we do because it’s important to our self-image – but if the price is right, we usually follow the money, for J.K. Rowling, Ali Smith or Heinz.

Today is Day 1 of reading: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

Finished it about half an hour ago and just wanted to record my reaction before I think of something cleverer to say.

FANTASTIC!

J.K. has done something amazing here, ditching the formula to write the best (?) book of the series, under unimaginable pressure of expectation from millions of people all over the planet. Incredibly gripping, moving and satisfying conclusion to a long series too. I thought she didn't have it in her. I was wrong.

Lots more to say about the way this book has been sold and bought. Later.

"'It's me,' he muttered, crouching down between them. 'Will you come with me?'"

Today is Day 2 of reading: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

When I said I was ready for The Deathly Hallows...

2007-07-20T03:33:00.000-07:00

... what I meant was, after a four-year gap, I have just read Harry Potter 6. And - more usefully - I have worked my way through the Wikipedia plot synopses of the first 5 to try and remember who's who and what happens when. I am up to speed. I am almost excited.

Where would J.K. Rowling be without her favourite plot device of characters listening at doors, beneath invisibilty cloaks etc., overhearing bits of conversations and getting the wrong end of the stick? That aside, nice work.

On Wednesday, I told the members of my book group I had just finished HP6 and they looked at me like I'd just laid an egg. How can you claim to be interested in books and yet look down on Harry Potter? It's like saying you're into music but don't really like the Beatles. And anyone who says they don't really like the Beatles tends to be an idiot. Either a) they have terrible taste or b) they are a reactionary poseur. (Stellar moron Robert Elms fulfils both of these criteria.)

Anyway, I am all set to read HP7 quick before some bastard spoils the ending / pronounces it a disappointment / tells me how much better Philip Pullman is.

I am ready for The Deathly Hallows

2007-07-19T03:32:00.000-07:00

Are you?

Back in Bast

2007-02-06T06:55:00.000-08:00

Sorry everyone. I stopped posting last year, precipitated by the awful Dice Man. I was thinking more about what I was going to write here than about the books. And thinking about The Dice Man filled me with terminal inertia.

Anyway, I finished The Dice Man and a further 17 (much better) books, and the original List of Betterment was completed just before Christmas. Well done me.

I also cracked the Fall, at least until next week when their new LP comes out.

After six months off, I have decided to pick up the blog now and again when I have something to say, about books or anything. I will post the original List in full in the next few days for your sheer bloody entertainment.

I am reading again too.

Today is Day 1 of reading: Saturday by Ian McEwan

The worst paragraph and sentence, so far, from the List of Betterment

2006-08-29T01:36:00.000-07:00

“Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet c**ts.”

The Dice Man: please, please make it stop.

Today is Day 9 of reading: The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol was completed on Day 8)

Dead vs. Die

2006-08-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

As I wrote a few days ago, on Sunday I had a long train ride from Edinburgh to cope with. Rather than attempt to read Dead Souls for seven hours straight, I determined to divide the journey between that book and the next on the L of B: the significantly easier The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Or so I hoped.

I skipped between the two books all the way home, inadvertently causing a Dead Souls vs. The Dice Man punch-up, a duel I have resolved to see through to the end. And without wishing to give too much away, I can safely tell you that it isn’t an even match. Dead Souls is more slippery than I expected and quite hard work. You have to concentrate while it twists in and out of its own narrative. And you read it with the knowledge that the novel is unfinished, that Gogol burnt the manuscript and died a few days later – so if there ever was a pay-off, you won’t get to read it. Nevertheless, so far, the book is repaying close attention and I expect to get a lot out of it by the time it stutters to a halt.

The Dice Man, on the other hand, is shit.

Today is Day 4 of reading: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol and The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

A date at the book fête

2006-08-22T04:09:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. As someone once said, compared to the electric carnival of the film, music and comedy festivals, the Edinburgh International Book Festival is a coconut shy. The gardens and marquees throng with the sort of people who don’t watch television.

On Saturday morning, I attended a sold out discussion between the esteemed Albanian dissident author Ismael Kadare and the translator of many of his novels, David Bellos, an event which was no more or less spontaneous than many of the comedy shows currently playing on the fringe. In Q & A format, Kadare and Bellos made an easy double-act; I subsequently learnt that they had performed their (largely scripted) routine several times before at previous literary bonanzas.

I don’t really like book festivals; there is something bogus about them. Five different company logos were visible on or around the stage where the gurus sat and held forth. “How does a book make you feel?” demanded a Royal Bank of Scotland banner. “Heartbroken. Moved. Spellbound. Captivated. Inspired. Angry! Sad. Happy:). Nervous. Shocked!”

Or, as it turned out, none of the above. Kadare sought to do little more than shade in the outline of him presented in the Book Festival programme. He was not particularly interested in giving anything away, more in presenting a précis of himself in line with what the public had paid to see: an important man, earnest, wry, generous in assessment of his own achievements. In other words, the difficulties of the art, the inconvenient egoism, the quibbling over money etc. were suggested only a little – just enough to confirm rather than undermine the mutual comfort of writer/performer and audience.

I believe what people tell me, that Kadare is a great writer, that he will win the Nobel Prize for Literature and deserve it. And who would blame him for sending out a replica self, like a Kraftwerk dummy, to take care of personal appearances while – metaphor! – the real, committed Kadare stays at home and writes? But this was a professional engagement without engagement, another gig on the grand tour, a precise hour of self-impression, not expression.

Or as Peter Collingridge said later: Nobel Lite™.

Today is Day 3 of reading: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol and The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

Henry f***ing James: a publisher confesses

2006-08-21T01:05:00.000-07:00

In an e-mail to the List of Betterment, a senior publishing executive writes:

“Dear Len,

When I was a student I read the first 39 pages of Portrait of a Lady by Henry f***ing James five times, progressing no further on each occasion. I proceeded to write a highly original essay on the importance of tea in Henry f***ing James’s Portrait of a Lady.

Enjoying the blog.

R.”

Are you a high-flying figure in the world of books? Have you been living a lie? The List of Betterment would like to hear from you.

