About A Week: Now Read On
Peter Hinchliffe decides it's time to read books he really wants to read - not the books he thinks he ought to be reading.
There you are, absorbed in the pages of a book, when you come upon a paragraph which speaks directly to you.
It happened to me last week. The book? The Time Of Your Life, a delightful celebration of the so-called twilight years, articles, poems and relevant snippets compiled by John Burningham.
And there, embedded in an excellent piece of writing by Patrick Sergeant, was the following:
“The leisure of old age means more time for books and for books you enjoy. You realise at last that all the books you know you ought to read you now will not, and it is a great relief to turn to the books you enjoy instead of those that supposedly nourish the mind.’’
For most of my life I’ve been drawing up lists of must-read classics.
I enjoy reading. I have happily lost myself for days on end in some of the greatest works ever written. War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Remembrance of Things Past, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield…
Yet there are classic writers - a long list of them - that I find indigestible.
Jane Austen for one.
Oh I know she’s a clever writer. I know she is amusing, witty, the most alert social observer of her age. But whenever I try to read her, a floodgate is lowered in my brain, denying entry to the flow of her prose.
There’s an amusing letter in today’s Times newspaper, written by Mrs Brenda Brissenden who lives in Devon.
“Sir, In an effort to wean my eight-year-old granddaughter away from television cartoons I showed a video of Pride and Prejudice to her over a period of days. So great was her enjoyment that, as it ended, she asked “Is there a Pride and Prejudice II?’’
I’m with Mrs Brissenden’s granddaughter. I thoroughly enjoyed Pride and Prejudice - The Video. I would gladly watch Pride and Prejudice II and III.
But Pride and Prejudice the novel…. My attention sinks faster than a lead submarine, refusing progress beyond page 20.
In my case, a puritanical drive to self-education, the compilation of lists of must-read worthy books, results from leaving school at the age of sixteen, instead of going on to university.
That Puritanism, which led me to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Proust, has brought me great pleasure.
But there has been pain. A kind of pain. The pain of not liking Miss Jane, when so many admire, nay worship, her skill at weaving words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into books.
As if the pain of failing to relish the prose of the estimable Jane were not sufficient, Penguin have just produced a list of 20 “great ideas’’ books. “Read the revolution’’ Penguin advise on their Web site.
Apprehensively I scan the list. Seneca, St Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, William Hazlitt…
Oh dear! I’ve only read one of the twenty, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Ah well! Tear up the top-20. And back to reading the books I really want to read. Such as John Burningham’s splendid collection, which contains ample material to promote serious, and reassuring, thought in the ageing mind.
