5 Books I definitely do not love

Most of the books I have read which I do not love (hate seems a little strong - I wouldn't even bother burning them) are those which I have thought I 'should' read because they are 'classics'. I am a little embarrassed that I managed to get half a degree in English Literature without having read a lot of books that I heard referred to as 'classics'. Part of me just wanted to read them to see what was so classic about them, and part of me wanted to spend less time reading books which I could never discuss with anyone as I was the only one who had read them. It is surprisingly hard to think of a list of all the books you have been told are classics when you try to, so I started with the big ones and those I could find for cheap in the charity bookshop near where I used to work. As this is technically the number one spot, I will start with the book I have enjoyed least and that took longest to read: 1. Moby Dick As I opened the book and saw that first line, I wondered how many people knew that line but had not read the rest of the book. I now envy those people, and if anything good should come out of me having read the bloody thing I hope it is that I do warn people at every opportunity I get not to bother reading Moby Dick. I can sum the whole thing up in two sentences: Ahab gets partly eaten by whale, whom he inexplicably names Moby Dick before pledging to find and take his revenge upon him. To distract readers from the pointlessness of this endeavour, a lot of really boring factual information about whales is interspersed with the details of the fruitless whale hunt, making the hunting part seem marginally more interesting, but ultimately still not as interesting as closing the book and spending the rest of the day collating a list of all the things more interesting that whale anatomy. The single best thing about the book was that when I got to the point of desperation where I began to count how many pages I had left (this usually occurs around the mid-point of a novel, but in this case it was after about 100 pages) I found that almost the entire final quarter of the book was taken up with a series of poems and other crap about whales that were completely incidental to the plot (as was much of the stuff before that in fact), so much so that after only a moment's hesitation I decided I would not make myself read them, and in effect reduced the misery to which I was determined to subject myself by around 20%. I ploughed on with all the other stuff because I was not going to be defeated - having wasted a couple of days reading the bloody thing, I wasn't going to give up until I could say that I had examined the evidence for it being a good book and found it so lacking that I would even argue as to whether it should be called a book, favouring as I did the term 'punishment' at the time. I am aware that the novel is considered a great work, exploring themes of idealism vs pragmatism, the class system and so on and so forth, but however interesting the ideas may be, the novel itself did them no justice in my eyes. I am not unintelligent, I understand most of what I read and when I don't, I work it out or look it up, but rarely have I been less inspired to try and find out the point of something as I was when faced with hundreds of pages of whaling, broken up with the occasional storm. The pace was unbearably slow, presumably because Melville was cramming in all this symbolism and setting the scene for his metaphorical fight between good and evil, but ultimately, the genuine pointlessness of enacting revenge on an animal following their instincts is not something which needs much explanation. Maybe, if you decide you are going to write about how people's ambition can destroy them and make them fail to appreciate any of life's pleasures, the way to demonstrate it once and for all is to force them into the situation which I found myself in when reading the thing - my ambition to finish the book made me unable to enjoy any of the other perfectly nice books I had to read, tainted the ideological plan I had to read the 'classics' and made me feel impotent against whatever authority had decreed that this was a 'good book' (not THE good book, although Tim Minchin has written a very funny song about that, so check it out). So in a sense, Moby Dick was a perfect way to demonstrate the pervasive nature of unfulfilled ambition, but in another, more realistic sense, it was just really boring. On the plus side, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling sums up everything I have just written in a much funnier and less long-winded way than I have, so you can gain insight into what it must be like to suffer through a really long boring book whilst enjoying a quite short and funny book - problem solved.

The Colbert Report

I'm still finding it increasingly difficult to know that the Colbert Report is on in this country, but we can't watch it. It pains me, but I'm beginning to wonder whether £35 a month for access to half an hour's worth of programming a day is actually quite a good deal - nearly £2 an episode wouldn't be so galling if it wasn't for the fact that we did have the FX channel and were blissfully happy, and should we succumb and start paying for it, we will never know whether it might have reappeared at some point anyway. Plus, if we went out for an evening, the cost of each episode would increase, which would mean that alongside the disappointment of not seeing the show, we would have the mounting costs to justify to ourselves as well. A part of me is really angry that there are people out there just enjoying the show, a part of me thinks the message on the Colbert Nation website is almost worth it, and a part of me wants to e-mail Stephen Colbert himself, throw myself on his mercy and beg him to give me personal access to the shows on the grounds that I love them so much. Well, I think that's the part of me that just wants to throw myself on Stephen Colbert generally if I'm honest - it's looking for any excuse...