Today is Day 2 of reading: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol and The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

“Sometimes you read James and think you are going mad”

2006-08-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

In the Guardian, Stephen Moss writes an opinion piece about teaching classics as part of the school curriculum:

“Why do teenagers need to read the “classics”? What on earth do they make of Henry James, whose late novels should be read at a funereal pace? James said this was essential. “Take, meanwhile, pray, The Ambassadors very easily and gently,” he told a friend. “Read five pages a day - be even as deliberate as that - but don't break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step - and then the full charm will come out.” Sometimes you read James and think you are going mad, so complex is the prose and intricate the thought: this is literature to be interrogated, not read. It is madness to instruct teenagers to read it, and will probably put them off reading for life. Certainly off James.”

Never mind teenagers. How thrilling to know I am exceeding James’ self-prescribed daily page count by 1000%.

Moss concludes:

““Dumbing down” is not about content; it's about style of presentation. You can teach great literature in a dumb way or you can teach more humdrum literature in a great way. Why not take the latest example of chick lit and analyse it; or compare JK Rowling with CS Lewis; or take a leaf out of Christopher Ricks's book and study the language of pop lyrics? Anything other than read Bleak House or The Way We Live Now, which are best left until your mid-50s. Reading the canon is the work of a lifetime. Schoolchildren have better things to do.”

But we need to do both, don’t we? The person who comes to The Way We Live Now in their mid-50s having read nothing but chick lit and pop lyrics will not be equipped to enjoy or even understand Trollope, James etc.

The List of Betterment reminds us that we need to be challenged by art, whether we are 18, 38 or 88. Art isn’t easy; sometimes we need to work at something before we can begin to appreciate it; and there is nothing wrong in starting young.

Perhaps the newspaper columnist Stephen Moss genuinely has the welfare of children at heart. Or perhaps he is just an old-fashioned elitist who is perturbed at the thought of literature falling into the wrong hands. I wonder...

Today is Day 12 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Mark E Smith and the List of Bitterment

2006-08-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

On the train to Edinburgh, listening to Dragnet by The Fall, an album I don’t really know. It includes consecutive tracks Printhead and Dice Man, which seems like a heavy hint that I should obey my own symbolic throw of the dice and put The Dice Man next in the reading queue after Dead Souls (or alongside it – a long train journey home looms on Sunday and Dead Souls might not lend itself to escapism).

Allowing The Fall to dictate the direction of the List of Betterment in a Dice Man-ish manner signifies the belated intersection of two different projects (or “crackpot schemes” as my friend Paul would have it) – the List of Betterment, which you know about, and my other big undertaking of the past year: to listen to, assimilate and enjoy every studio recording by the Fall a.k.a. the List of Bitterment.

The Fall have been going for thirty years and have recorded thirty albums, and numerous singles and radio sessions. A year ago, I was familiar with almost none of them: a few singles like Hit the North and Victoria, and Bingo Master’s Breakout on an NME punk compilation. I owned one Fall album on vinyl, Extricate, but I had never listened to it (bought cheap at a record fair in Brighton in 1990 and filed away). The rest of the vast back catalogue was a mystery to me, as was the group’s appeal. Why? I have so many friends who really like them. Either I was immune or I was wrong.

So rather than do something constructive with my spare time, like learning to drive or play the guitar – I can’t do either – I set myself the task of cracking the Fall. First I bought the complete John Peel sessions box-set and the compilation 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong. I applied myself to both – one radio session per day from the former and half-hour chunks of the latter, which I suppose was the equivalent of 50 pages per day from the L of B. Having made these initial excursions, I then started work on the group’s albums. I know this seems a rather dry, overly-methodical way of going about reading books or listening to records – enjoyment! – but, little by little, it gets you farther along. And then maybe you’re not the same.

Thus, over the course of year I have worked my way through Live at the Witch Trials; Dragnet; Grotesque (After the Gramme); Slates; Hex Enduction Hour; Room To Live (Undilutable Slang Truth!); Perverted By Language; The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall; This Nation’s Saving Grace; Bend Sinister; The Frenz Experiment; I Am Kurious, Oranj; Extricate; Shift-Work; Code: Selfish; The Infotainment Scan; Cerebral Caustic; Levitate; The Marshall Suite; The Unutterable; The Real New Fall LP a.k.a Country on the Click; Fall Heads Roll; plus a live album (I Am As Pure As Oranj) and a couple of playlists of b-sides. I have seen the group play live twice, once in Islington and once in London. Has it worked? Has it been fun? Yes, and yes – though poor Mrs Bast, who has had to share some of this musical journey, would disagree on both counts.

In the words of my friend Ben: “There are periods in life when you don’t want to listen to the Fall. But when you do want to listen to the Fall, you don’t want to listen to anything else.”

The thing about the Fall – which I think I now understand – is that they are a musical genre in their own right. Just as there is jazz and blues and country, there is the Fall – and the Fall is Mark E Smith. He makes up the rules of the genre as he goes along, because he is the genre. He is the artistic impulse at its most extreme – sometimes brilliant, sometimes disastrous, often contradictory, always consistently itself. Smith is like Bukowski, another boozer and imperfect artist; you may not like all his books but if you get it, you will keep coming back for the writing, the voice, the attitude, the uniqueness of the work.

Anyway, more by accident than design, the Fall are the soundtrack to the List of Betterment, its highly irregular backbeat. Both lists have made me work but both have been worth it. I feel I’m not the same.

Mrs Bast, last week: “It’s alright, you’re allowed to be melodramatic on the blog.”

Today is Day 11 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The key to happiness

2006-08-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

According to The Epic of Gilgamesh, 4000 years ago.

“Humans are born, they live, then they die,
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savour your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.”

At first glance, this seems like the wisdom of the ancients. But equally it is the sort of thing you read on the back of a self-help book. i.e.

Do you:

Enjoy your life? [try to]
Spend it in happiness, not despair? [try to]
Savour your food? [yes, when I have time]
Make each of your days a delight? [not really, no]
Bathe and anoint yourself? [I bathe but never knowingly anoint. Do I get half a point?]
Wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean? [Hmm. I wear dark clothes that are usually clean. OK?]
Let music and dancing fill your house? [phew, an easy one. Yes, all the Basts like music and dancing.]
Love the child who holds you by the hand? [ABSOLUTELY]
Give your wife pleasure in your embrace? [“I’ve had no complaints”]

If you answered mostly ‘yes’, you are either a) unbearably smug, b) self-deluding or c) imaginary.

If you answered mostly ‘no’, you are either a) depressed, b) poor company, c) yawningly tedious or d) all of the above.

Either way, you need Gilgamesh – now available in tablets!

Today is Day 10 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Book 33: The Epic of Gilgamesh

2006-08-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

From the back cover:

“Gilgamesh is the first work of world literature and remains one of the most important. Written in ancient Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC, it predates the Iliad by roughly 1000 years. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tables (sic. – they mean ‘tablets’) on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1850 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century.”

Its historical significance is undeniable but The Epic of Gilgamesh was also the favourite book of a man I used to work with at a bookshop in the early 1990s. His name was David and he was, and still is, an artist – I heard him on Radio 4 a few months ago, discussing a new piece of his work, a collaborative project with old people suffering from senile dementia, and utilizing the same lifelike politeness he used to practise on customers. When I knew him he bought the art books and laboured in the shop’s unpacking room. He was both charismatic and rather intimidating. In addition to Gilgamesh, he was also a fan of, variously: high-quality black t-shirts from boutiques (as opposed to crappy ones from Camden market, as worn by me); pilfered medical slides, showing real hermaphrodites, amputees etc., which he would giggle over during tea-breaks; Laurie Anderson’s concept albums; the art of Joel-Peter Witkin, whose photographic portraits were comprised of severed body parts, fat women knocking nails into their own heads etc.; occasional recreational drug use; Polaroid photographs of ironing boards, in use or propped up in repose, which he intended to publish in a book, a high quality cloth-bound limited edition of one (I hope he did it); and Moby-Dick.

David liked Moby-Dick a lot. Did I first try to read it to get in with him? Probably. Our bookshop co-worker Mike read it at around the same time. Mike was the singer in a band called the Becketts. Whereas I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages, Mike was so bowled over by Moby-Dick he wrote a song about it called ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, which the Becketts recorded for their second album Myth – 600 pages condensed to three indie-rock minutes. It was quite catchy. The chorus went:

“Ship to shore!
What Ahab saw
Before it drooowned him!”

Short but ingenious.

Anyway, Gilgamesh. I don’t remember exactly what it was David – never Dave – liked so much about the story, but I know it was the first time I had ever heard of it; reading the tale fifteen years later is probably another belated attempt to get in with him. Well, David, this time I’ve actually read it. And if I were to condense it in song, the chorus would go like this:

Gilgamesh!
God or flesh
You’re only huuuuman!

(Which, if you know what happens in the book, is really clever, trust me…)

In his introduction, the translator-poet Stephen Mitchell hammers the parallels between the ancient text and the current situation in Iraq (Gilgamesh = Bush), but he’s got a book to sell, so let’s ignore him. This is a great big rollicking story of gods and superheroes, with plenty of sex, violence, tests and quests, a Noah-like flood, a clever, textually-aware ending and a suitable comeuppance for the order-defying hero. It easily survives the translation from clay table (sic.) to page, and from the second millennium BC to the 21st century AD.

For the lesson of Gilgamesh is this. It teaches us not just that power corrupts (yes, Stephen Mitchell, WE GET IT!) but more importantly it shows us that, whether in ancient Mesopotamia, historic Earls Court or contemporary Kent, people will always want to read about acts of insane bravery, sexually rapacious priestesses and men chopping the heads off monsters. But only a few people want to read about ironing boards. And those are the ones I like.

Today is Day 7 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Henry James, the Man with Two Names

2006-08-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

Well well well. Actually enjoying The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Or Henry f***ing James, as he is typically known in our house. Mrs Bast cannot say his name – or names – without cursing like a medicine-drinking old man. A bad experience with Daisy Miller seems to have warped her. But she was a student then. If I had read this book when I was a student, I would have cursed too. Or, more likely, not read past the preface. Actually, not just when I was a student – if I’d read this before starting the L of B I would have given up before the preface, while cursing.

My ambition: to finish this book and say those names with doe-eyed admiration. Henry f***ing James!

Today is Day 5 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Shuffling ahead of myself

2006-08-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

On the way back from Tankerton slopes this afternoon, relieved that the first thirty pages of The Portrait of a Lady had been mostly comprehensible, the iPod shuffled itself to Dead Souls by Joy Division. Another miraculous technological intervention! So Dead Souls (by Gogol) will be the next book I read.

(Note: I know this selection method may seem rather whimsical (at best) so let me explain. There is a longlist of Betterment, from which List of Betterment selections are made. I am keeping the longlist close to my chest – it won’t be posted here – but the books that feature on it have been acquired and are in piles on our bedroom floor; about thirty in all. Within that framework, I am trying to maintain some spontaneity, some energy to drive into each book with enthusiasm or purpose. Part of this process is about stepping out of the consumer cycle, which is why the books have been bought or borrowed in advance. I wanted the process to be about reading one book after another rather than buying one book after another. So as you may have noticed, I try and let each successive selection be guided by chance – a text message, a track on an iPod, a passing reference in conversation, a recommendation or condemnation in a newspaper or magazine. Both The Portrait of a Lady and Dead Souls have been on the longlist since the start of the year. As I said yesterday, my friend Michael is currently reading the former, which will make for a new experience – almost like joining a book group! – so his text message was the nudge I needed; something new. And for the latter, I may break another L of B rule and do some background reading before I read the novel: Nabokov considered Gogol one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Russian writer, and his essay on Dead Souls is contained in Lectures on Russian Literature. Following the emancipation I felt re: Don Quixote, I am hoping Nabokov will send me into Dead Souls with a full head of steam, like a trusted recommendation. Or maybe he will inoculate me against discovering the book for myself – we shall see. 600 pages of Henry James to get through first.)

Today is Day 1 of reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Predictive text

2006-08-04T01:47:00.000-07:00

My friend Michael is currently engaged on his own List of Betterment. We last spoke on Wednesday morning when I was in the middle of a work crisis. A bit later he sent me this message of support:

“You think you’ve got problems? I am currently reading Portrait of a Lady. Good luck with yrs!”

Let the text show the way! Next up: (The) Portrait of a Lady.

Today is Day 5 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh

For ‘Religion’, read ‘Books’

2006-08-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

From I Capture the Castle, pg 291-2:

“When she said about my ‘getting’ religious, I instantly realized that she was right – and it came as such a surprise to me that I thought, ‘Heavens, have I been converted?’ I soon decided that it wasn’t quite so drastic as that; all that had come to me, really, was – well, the feasibility of conversion. I suddenly knew that religion, God – something beyond everyday life – was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness – a pretence that things are real, due to one’s longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the vicar said about religion being an extension of art – and then I had a glimpse of how religion really can cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.

