5 books I love (part 3)

3. The Diary of a Nobody This book makes me feel nostalgic for a time way before I was born. The bluff and buffoonery of Charles Pooter is all a part of an intricate social fabric which has to be preserved at all costs, regardless of whether it offends, makes you open to ridicule or ends in disaster. My favourite part is the painting - the peculiar urge to paint almost anything when you have a brush in your hand and a pot of paint is such a universal feeling that I can't imagine anyone who has ever undertaken DIY work failing to sympathise. There is something comforting about having a window onto the daily ins and outs of a life so ordinary that you feel as though you could be reading a genuine account of the time - why would anyone mention their constant battles with a boot scraper, the perils of making sure the grocer's boy delivers to the 'proper' entrance or the minutiae of their butter order. In checking the exact wording of the chapter title, I have stumbled across a Librivox recording of the entire book, which to my dismay is read in such a dead-pan expressionless way that it completely belies the whole point of the book to my mind. Like everyone, the day to day events which make up Charles Pooter's life are not particularly interesting to an onlooker, but the taking of offence, the general inability to accept any responsibility for his mistakes and the constant feeling of teetering on the brink of a social disaster makes this book compelling as far as I am concerned. Maybe I take too much pleasure from the self-imposed misfortunes of others, whether they are real or fictional, but I do feel that a little vocal characterisation wouldn't have gone amiss. Not to criticise Librivox though - I only came across them today and it must be a gargantuan task to collate all these recordings.