5 books I love (part 5)

This is a tricky one - having already committed myself to four books (or rather 11 books in total if you don't count 'Three Men on the Bummel'), choosing only one for the last spot feels as though I am rejecting every other book in the world, despite the fact that I purposefully chose a non-exclusionary description for these books. However, I think I am going to have to go with an author rather than a specific book as all her books are good in the same way whilst all being very different. 5. Kate Atkinson I really like her books, not only because they have intricate plots which are somehow constructed in a way which doesn't leave you confused and flipping through the earlier pages to try and remind yourself of what's going on. There is just enough character development that you engage with them, but not so much that you end up reading entire pages where nothing actually happens except the discovery of the underlying reason behind why someone did something that you read about ten pages ago. The first of Kate Atkinson's books is 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' which is set across three generations of the same family, and although there is an element of a mystery, you don't spend the whole book trying to work it out - it's an engrossing read but you don't really realise that there's a discovery to be made, making the moment of discovery even more enjoyable because the plot wasn't entirely propped up by the need to know a certain piece of information in order for the rest of the plot to make sense. I think my favourite of her books is Emotionally Weird, which makes me feel drunk to read it, such is the demeanour of so many of the characters that it feels a bit like the kind of memory you have when you wake up and you can't be sure whether you are recalling events of the previous day or a dream you had whilst sleeping it all off. Kate Atkinson has managed to perfect a writing style which is funny, intriguing, thought-provoking and completely engrossing - I love her and have just found out that she's got a new book out. Something for the Christmas list I think...!

5 books I love (part 4)

4. Three Men in a Boat In a similar way to The Diary of a Nobody, I find the account of the antics of the boating party invariably entertaining - there is such a gentle pace to the humour making the insults and infighting sound more fun than the moments (few though they are) when they all get on. The language is so modern, it's almost impossible to believe that the book was published in 1889, but the thing that really clinches it for me as a great book was something I learnt from the BBC 'adaptation' featuring Dara O'Brien, Grif Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath*. Jerome K Jerome apparently intended to write a serious travel guide to the Thames including historical facts, significant spots to stop etc, but when he came to it, he found that the comedy couldn't be suppressed and it ended up being textual slapstick**. There are so many brilliant quotations, mostly about the ability of inanimate objects to misbehave willfully when there is a chance that they could create havoc by so doing, that it would be impossible to pick out all the parts which have made me smile. The subtlety of the language, the sincerity of it all, the gentle commentary on society and the nature of friendship all combine to make a book which I really didn't want to end. *For some reason Rory McGrath's surname completely escaped me for a moment, and to try and speed up the process of re-remembering it, I turned to Google. It amuses me that the first search I made was 'Rory annoying celebrity' and it amuses me even more that this provided me with the answer I was looking for. **I think I have just coined a phrase of my very own : a quick Google on the phrase 'Textual Slapstick' reveals that my search did not match any documents, meaning that this blog entry should be a Googlewhack - yay! I am aware that I am sad, not only for being pleased that I might be a Googlewhack but largely for even Googling a phrase I had only just written. I was pleased with it, and (as great artists often do of course) I wanted to check that the reason it had popped into my head wasn't because I had stolen it from somewhere. Now that it seems it is original, I will bandy it around until this post can be cited as the origins of the phrase, and in the sprit of that will have to publish three posts today in case anyone gets in there first!

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.