I found myself saying: ‘Sacrifice is the secret – you have to sacrifice things for art and it’s the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.’ Then I got confused and I couldn’t hold on to what I meant – until Miss Blossom remarked: ‘Nonsense, duckie – it’s perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.’”

The conflicts of the List of Betterment, dissected by Dodie Smith. When I mentioned Noel Streatfield and Nancy Mitford, I should have added Graham Greene and Immanuel Kant.

Ain’t no Malory Towers.

Don Quixote revised, repented

2006-08-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

Revisiting what I wrote about Don Quixote (Book 29) on this blog six weeks ago. Hmm. It reads like someone trying too hard to be a) positive and b) profound about a book they don’t really like.

When we were on the stressful Bast family holiday I read Nabokov’s lectures on Don Quixote, Nabokov being a favourite writer of mine and his Lectures On Literature a book I leant on heavily at university. This is what Nabokov thinks of Don Quixote:

“Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is nonsense. As a matter of fact, it is not even one of the greatest novels of the world, but its hero, whose personality is a stroke of genius on the part of Cervantes, looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that Cervantes has injected into the main character of a very patchy haphazard tale, which is saved from falling apart only by its creator’s wonderful artistic intuition that has his Don Quixote go into action at the right moments of the story … I repeat, the intuition of genius saved him.”

Well, exactly! This was exactly what I meant to say, if only I had the bravery, acumen and skill of Nabokov (which of course I don’t). It is a way of looking at Don Quixote which makes room for the novel’s flaws; which allows the reader to dislike parts of the book without dismissing it all.

The book is: compassionate, hilarious, archetypal. It is also: cruel, boring, chaotic.

I am aware of the temptation to substitute one received opinion (sceptical) for another (worshipful). Nevertheless, I should have found a way of articulating what I didn’t like about Don Quixote six weeks ago, instead of obediently – and transparently – toeing the literary line.

Black mark, Bast.

Today is Day 3 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Book 32: I Capture the Castle

2006-08-01T02:09:00.000-07:00

“High summer can be pitiless to the low-spirited.” pg 308

This took weeks to read, owing to a stressful family holiday and an employment crisis (both resolved amicably). And the weather of course. Diluted my enjoyment somewhat but still terrific – I just wish I had read it at a less turbulent moment. It’s a brightly melancholic book, charting a girl’s progress from late childhood to the beginnings of maturity and adult misery; a shouldn’t-really-work mix of Noel Streatfield and Nancy Mitford – waspishly jolly, with little jolts of sadness. Wonderfully funny in places too. Easy to see why so many women read it in adolescence and find it stays with them for life. (The edition I read carries a quote from J.K. Rowling on the cover: “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I’ve ever met.”) Very effective portrayal of writer’s block too (Cassandra’s father, locked in his tower by the children until he writes something) and of the art/culture/money demi-monde of 1930s London; the children’s step-mother Topaz is drawn brilliantly – melodramatic & flighty, but sympathetic & perceptive too.

Five years ago this was packaged as a children’s book – the author wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians – but these days it can be ‘repositioned’ as a modern classic, now that adults happily read Harry Potter, Pullman, Haddon etc etc. Irony: that J.K. Rowling quote is there to appeal to adult readers, not children.

Today is Day 2 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Poverty

2006-07-31T03:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, yet another book about poverty: the effects of poverty and the fear of falling into poverty. Of the 32 books so far completed on the List of Betterment, 15 have poverty as a central or significant theme – nearly half the books, in other words.

The modern novel, by which I mean the post-war Western intellectual novel, is shaped therefore as much by the development of ideas, modernism, post-modernism etc. as by finally not having to worry where the next meal is coming from – arguably for the first time in history, or at least in the history of the novel. And freed from the burden of debt, hunger etc. what, who does the modern novel produce? [YOUR PERSONAL LEAST FAVOURITE CONTEMPORARY AUTHOR HERE]

Having spent the last few weeks struggling with possible imminent poverty for the Bast family (hence the silent blog), this feels very vivid to me at present. What use is a book whose starting point is the shared complacency between middle-class reader and author?

Rachel Cusk, Toby Litt, Salley Vickers, Ian McEwan, Julie Myerson: indulgences you really cannot afford.

Today is Day 1 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Book 31: Everyman

2006-07-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

So I have now finished six books by Philip Roth. This was a short one, short but passionate, a fulmination on old-age, illness and death. I will not be giving it to my mum – she has lost too many friends to cancer this year to want to read about it too, however perfectly constructed the sentences may be.

And no one can construct sentences as well as Roth. They need to be read and re-read for their rhythm and their harmony. I do have some misgivings about his view of women. (There is an outrageous line in this book about there being little more to the protagonist’s third wife than her asshole, the asshole she happily offers him for sex – less, in fact; less than her own asshole!) But if you took out the streak of misogyny, and the unquenchable libido, you wouldn’t have Philip Roth. His writing is recklessly honest in subject matter, yet beautifully fastidious in execution – in fact, he is a genius.

I really must finish American Pastoral.

The opposite of word-of-mouth recommendation

2006-07-05T05:17:00.000-07:00

I have long been planning to read Lampedusa’s The Leopard. But this morning some over-opinionated fathead in the newspaper – i.e. one of their regular columnists – revealed that he has just read The Leopard, “as he does every summer”. Yuk! “One of the most evocative, poignant, elegiac and melancholic portraits of lost love and lost values,” notes this self-regarding idiot, “and much shorter than Anna Karenina.”

Is it just me who gets infuriated by this sort of culture-bragging? I don’t want to read the book now.

Yes, I am aware there is some irony at work here but I prefer not to put my finger on it.

Philip Roth: another apology

2006-07-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

I would like to apologise for the appalling narcissism of the previous post.

Sorry.

Today is Day 1 of reading: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Philip Roth: an apology

2006-07-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

I am now reading Everyman, the just-published novella by Philip Roth. It is only the fifth of his books that I have read in full. This tally would surprise several acquaintances, who are under the impression I have devoured everything by America’s greatest living writer since Sabbath’s Theater in 1995. They are under this impression because I have LIED to them about my commitment to Roth. And I have not just fibbed a little; I have LIED a lot – cheerfully, confidently, baroquely. These are friends with whom I have had long Roth discussions, about books I have earnestly recommended – to them – but not actually read myself. Wow, I think as I hear myself enthuse and dissemble, I love Philip Roth!

