Read and Reading.

I'm usually not one for being able to measure the passage of time in any kind of reliable fashion, but with the good ship 2010 not yet too far from the shore, I can actually count, for once, how many books I've read this year.

So far:

Pierre Bayard - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Gav Thorpe - Malekith
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Tibor Fischer - Good to Be God

oh and finally - George Orwell - 1984.

The reason behind this isn't so much that I like to show off about such things but that I was able to breeze through them in such a short time with nary a strained eye or gritted jaw of forced intellectual improvement in sight.

And no, neither did I give in to pressure of the canon to read 100 'classics' before I die - 1984 was actually for some A-level tutoring I'm doing - but I'm ultimately glad that I did pick it up. Outside of the context of it being the nearest and easiest shrieking perch for people making broad and lazy comparisons with whatever 'totalitarian' sanctions their resident democracy is imposing upon them at any given time, I enjoyed it first because of the stylistic punchiness (you can tell Orwell used to be a journalist) and secondly, of course, due to the sublime distillation of the concept of power, the will to power, and politics and that. I'm not intending a review here, and by no means do I wish to breathlessly extol its every nuance, as has no doubt been done in trillions of A-level and undergrad papers to this day.

In a sense, the first book (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) entirely dismantles the subject of this blog. This emphasis on quantity of books read over the quality of their reading always whiffed a little off to me I must say, and it's certainly with distinct wariness that I list them here, lest I look like a preening tit laying out the respective physical evidence of his cumulative refinement. The book itself confirms something I've long suspected about reading and readers: that a vast amount of it is self-aggrandising bullshite. People largely delight in listing, book for book, what they have read or loved reading recently in the manner of a hypochondriac meticulously reading their current medication to any who'll listen, as though each is inherently imbued with a set value of culture points, you know: 50 points for James Joyce, bonus 5 for Finnegan's Wake, 60 for Dostoyevsky, bonus 10 for anything in translation, minus 5 for anything adapted into a film post-reading, or without the caveat of 'the book is simply SO much better, they ruined it completely. But even with medication, accurately dosed and completely consumed by the individual, the results are never entirely the same. This we know.

What is it to even say that we've 'read' a book anyway? That we've categorically ripped it to our internal hard-drive and stored it in our cerebral bookshelf forevermore? Even with Harold Bloom-like reading speed (he could apparently, in his youth, scoff an entire novel in an hour), how much is honestly retained? The shameful truth, that I know lurks in the dingy basement of my brain behind the dusty bookshelves, is that the vast majority of authors I 'know', or have 'read' soon become mere fluffy blurbs with brief internal memos on character and style; a fuzzy glow that shames us with the knowledge of our hours spent furtively poring over page after damn page for our own intellectual well-being. Stoically we all brave our Milton or Shakespeare as we would our greens at the table: it's not nice, we know, and it's not tasty, but it's GOOD for you, listen to Big Mother. As Bayard writes (and I can't remember this exactly because I'm an imperfect reader), with many texts we're simply better off saving ourselves the bother of reading them, and instead merely becoming au fait with the conventions and stock phrases of book-talk that can generally be transposed onto any given book. Things like comments on the accuracy of the setting, the pace of the dialogue, how much better his older stuff was, or the accepted attitudes towards a work and its place in literary history. As he says, I know that Ulysses was a crucial modernist text, that it's written in a stream of consciousness style and takes part over the course of a day from the point of view of various characters such as Stephen Daedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Also it's written by James Joyce, who's Irish. And there's a sex scene at the end, or something.

But if one were to go through the sheer martyrdom of reading it, who's to say that this isn't all they'd be able to remember after a few months or years anyhow? Of course, it's not as if I have acute reading dementia and can only know what's on the page in front of me (true as it is to a certain extent), but people need to be more honest about how much we con each other and ourselves about what we truly know about our books. It's not that people shouldn't read, but that the literary hair-shirt wearing of so many cultural flagellants is simply a colossal waste of time. Put War and Peace down Carol, look it up on Wikipedia, and have a bloody cup of tea.