5 Books I love (part 2)

2. The Pirates! In an Adventure with... Well, technically this isn't a book either, so much as a series of books, but I couldn't possibly pick out a favourite of them so they all get lumped in together. Apart from anything, they are all very much on a similar theme, plus I have still got some to read to complete the set. However, I am not going to let that put me off writing about them. One of the things I love about these books is that none of the pirates have names - there is the Pirate Captain with his luxurious beard and then albino pirate, the pirate with the scarf etc. For a while I thought that there might be some kind of clever shenanigans and it would turn out that they are all the same three pirates or something, but there doesn't seem to be - it's just fun. That is something I really like - most of the books I have read which I have found to be really hard work are those where the characters have names that won't seem to go into my head, or Russian translations where everyone has several names depending on who is talking to them. I enjoy being able to read a whole book where the person mentioned is self-explanatory - I don't need to know any more than that there's a pirate in green, and not having to even think about who is who makes a refreshing change. Another thing which really appeals to me is that the setting is in a modern version of the 19th century - Darwin is out on the Beagle, but they get their photos developed at Snappy Snaps on the High Street, so you don't have to worry about historical accuracy or understanding the piece in the context of its setting which is nice for someone like me whose historical knowledge is limited to the bloody Corn Laws and their subsequent repeal thanks to a willfully uninspiring school syllabus. Then there are the foot notes - many of my favourite authors like a bit of footnotery: Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin etc all seem to inhabit a genre where a footnote is used to give the reader a little extra laugh without interrupting the plot, which I like. The Pirates! books feature footnotes which contain about as much in the way of facts as you're going to get and conform to my favourite way of learning information - a random comment, barely relevant to the topic at hand, but interesting all the same and worth pointing out if it is something you know. I will often drop into conversation that Shakespeare's father was a prosperous glove maker because I know it to be true and whether it's relevant or not, people always say 'Really? I didn't know that.' which makes me feel as though I am not weird for remembering it for 15 years since I read it at school. And finally, because the books are really quite tiny so I have already spent almost as long writing this as the author did writing the first of the series (which I am lead to believe took him two weeks), is that they are good, swashbuckling fun - the Pirate Captain is a very sympathetic character, whose love for ham, his luxurious beard and making himself appear better at his job than he is are all qualities that are so at odds with the murderous activity he engages in (make no mistake - the books are pure comedy, but plenty of people get run-through in the course of an adventure) that you can't help but love him. The books are fun, plain and simple and I honestly think that they could save a lot of time in speaking to people who turn out to be twats - give them one of these books and if they don't laugh, stop wasting your time talking to them.

5 Books I love (part 1)

I decided to write a post about 5 books I love, but once I had completed number one, I realised that I was going to have to split it up, and then started thinking about 5 books I distinctly don't love but have read because they're 'classics' and I felt I should. So there's more to come...

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

OK, so this is technically a trilogy in five parts, meaning it would have to be all of my top five books, although it was originally a radio series maybe it shouldn’t be any of them, but I am glad that it is now available in a series of other formats, including (so Wikipedia tells me) two series of towels. I have been a fan since listening to the radio series, courtesy of my step-dad’s possibly illegal home taping of them, as a smallish child to keep me entertained on long car journeys. I consider it to be one of the most influential introductions made in my life, because it instilled in me a life-long (so far) love of Douglas Adams and hours and hours worth of conversation with my brother which few others can understand.

To me, there are few things more satisfying than calling someone a ‘hoopy’ or a ‘frood’ and them understanding it, not least because it’s quite a compliment and if you have gone to the effort of complimenting someone in a language you hope they will understand, it’s gratifying to be met with enthusiasm rather than a slightly askance look and an attempt to disengage from the conversation altogether.

There is something joyful about these books – there are not only no rules, but the ones made up to fit the story don’t apply when the plot makes them inconvenient, yet Douglas Adams avoids falling into the trap so many ‘sci-fi’ (I’m using the term broadly) books do of either making everything so completely ‘other’ that I can’t really get into it, or of creating such fantastic scenarios that it all ends up being contrived and complicated in an attempt to come up with a meaningful ending to the storyline.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, however, combines the confused curmudgeonliness of Arthur Dent with the worldly optimism of Ford Prefect. Then in case they weren’t polar enough for you, you also get Marvin the Paranoid Android, who out-curmudgeons Arthur Dent without any of the confusion, and Zaphod Beeblebrox who out everythings everyone pretty much.

The thing I love most about the Hitchhiker’s Guide books though is the fact that having done some basic fact-checking whilst writing this, I have been inspired to read the books all again as soon as I have finished Robinson Crusoe…