The most egregious example of this LYING would be my endorsement of the novel American Pastoral to my friend Dom, despite having got no further than page 50 or thereabouts. Following my (bogus) lead, Dom read American Pastoral and thought it was superb. Then he read Roth’s next novel I Married a Communist and thought that was superb too; but it was another book I’d given up on early. Line for line the writing was incredible, I just… ran out of puff. There was something exhausting about both books – their relentless excellence.

Anyway, I have subsequently compounded the original offence by years of conversations with Dom about Philip Roth, not wanting him to find out either that I bullshitted him in the first place or that I am still bullshitting him a bit. Every time I read a new book by Roth and discuss it with Dom, I have to remember to compare it only with the books I have actually read, for fear of being caught out in my shameful LIES. And I overcompensate by wildly praising Roth's every comma, colon and full stop.

Dom, I am sorry. The LYING stops, right now.

(And sorry to another friend, Paul, for making you read all 800 pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, which I said was “incredible”, despite not having read a word. Fortunately you liked the book. At least you said you did. Maybe you hated it and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Or maybe you were lying and haven’t read it either. I understand. It’s a very long book).

So, for the record, here are the Philip Roth books I usually say I’ve read, followed by the TRUTH.

Portnoy’s Complaint – yes. In 1990. Didn’t really understand it.

Sabbath’s Theater – no. But Mrs Bast has read it. I base my opinion on hers.

American Pastoral – first 50 pages. Incredible.

I Married a Communist – first 70 pages. Incredible, if monotonous.

The Human Stain – breakthrough! An extraordinary novel, one of my favourite books. The closing scene on the ice is both totally unpredictable and totally satisfying – as good as fiction gets. And I’m not just saying that to prove I’ve read the whole thing. But I have.

The Dying Animal – very short, so finished this one. Can’t remember anything about it though.

The Plot Against America – curate’s egg. But the good bits e.g. the family’s tour around Washington DC, are amazing. And he gets full marks for 2004 election timing.

Actually, I do love Philip Roth. But love is a complicated thing.

Today is Day 2 of reading: Everyman by Philip Roth

Book 30: Beyond Black

2006-07-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

“At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.”

After a run of reading classics, including the Greatest Novel Of All Time™, I wanted to read something a) contemporary and b) which had been recommended to me by more than one person. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel fitted the bill. It’s a classic word-of-mouth success, this book. It hasn’t won any prizes. The author, although well-liked and respected in the publishing industry, is neither glamorous nor young – she has a track record of solid, literary novels. But people are talking about this particular book and recommending it to their friends, including me.

I loved it. As I said yesterday, it’s a fantastic book – spirited and sardonic but also humane. Mantel has meshed together: a ghost story; the parabola of a failing friendship; a sketch of suburban southern England; a survey of the British psyche from the mid-1990s to the near-present; some very good jokes; a meditation on reconciliation with the past (see the above quote).

This last one resonated with me. Part of this exercise in Betterment is an attempt to face down the past – to reconnect with my love of books and with myself. Books were my weapons when I was younger but I used them in bad faith and then I used them up. So I am trying to let these books lead me back towards myself, before I end up “bleeding in the ditch” (spiritually).

Oh cheer up, you miserable fucker. At least England are out of the football.

Today is Day 1 of reading: Everyman by Philip Roth

Mantel piece

2006-07-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Later today there will be a football match which England will win or lose. What has it been like, living here, the last few weeks? Nearing the close of the sublime Beyond Black, I found this:

“… she looked out of the uncurtained window on to the site of urban clearance beyond. Probably going to build a mews, she thought. For now, she had a clear view of the back plots of the neighbouring street, with its lean-tos and lock-up garages, its yellowed nylon curtains billowing from open windows, its floribundas breaking through the earth and swelling into flagrant blood-dark bloom: a view of basking men throwing sickies, comatose in canvas chairs, their white bellies peeping from their shirts, their beer cans winking and weakly dribbling in the sun. From an upper storey hung a flag, ENGLAND red on white: as if it could be somewhere else, she thought.”

A fantastic book.

Today is Day 5 of reading: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

The unreading public

2006-06-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

A lot of my reading is done on the move: on trains and buses and occasionally aeroplanes. In eight months of Betterment, I have only seen three other people reading ‘classic’ books – and all those were women. In other words, of the thousands and thousands of men travelling in and out of London, and all around it, I seem to be the only one lugging a copy of Don Quixote.

What men read on public transport (if they read): Metro, the Standard, the Sun, starting at the sports pages and working backwards; Nuts, Zoo, Loaded, but no unabashed pornography; a few books but mostly genre – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, sci-fi, thrillers, the novels of Tony Parsons, the novels of Dan Brown; the emulsifier list on a packet of peanuts. Mostly though, they hammer self-importantly on their laptops or play video games. Or listen to their iPods with the tinny white earphones. Or call their girlfriends, noisily. Or fall asleep, noisily.

In other words, every day I have to escape from their escapism.

(but ladies! – don’t get complacent. It seems there’s only three of you not reading Heat.)

Today is Day 1 of reading: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Book 29: Don Quixote

2006-06-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Some eccentric old men wander around the countryside, having adventures and bickering; it must be Last of the Summer Wine.

It’s difficult not to be glib about this book in a paragraph or two. Don Quixote is one of the most important and influential novels of them all, the Mona Lisa of novels, a masterpiece with infinite interpretations. But should you still need a reason to read it, it’s actually very funny (much funnier than Last of the Summer Wine at any rate) and it will surprise and gently exercise your intellect. It meanders all over the place, and I could have done without the novel within a novel in the first half. But the quarrelsome relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the premise of the book’s second half – that everyone has read the first half and thus Quixote’s fame has spread far and wide – seem modern and brilliant.

Quixote’s ‘impossible dream’ is an immortal idea that resonates with readers in different ways, depending on their perspective. For example, last year, to mark the 400th anniversary of the novel’s first publication, the left-wing government of Venezuela printed a million copies of Don Quixote and gave them away to its citizens. President Chavez urged his people to “feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who went out to undo injustices and fix the world”. Not so much about the jokes.

