Having begun on the back foot, let me finish on the front. I have wasted enough ink telling you what this book is not. Over the course of a year or so, the slow process of reading these fifty great books, and the other two, gave me back my life. The actions I describe here, inspired by a particular volume or a passage of writing, were often the direct result of chatting with no one except myself. I was my own 3D Facebook; number of friends: one. And therefore, as you read this book, please consider it a passionate defence of those two elements I consider most at risk from our neophiliac desire to read fashionably, publicly, ever more excitedly: patience and solitude.
Because, when you stop and think about it, the rest is time off.
Andy Miller
The Garden of England
Summer 2013
‘Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.
What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.
Such a life has not been granted me.’
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
‘I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world – this world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
My life is nothing special. It is every bit as dreary as yours.
This is the drill. Every weekday morning, the alarm wakes us at 5.45am, unless our son wakes us earlier, which he sometimes – usually – does. He is three. When we moved into this house a year ago, we bought a Goodman programmable radio and CD player for the bedroom. The CD player, being cheap, is temperamental about what it will and will not play. When it works, which it sometimes – usually – doesn’t, the day begins with ‘I Start Counting’, the first track on Fuzzy-Felt Folk, an arch selection of children’s folk tunes on Trunk Records. (For a few weeks after we got the CD player, we experimented with alternative wake-up calls, from Sinatra, to the Stooges, to Father Abraham and The Smurfs, but the fun of choosing a different disc every night quickly turned into another chore, one more obstacle between us and our hearts’ desire – falling asleep.) ‘I Start Counting’ is a lilting and gentle song, a scenic shuttle-bus ride back to Morningtown, and the capricious CD player seems to like it. So we have settled for ‘I Start Counting’. ‘This year, next year, sometime, never …’
But on those mornings when the CD won’t take, the radio kicks in instead. These are the days that begin at 5.45am not with a soft dawn chorus of ‘I Start Counting’, but with the brutal twin reveille of Farming Today at ear-splitting volume and the impatient yelling of our only son, who has invariably been awake for some time. ‘Is it morning yet?’ he enquires, over and over again at the top of his lungs. We lie there, shattered. Someone somewhere is milking a cow.
I stumble downstairs and make a cup of tea. In the time it takes for the kettle to boil, I put some brioche in a bowl for my son – his favourite – and swallow a couple of vitamin supplements, cod liver oil for dry skin, and high-strength calcium (plus vitamin D) for bones. The calcium tablets are a hangover from a low-fat diet I put myself on four years ago, wanting to get in shape before Alex was born, one of the side effects of which, other than dramatic weight loss, was to make my shins ache from a real or phantom calcium deficiency. The pains soon went but the tablets have become another habit. At that time, my job was making me miserable. For too long I compensated by eating and drinking too much, wine at lunchtime and beer in the pub after work, with the result that for the first time, in my early thirties, I had become a fat man with a big, fat face. I shed three stone and have successfully kept the weight off, so that now, combined with the effects of sustained sleep deprivation, my face is undeniably gaunt. Acquaintances who haven’t seen me for a while look concerned and wonder whether I’m ok. ‘Have you been ill?’ they ask. I love it when they do this.
The kettle boils. I pour the hot water onto the Twinings organic teabag nestled in the blue cat mug which came from Camden market in the early 1990s, soon after my wife, Tina, and I first started going out, and which for reasons both of sentimentality and size remains her preference for the first cup of tea of the day.fn1 Sometimes I put out the mug and bag in readiness the night before, sometimes I don’t. I stir the teabag, pressing it against the side of the mug and squashing it on the bottom. Then I throw it in the bin, pour in the organic semi-skimmed milk, give the tea another stir and put the spoon to one side so I can use it again in an hour’s time to eat half a grapefruit – another surviving component of the low-fat diet. Actually, to all intents and purposes, I am still on the low-fat diet. I don’t drink beer any more and I rarely eat cakes, chocolate, biscuits, etc.
fn1. While the mug is blue, the cat itself is ginger.
If reading about this is sapping your spirit, you should try living it.
I take my wife her tea in bed. On a good morning, she will be waiting to take the hot cat mug from me, but sometimes, when I arrive in the bedroom, hot tea in hand, she has gone back to sleep and so I have to wake her up and cajole her into a sitting position. This does irritate me. I have been performing this small, uxorious duty for the last thirteen years; surely I am entitled to a measure of disgruntlement that she, luxuriating in precious minutes of sweet sleep I have already forgone on her behalf, cannot even be bothered to sit up? By now, three-year-old Alex has climbed into bed, though, so all slumber soon ceases. We lie in bed together, our whole family, complete. The best minutes of the day.
At this point, a fork appears in the road, depending on which of us has to go to London today. Tina and I both have jobs that permit us to work selected days from home. I look after Alex on a Thursday and his mother spends the day with him on Monday. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, he is in nursery from 7.30am until 5.30pm. My mother-in-law helps with the pick-ups and drop-offs, as well as the washing and ironing. We pay her a small monthly retainer for these chores, which discreetly bumps up her pension and helps keep her grandson in chocolate buttons. However, by placing this arrangement on a financial footing, my mother-in-law is understandably reluctant to perform any grandmotherly tasks which fall outside her remit. We rarely arrive home after a long day at the office to discover, to our surprise and delight, someone has baked a cake or hidden a thimble.
So one of us goes to work in London, sometimes two of us. If it’s me I make sure I have enough time to eat breakfast, which is the same breakfast I eat every day except Sunday – half a grapefruit, a glass of orange juice from a carton, a slice of wholemeal toast and Marmite, and a mug of strong black coffee, brewed in a one-person cafétière. On Sundays I have black coffee, warm croissants and good strawberry jam. After six days of abstinence, the sudden Sunday combination of sugar, caffeine and pleasure propels me to a state of near-euphoria. This is usually the most alive I feel all week. For about half an hour, things seem possible.fn2
fn2. In the interests of full, Patrick Bateman-like disclosure, here are the brands which make up this breakfast. Grapefruit: Jaffa, pink, organic. Orange juice: Grove Fresh Pure, organic. Bread: Kingsmill, wholemeal, medium-sliced. Low-fat spread: