Better Dead Than Well Read ...

I've always been a freak for lists. When I was a kid, you couldn't pry the Book of Lists out of my hand. Now I'm always up to compare my endless opinions against someone else's. So the English geek in me was sort of entranced by this story from the London Times:

10 Books Not To Read Before You Die

The producer of at least three television shows that you may quite like shares with us his definitive list of books that just aren't worth the bother

Richard Wilson

Recommended lists of ‘essential’ reading are the most pernicious ‘to do’ lists of all. Lists of physical achievements or magical holiday destinations or wonderful restaurants or fabulous hotels make you feel like your life has been wasted; a list of great books you should have read makes you feel like your brain has been wasted.

Most people embarking on a journey into a new book will feel they have to hack through a hundred pages of dense undergrowth before their conscience will allow them to give it up as a lost cause. But how many people feel secure enough in their own judgment even to do that? How many times have we all ploughed on to the end to find there’s actually no treasure after all? A book, even a useless one, can take several days out of your life so it’s a big investment.

The best way to fight the massed ranks of recommended books is with an offensively glib and, if possible, ill-informed reason for not bothering with them.

10: Ulysses – James Joyce

There’s a brilliant scene in the much-underrated sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, when Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) snatches a book from Mr La-di-dah Gunner Graham and says:

‘What’s this you’re reading? Useless?’

‘Ulysses, Sergeant Major.’

At school I remember my English teacher saying that he knew no one who had managed to get to the end of it. It does sound rubbish, doesn’t it? I’d have thought it was the duty of a great book to drag you along to the last page. But in a way, that’s good to know: if it’s famously hard going you have the perfect excuse not to bother with it.

9: Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

8: For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

The Hemingway style is impressive at first. Simple sentences with few descriptions. They avoid adverbs and adjectives and, as a change from the over-elaborate works of Dickens and Austen, it’s OK for a while. Then you realise it’s a bit dry and boring and the more you find out about Hemingway, the more you realise he was a bore too: a terrible macho bore obsessed with bullfighting, guns, boxing and trying to catch big fish; really quite a tiresome bloke you wouldn’t want to spend time with.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

6: The Dice Man – Luke Reinhart

Basically, this fairly unpleasant bloke does whatever his dice tell him to do, which is often quite terrible. But there’s a flaw in the structure of this book. He writes down an option for each number of the dice and then lets the dice decide what he should do. ‘Throw a six and rape the woman upstairs’?! How did that get on his list of things to do? If he’d written down, ‘Throw a six and have three crispy pancakes for tea’ he wouldn’t have got into so much trouble.

5: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Dreary ramblings of an unreliable and workshy tosspot. Its sole distinction consists in the creation of ‘Gonzo journalism’, which made it OK for journalists, particularly rock journalists, to get shit-faced with whoever they happened to be writing about.

4: The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolff

I don’t know if Naomi is a genuine academic – I couldn’t be arsed to Google her – if she is, she is probably Emeritus Professor of the bleeding obvious. The Beauty Myth is about how women feel under pressure to look good and lose weight. There you go. That’s it. I could get a similarly sophisticated level of socio-political analysis from the fishwives on Loose Women.

3: War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Way, way too long.

2: The Iliad -- Homer

The very idea that you are somehow culturally incomplete without knowledge of Homer is ridiculous. The Iliad is one of the most boring books ever written and it’s not just a boring book, it’s a boring epic poem; all repetitive battle scenes with a lot of reproaching and challenging and utterances escaping the barrier of one’s teeth and nostrils filling with dirt and helmet plumes nodding menacingly. There’s a big fight between Achilles and Hector and that’s about it.

1: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

From what I can gather it’s Mills and Boon from the olden days, and really boring Mills and Boon at that. I did try reading a Jane Austen novel once, but it hadn’t got going by fifty pages so I guiltily gave up; the characters spoke in a very oblique way and it seemed to be all about hypocrisy and manners and convention; worse than that, it was really difficult to find the doing word in a sentence.

True confession time: Out of the 10, I'll admit to having read four: Lord of the Rings (I was like 10), For Whom The Bell Tolls (can't avoid Hemingway if you get a Master's in lit), Fear and Loathing ... (a journalism school requirement) and Pride and Prejudice (I was getting in touch with my inner chick lit self). Truth be told, they all kind of sucked, at least in the sense that I wouldn't read them again even if I was on a five-hour flight to New York without a book and I found one of them in the seat-back pocket. But, jeez, how do you make a list like this and leave off so many prime candidates. My Top Five additions?

1. Anything at all by Joyce Carol Oates. In the time it took me to write this blog entry, she wrote another 700 pages of dreck.

2. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. Makes a great doorstop.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. Great writer. Not a great work, no matter what the critics say.

4. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison. Call me a racist if you must, but it just doesn't illuminate much of anything for me.

5. This blog. If you're here now, you should really reconsider your taste in e-literature.