It is the second most published book in the world after the Bible – and it functions as a secular gospel, a tribute to the spirit of Man rather than God, which is why writers in particular venerate it; all human life is here.

Today is Day 22 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

A day among the Dickensians

2006-06-18T01:53:00.000-07:00

From an interview with the urchin-comedian Russell Brand in yesterday’s Telegraph:

“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.”

To Broadstairs, Kent, for the annual Broadstairs Charles Dickens Festival. This is an excuse for the Rotarians of this relegated, degraded, decaying seaside town to dress up in period costume and process down the high street on the hottest day of the year. There was a clear split between those who had made the effort to be a specific Dickensian character (eg. Miss Havisham, Scrooge, a very good Secombe-style Mr Bumble) and those who had simply thrown on a top hat or a crinoline. Dickens lived in Broadstairs for a while, you see, so all the pubs and cafes are called ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ or ‘Peggoty’s’ or – in the case of a vendor of crockery – ‘Plate Expectations’. I was pleased to see a florist’s shop called ‘The Secret Garden’; wrong author completely.

Anyway, while waiting for the parade to begin I sat under a tree and read Don Quixote, iconoclastically.

Mrs Bast and young Master Bast being otherwise engaged, I was soon joined by two Australian acquaintances, Jenny and Kate. They were suitably impressed by the cultural pageantry (Australian letters having yet to produce an author who might be celebrated in this manner, not even Clive James). But the ladies were even more impressed by the family walking ahead of us, whose dog had been dressed for the occasion in an England football shirt.

At the grand opening ceremony, the crowd was welcomed by a town crier, and then treated to two short extracts from Hard Times, this year’s festival drama. The perfomance took place in on a makeshift stage in Victoria Gardens, in front of an arts and crafts marquee. And then a very diffident ‘Charles Dickens’ stood up from his writing desk at the side of the stage and asked if there was anyone present from his various novels, at which point ‘Magwitch’ and ‘Fagin’ and ‘Mrs Gamp’ etc. etc. made themselves known and said a few words in turn. “Is there anyone here from Bleak House, published 1866-7? Dombey and Son? Oliver Twist?” (Answer: yes, no, and the whole workhouse respectively.)

I read a lot of Dickens when I was younger, which is why he doesn’t feature in the List of Betterment. I am still very fond of his work, especially Bleak House, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. There are not many authors one could celebrate in this manner; Shakespeare or perhaps Austen or the Brontës, but even they would struggle to produce the panoply of archetypal characters that continue to live in the British popular imagination. The novels of Charles Dickens are the closest thing English literature has produced to football – if only we’d seen a dog in a top hat or a crinoline, the analogy would be perfect.

Today is Day 14 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

And the Man of the Mancha award goes to...

2006-06-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

Me, for trying to make this book last as long as the World Cup.

Today is Day 12 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Book 28: Under the Volcano

2006-06-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

This is the book that got the List of Betterment back on track. It was difficult, confusing, pretentious, maudlin, scary, politically incorrect and I loved it.

Anthony Burgess said this was “a Faustian pact of a novel” or something similar, by which he meant – I think – that this is a book about alcoholism that could only have been written by an alcoholic. Or rather, an extremely talented writer who drank himself to death and took notes while he was doing it.

Stylistically, it’s like Graham Greene channelling Melville, with some heavy occult symbolism and rampant self-pity thrown in. Fun, no? Like Moby-Dick, you really have to work at it, but it’s worth it in the end. It is unique.

Thank you Malcolm Lowry. I wouldn’t like to go down the pub with you – you would drink me into the ground – but you made me use my brain again.

Today is Day 10 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

One for the writers

2006-06-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

From Don Quixote, Chapter XLVIII:

"I also saw that the number of simpleminded men is greater than that of the prudent, and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools, I do not wish to subject myself to the confused judgment of the presumptuous mob, who tend to be the ones who read these books."

Book 27: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

2006-06-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

And now I really hit the wall. It took me almost three weeks to finish The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, longer than it took me to read Moby-Dick or Catch-22 or Vanity Fair or anything else this year. And The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is not a long book.

McCullers’ prose is surprisingly modern in style, especially considering the novel was written, if not actually published, before WWII, and her Southern Gothic is sweet enough in small doses. But she was 23 when the novel was published, and over all I found the book wearyingly adolescent, more precocious than convincing, and certainly less convincing than Absolute Beginners, a work about adolescence (written by a 40 year old man).

400 pages of Solitude, then 300 of Loneliness: not a good combination.

I was saved by a drunk.

Today is Day 8 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Book 26: One Hundred Years of Solitude

2006-06-07T00:50:00.000-07:00

When I started reading all these great and famous books, I swore I would never simply say: “I like this” or “I don’t like this” and think that constituted an adequate response to a work of art. Who cares if you don’t like – for example – Middlemarch? It was here before you arrived and it’ll be here long after you’ve gone. A lot of people who know about these things consider Middlemarch to be a masterpiece. Shut up and learn, Bast.

Well, the temptation to say – no, yell – “I don’t like One Hundred Years of Solitude!!!” is mighty strong. But I won’t do it. So let me say, calmly, I didn’t enjoy the book but there were reasons.

I can’t decide whether I was becalmed before García Márquez or whether García Márquez becalmed me. Either way, it was the wrong moment to dig into a long, winding, mono-paced magical realist yarn. The book snakes and winds and digresses in a charming, enchanting way but it seemed rather lifeless to me. For all the deaths and births, affairs, marriages, storms and wars, it was only words on paper (a fact unhelpfully underlined by García Márquez in the textual ending of the novel). It only took me eight days or so to read it but it felt much longer. I kept looking in vain for the book’s inherent Nobel-ish qualities. And I kept looking at my watch.

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude on the day before my 38th birthday, in a hotel room in Bournemouth, where my family spent a couple of happy Easter breaks when I was a kid. In the afternoon, I wandered around the town “looking for a doorway back into the past” (lovely phrase from the novel). Anyway, I was so traumatised by the upheaval of re-reading Absolute Beginners and hitting 38 etc., I think I was looking for something from One Hundred Years of Solitude that it couldn’t possibly give me – that no novel could give me. But you can’t re-read Absolute Beginners for the rest of your life, can you? You have to move on.

So I put my best foot forward and got stuck in some adolescent's chewing gum…

Today is Day 3 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Book 25: Absolute Beginners

2006-06-06T06:05:00.000-07:00

“It’s terrible, in other words, to live entirely without hope.”

