Reading Plan: February 2016
Things that may (or may not) interest you from my January: (1) I was longlisted for a Trailblazer award by the London Book Fair – the awards are in a couple of weeks and will be an excellent opportunity for me to unleash my awkward-at-formal-occasions self who has been kept far too shut up of late. (2) I wrote a short foreword for an anthology of young writers’ work recently. It has since become an Amazon bestseller (absolutely nothing to do with me and my tiny foreword, I should add). (3) I am now the proud
owner of a functioning 1930s typewriter. You’ve got it, I am now one of those clichéd wankers. You’re welcome.
All in all I can’t say January has been too bad to me. Hopefully some of you will have read my reviews of The Godfather and Leading. The Godfather was really interesting – I’ve seen it on countless lists of twentieth century books you must read and I can understand why: it is a cult classic. But it does make me think about what makes a book a ‘must-read’. The Godfather is good but it is pulp fiction in my opinion. That is not intended to sound snobby – nothing wrong with being pulp fiction – but does prominence in the culture of a period alone make a book worth reading period? I don’t actually have an answer to that but I think it is interesting. Will 50 Shades of Grey be a ‘must-read’ of the early twenty-first century? If prominence makes a book worth reading then E. L. James, J. K. Rowling, and Dan Brown will be the important texts for understanding our times. Do they really represent anything useful about us? Well, probably yes, actually. I don’t think they are the be all and end all by a long stretch but they do say something about our reading predilections. Whether that is interesting or not possibly depends on how you read and how far you think books reflect anything about the real world.

Psychology (I haven’t got a reference for this to hand but will add it in later if I come across one) describes suicide as an act that happens when someone is asked to bear more pain (psychic or physical) than they are capable of bearing. This is inescapably the case for many people. But it seems to me that the extinction of hope that suicide represents comes not at the final act but at the final decision. Inevitably as a big reader, I end up trying to understand the world through books. Life has for a long time seemed to me to be without any meaning save that which we ourselves infer on it. Increasingly I feel that the only thing that binds us to this transient existence is the stories we tell, which hold us together; stories that are personal, that make up our memories, or the stories that exist in the gaps between experience. Without stories existence has no shape – it is entirely formless and thus meaningless. If there is one character in literature that represents the antithesis of suicide, it is, for me, Jay Gatsby. His endlessly hopeful pursuit of a lost love and his complete refusal to acknowledge the universal truths of time and circumstance are at the heart of the human spirit. Life must be endured but for Fitzgerald and his fine boy from the Midwest, pure romanticism give life its colour. A suicide is birthed in the mind at the moment when one determines no longer to beat on, but to succumb to the current and allow hope to be extinguished.
Cheerful, right? I hope you aren’t here for the laughs. Incidentally, Gatsby has been on my mind lately and so has a line, less than a line, from Conrad: “we live in the flicker”. I’m sure many of you will carry

So, back to reading. Camus. I shall doubtless write something about The Myth of Sisyphus this month. Incidentally, judgement has also been on my mind a lot lately for various reasons so I have been thinking back to the The Fall (Camus’s novel rather than all that business with Eve scrumping for apples). Being able to avoid making judgements about others seems both entirely impossible and incredibly moral. But that is probably a discussion for another time.
I also want to write about To Kill a Mockingbird but that might get pushed back a bit depending on how long I take thinking about other things. I also want to think about morality in books and whether characters who ooze moral certainty with every act make for slightly dull fiction. Does the postmodern world now demand conflicted characters or do we still appreciate those who are simply good ala dear old Atticus Peck, or Gregory Finch, or whoever that fine southern gent is.
If, like me, you’re not quite sure what this post is all about then you are not alone, and I think I shall sign off here before my mind determines to stomp off in some other unexpected direction. Thanks for sticking with and pop back over the month to check I’m not wholly incoherent eh?
0 Comments
I always welcome comments...