Actually, my troubles didn’t begin with One Hundred Years of Solitude, they began with Absolute Beginners. I loved this book as a teenager. It changed my life, possibly the only book ever to have actually changed my life (that phrase has been bankrupted by over-use in newspapers, magazines, reading campaigns etc.). It liberalised me and liberated me – made me happy to be young and alive and awake to the possibilities of difference, in race or taste or sexuality or whatever.

So last month, at the half way mark, closing on another birthday, I re-read it for the first time in twenty years and it turned me upside down all over again. Variously, I felt: elated; homesick; angry; exhilarated; righteous; and right. I felt vindicated. When I was 15, I knew where it was at.

I work in West London, exactly where the novel is set. I used to live here. In the week I read the novel again, the BNP made significant gains in London at the local elections. It was easy for me to superimpose the 1950s race riots Colin Macinnes writes about on to familiar streets. But the book didn’t just draw a line between the present and the past (my present and my past), it made me feel they were happening simultaneously – a layering of the 1950s (the events of book), the 1980s (me when I first read it), and the here and now – the whole ambiguous relationship between me and London and books and the 21st century, twisted and alive.

On the down side, it made me realise that I have been living without hope; One Hundred Years of Solitude did not much help me deal with that. And so I lost a month.

I would like to reproduce the whole immortal, invisible Absolute Beginners right here on this blog but that would be both time-consuming and illegal. So why don’t you buy a copy? You can get it for 1p via Amazon marketplace. 1p! Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners. If you are young and British it will say more to you than Salinger or Hunter or Howard bleedin’ Marks or anything else you might pick up from the ‘cult reading’ section of Waterstone’s or Fopp.

“I got a Coke, and went and gazed, and it certainly was a sight! All those aircraft landing from outer space, and taking off to all the nations of the world! And I thought to myself, standing there looking out on all this fable – what an age it is I’ve grown up in, with everything possible to mankind at last, and every horror too, you could imagine! And what a period it’s been in England, what a time of fun and hope and foolishness and sad stupidity!”

It’s 2006. I wish we didn’t, but we still do need this book.

Today is Day 2 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

back, Back, BACK!!!

2006-06-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

From Don Quixote:

“In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude dried my brains up – and I lost a month, sorry. But I’ve just finished Under the Volcano; amazing, terrifying book, and I’m back on track. Will update on Books 25 to 28 over the next few days.

Today is Day 1 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Then and now, simultaneously

2006-05-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

From Absolute Beginners:

“…Every job I get, even the well-paid ones, denied me the two things I consider absolutely necessary for gracious living, namely – take out a pencil, please, and write them down – to work in your own time and not somebody else’s, number one, and number two, even if you can’t make big money every day, to have a graft that lets you make it sometime. It’s terrible, in other words, to live entirely without hope.”

From an interview with Scott Walker in Mojo:

“I suddenly woke up … I’d acted in bad faith for so long I’d lost my heart for the world, sort of. I had to discover my life again, to just do it for me alone. So I made the decision: no more bad faith.”

Today is Day 4 of re-reading: Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

The Fear it is over, the Loathing is past…

2006-04-29T00:15:00.000-07:00

Fear and Loathing is a cornerstone of the cult industry, in Britain at least, one of the prescribed doses of the adolescent consumer’s course – more, I suspect, for the vicarious thrills it offers than the fancy prose (see also: Withnail & I, which in style and theme and Ralph Steadman artwork, is Fear and Loathing recast with out-of-work English actors).

Anyway, I finished it yesterday. I never read this book as a teenager. There didn’t seem a thing in it I could relate to. And it just seemed such an obvious choice. Actually, I think I would have hated it then. So reading it now has been odd but fun. Putting aside the guns, the drugs and the sweating, macho commitment to The Truth – guess what? – Dr. Thompson could also write, and he wrote in quotes. I could fill this page with his perfect sentences.

“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit.”

“He [Timothy Leary] crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.”

“They looked like somebody had just sprayed their table with shit-mist.”

Etc. till dead.

Today is Day 1 of re-reading: Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

Hunter said it best

2006-04-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a journalist’s book; a book by a journalist who invented his own genre (gonzo), about a journalistic assignment, to be read either as sleazy metaphysics (the hunt for the American Dream) or as social comment (the whole burnt-out early 70s) or as one long riff on journalism itself, and much beloved by other journalists – particularly music journalists. Fear of the world & Loathing of the self; this book is a journalists’ Anatomy.

Today is Day 3 of reading: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Book 24: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

2006-04-25T04:38:00.000-07:00

Loading up the Great Red Shark…

Today is Day 2 of reading: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

This service is non-stopping at Mr Rochester

2006-04-25T04:22:00.000-07:00

So. Jane Eyre. Many women’s favourite book (see the Guardian website, April 6th). It’s great. But it’s insane. And the insanity centres on Edward Rochester, one of the great romantic heroes of English fiction. Here are some of the winning attributes that have caused generations of women readers to fall figuratively at his feet.

He is really “ugly” – not my word but that of Jane Eyre. She can’t stop going on about it.

He is generally arrogant, surly and foul-tempered.

He is nearly 40, while Jane is 18 i.e. barely legal.

He has had a string of tarty mistresses, of which he repents. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

He may or may not have had a child, Adele, with one of them.

He keeps his first wife Bertha – who is clinically insane – locked in a room in the attic, in the care of a negligent and alcoholic nurse.

He leads another local woman, Blanche Ingram, to believe he is seeking to marry her, without having any intention of doing so.

In order to discover Jane’s true feelings for him, he dresses up in drag as a gypsy and “tells her fortune”.

He withholds from Jane all the stuff about the mistresses and the crazy woman in the attic, even when the crazy woman a) tries to burn him alive in his bed, b) stabs her own brother and c) creeps into Jane’s room on the eve of her wedding and nearly attacks her.

After the brother-stabbing, he makes Jane mop up the blood.

He attempts to lead this same ignorant and sheltered 18 year old into bigamy.

On Jane’s wedding day, the ceremony is disrupted in the most humiliating manner imaginable. Only at this point does he disclose to her the truth about the mistresses, the brother, the locked-up lunatic wife etc.

He then proposes that, instead of getting married, they run off to the continent and live together in sin.

He threatens Jane with violence when she – unsurprisingly – says no.

It is implied that the mad woman is syphilitic. So maybe he is too.

He ends the novel as a broken, one-armed blind man.

What a catch, eh ladies?

Today is Day 1 of reading: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

What would happen to the Brontë sisters in today’s Britain, on the evidence of their novels alone

2006-04-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

Jane Eyre + Wuthering Heights + The Tenant of Wildfell Hall = a surprise visit to Haworth Parsonage by a concerned Social Services.

Today is Day 8 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pardon?

2006-04-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

“… pushing her away with some contumelious epithet…”

“… judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”

“I stood motionless under my hierophant’s touch.”

Happy birthday Charlotte Brontë, 190 years old today.

Today is Day 6 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

51 favourite books I have actually read...

2006-04-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

… in the very approximate chronological order in which I read them (as far as I can remember).

My Book about Me – Doctor Seuss *
Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne
Moominpappa at Sea – Tove Jansson *
Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius – Terrance Dicks *
The Eighteenth Emergency – Betsy Byars
How to be Topp – Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot – Robert Arthur
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams *
The Death of Reginald Perrin – David Nobbs *
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
From Fringe to Flying Circus – Roger Wilmut
The Bible
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes **
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell *
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald *
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene *
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
New Grub Street – George Gissing
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Watchmen – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes *
Bleak House – Charles Dickens *
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov *
The Life of the Automobile – Ilya Ehrenburg
Collected Poems – Philip Larkin
Ulysses – James Joyce
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Money – Martin Amis *
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Lost Continent – Bill Bryson
Rabbit, Run – John Updike *
U & I – Nicholson Baker *
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Intellectuals and the Masses – John Carey
Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick *
Revolution in the Head – Ian MacDonald
Writing Home – Alan Bennett *
How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain de Botton
The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Evelyn Waugh
Anthropology – Dan Rhodes
The Human Stain – Philip Roth *
Like a Fiery Elephant – Jonathan Coe *
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
The People’s Act of Love – James Meek

And, of course, Howards End – E.M. Forster

* I have read many other books by this writer
** The only book that ever changed my life

Today is Day 4 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Book 23: Jane Eyre

2006-04-18T01:52:00.000-07:00

Here is the divine path that led me from Vanity Fair to Jane Eyre.

In the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, Jane Eyre was cited in an article about reading habits as many women’s favourite book. The boy equivalents were The Outsider (tick), One Hundred Years of Solitude (nope) and a nearly everything by George Orwell (of course).

Last weekend, our friend Penny asked if I was going to attempt Jane Eyre, because it was one of her favourite books, and her (all-female) book group had just read it.

While flicking through Jane Eyre, umming and erring, I notice that Charlotte Brontë dedicates the book to… William Makepeace Thackeray!

In other words, God is a woman and She wants me to read Jane Eyre right now. I obey.

Today is Day 3 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I am Vanity Pharaoh

2006-04-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a) a last push from early morning till lunchtime and b) Mrs Bast taking young Master Bast to a wildlife park to see rats and lemurs, Vanity Fair has been completed. Look! By way of celebration, I have tossed both my Easter bonnet and my powdered wig in the air.

Today is Day 19 of reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Half a League, etc.

2006-04-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Right, well, I have now been reading Vanity Fair for Ages And Ages. It’s taking me even longer to get through this one than it took me to read Moby-Dick – and in all I must have read that about twice, considering how many times I had to start sentences and paragraphs again because I couldn’t quite make sense of them. Vanity Fair is quite a measure more fun than The Whale Book but, still, I am beginning to crave for a change of scene/pace/crinoline. But nevertheless, it’s still great. Becky Sharp: regency class warrior.

In retrospect, this is a book it would have been better to devote a week to and read more per day – rather than choose a period when I’ve been writing and boss and authors have been jostling for editorial input, form-filling, free milk etc. To quote The Unfortunates (a certified List masterpiece TM):

‘The more involved I became with other people’s crap, the more I wanted nothing more than to get on with my own crap.’

Today is Day 18 of reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray: Is there anything he can't do?

2006-04-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

I am now into week 3 of reading Vanity Fair, which makes it seem like Vanity Fair is a slog. It isn’t. I love Vanity Fair. I just wish I had more time in the day to spend with it. Apart from anything else, it’s very funny. Anyway, from this morning’s fifty pages, here is a short extract that blew me away – a beautiful description of the estrangement between Becky Sharp and her young, unloved son.

‘Sometimes – once or twice in a week – that lady [Becky] visited the upper regions in which the child lived. She came like a vivified figure out of the Magasin des Modes – blandly smiling in the most beautiful new clothes and little gloves and boots. Wonderful scarfs, laces, and jewels glittered about her. She had always a new bonnet on, and flowers bloomed perpetually in it, or else magnificent curling ostrich feathers, soft and snowy as camellias. She nodded twice or thrice patronisingly to the little boy, who looked up from his dinner or from the pictures of soldiers he was painting. When she left the room, an odour of rose, or some other magical fragrance, lingered about the nursery. She was an unearthly being in his eyes, superior to his father – to all the world: to be worshipped and admired at a distance.’

Love those 'little gloves and boots'...

Today is Day 15 of reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Welcome to The List Of Betterment

2006-04-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

In November last year, mindful that I, Leonard Bast, will soon be 40 years old, I began a small but ambitious experiment: to work my way through a dozen books I had always meant to read but had never got round to, due to idleness, apathy or lack of confidence. Not that this has ever stopped me from pretending to have read them…

Anyway, I fixed on a list and started reading. Here it is.

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Post Office – Charles Bukowski
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – Patrick Hamilton
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

I finished that initial list three months later, good going when you hold down a job and are trying to raise a young family. It proved to be a fantastic, life-changing experience and I'll write more about it here in the weeks ahead. Not wanting to stop, I decided to extend the list to 50 books and give myself until 24th November this year to read them all – one year to the day since I embarked on the original List of Betterment. Since February I have read:

Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Stuart a Life Backwards – Alexander Masters
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Aerodrome – Rex Warner
The Odyssey – Homer
The Unfortunates – B.S. Johnson

I am going keep track of all the books I read this year, and will post my thoughts on books I have already read as we go along, plus anything else that springs to mind. I work in the British book industry. There’s a lot to talk about.

Today is Day 14 of reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray