Literary joys in lockdown

Lockdown has been tough for everyone, but from a personal perspective, one of its few high notes thus far has been that I have been reading as though possessed.

The year had already started well on the book front: by mid-March, I’d read 10 titles. About a week later, when I started working from home because of COVID-19 – seven days ahead of the curve – I was about half way through what would be my eleventh book of the year.

Perhaps I should explain a little: for some anal reason or other, I like lists – and I keep ones of books I’ve read, films I’ve seen at the cinema and live performances of various sorts, together with a bit of a rating system.

Additionally, in as much as I ever make new year resolutions, reading more is a perpetual promise I make to myself.

Strangely enough, it’s also the only one of those lists that is thriving this year. Roughly a book a week until I went into lockdown. In the 15 weeks since, the total is 23.

That doesn’t include anything I haven’t finished – and there have been one or two: almost always when I’m struggling to get going again after something that has absolutely grabbed me and refused to let go until the last page.

Some of the books involved are very slender – not least because I started reading poetry quite seriously. But then again, more than one book has been well over 400 pages.

Indeed, the one that I was reading when I went into lockdown was one such example – Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery.

Eco’s The Name of the Rose was the first literary novel I ever read voluntarily. It took me ages, but I loved it. I subsequently spent a long time getting through Foucault’s Pendulum.

Like those, The Prague Cemetery is about conspiracies: Eco is obsessed with them – and he is very good at showing you how they are created and how they grow.

There’s something unpleasant about the taste that The Prague Cemetery leaves in the mouth (albeit less so than after reading pretty much anything by Nabokov), given the nature of the anti-Semitic conspiracies that are created in this book. Almost all the characters really existed and what Eco has done is gloriously written and shines an unforgiving light on the conspiracy industry.

After that, Autumn and Winter, the first two volumes of Ali Smith’s seasons quartet. Written about a Britain in the wake of the 2016 referendum result, these are both are wonderful. Stunningly imaginative, they challenge the reader in unexpected and poetic ways. A joy to read and I look forward to the next two.

If you fancy something a bit more factual, then Hold on Edna! Is the story of the birth of the NHS, from the first baby born in it, Aneira Thomas – and I reviewed it here.

Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party is a classic murder mystery in a closed room. I found it really quite irritating until I metaphorically slapped myself around the chops to remember that most of the characters in Agatha Christie are irritating too.

Foley has created a seriously tense story that will have you turning the pages madly to the end.

And now to Ransom Riggs and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and its sequel, Hollow City.

These are wonderful works of fantasy; beautifully written, and illustrated by the most extraordinary vintage photographs, which both inspired the stories themselves and also give a really different feel to the books. I loved the first one – but the second is even better.

Wonderful stuff – and a perfect illustration that ‘children’s books’ can have plenty to reward adult reading.

On the fantasy front, it took me two goes at it, but I finally made my way through John Gardner’s novella, Grendel.

This entry into the Fantasy Masterworks selection is an alternate take on Beowulf and is short, but dense with ideas and images, and has a wonderful sense of the mythological that makes it very special indeed.

I mentioned poetry, and I’ve been reading a fair few slender volumes, so let me give particular mentions to Wendy Cope’s Serious Concerns, Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Margaret Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House.

In a melding of poetry and prose, I finally got around to reading the very short – but utterly stunning – Grief is the Thing with Feather by Max Porter. Do read – possibly after reading Ted Hughes’s crow poems first.

I’ve already mentioned Atwood, but if her poetry is good, her short story collection, Stone Mattress is, for me, even better. Frankly, it is the sort of dark gothic stuff that has lingered in the mind since.

It hasn’t all been ‘arty’: I’ve also finally read Stephen King’s one vampire novel, Salem’s Lot (and loved it.

But my bookish highlight of the last few weeks is absolutely a literary one.

For various reasons, I got around to James Baldwin and his semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain.

It is stunning. I feel a link because, while not personally knowing the Pentecostalism of speaking in tongues, I have experienced other elements of the evangelistic Christianity that he describes.

But beyond that, Baldwin, in this gloriously written debut, seems to me to make the lived experience of those with a heritage of slavery to be immediate and understandable to all. I have never seen it, and felt an understanding of it, so clearly.

It is an incredible book and, if I had to recommend just one from this lockdown of reading, that would be it.

I’ve just ordered more Baldwin – so what more can I say?

The books are sorted

Every year it’s the same: as the beach hoves into view, there’s a tower of books somewhere in the flat that, like a form of literary jenga, has items removed and others added as the days pass.

This is the holiday reading list and the compilation of it has become a tradition.

There are people who look askance at me and ask why on earth I don’t read on some form of electronic device and thus remove the need to carry books at all.

There are a number of reasons – including my lack of interest in exposing electronic gadgets to the sea, salt, sand etc.

There’s the point that, while I am far from being a luddite when it comes to technology and while I do have a tablet, I actually like books – not just for what they hold within their pages, but for the sheer physical feel and smell and look of them.

And it is most certainly true that, since I spend most of my working days in front of a computer screen, not to spend recreational time reading on another screen!

This year’s reading list is topped – or bottomed, given how the pile is currently constructed – by a collection of the translated works of Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

Machado had to flee Franco’s fascists and made his way over the border into southern France, where he died in Collioure. He was buried in the village cemetery.

It seems like the time to get to grips with such a figure.

Next up, was going to have been Stephen King’s Under the Dome, an 880-page epic.

I ‘discovered’ King back in the early to mid-’80s: I’d injured my back at polytechnic as a result of the actions of someone running a ‘voluntary’ workshop, and some months later been thrown off the course after my family GP signed me off for a week extra at Easter because of the state I was in.

Over the next year or so, I found I could barely read. I’d pick up a book – sometimes something new, sometimes an old favourite – but could rarely get more than a few pages in.

One day, I was browsing a little local bookshop in Lancaster, when I came across some of King’s novels.

I don’t think I’d ever read any horror before – and if you’d asked at the time, I suspect I would have declared that it didn’t appeal to me. But something made me pull Christine off the shelf and decide to buy it.

It was finished in days. The Stand followed. And many more.

When I need a reading boost, I still turn to King.

Last year, I’d had such a need and had bought myself Revival, which I enjoyed. As a result, my parents decided to get me Under the Dome for Christmas. For various reasons, I only got my hands on it just under a fortnight ago – and thought how apt that timing was, as it would make marvelous holiday reading.

It won’t be seeing Collioure.

A couple of days later, going through another slow-reading phase, I picked it up. It was finished in eight days – a rollercoaster of a tale. King really is a master storyteller: he makes it seem impossibly simple, but his stories have complexity and great subtlety and they catch a great deal of truth about the condition of being human.

With that now off the list, I’ve picked up Duma Key to give me another dose of King.

Every year, I try to give myself some ‘serious’ literature to read. I’ve been saying for some time that this would be The Year of Proust – except that it won’t. I need easy reading.

With that in mind, Jonathon Meades’s Museum Without Walls has also now fallen off the list.

What are still there are Anno Dracula Cha Cha Cha and Moriarty The Hound of the D’Ubervilles, both by Kim Newman.

I’ve read his first two Dracula books – and thoroughly enjoyed them – so decided to take the third, plus the Moriarty book, which promises more cultural mash-up fun, and already has me thinking of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (The book. Not the film).

The second volume of Paul O’Grady’s autobiography, The Devil Rides Out, is present on the pile, as is John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.

And then there’s the book I’ve just started, but won’t get anywhere near through before departure later this week.

Back in 1987, I picked up a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I was impressed enough that I bought Dune Messiah, but not impressed by that (I no longer even have it).

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, it seemed the perfect time to give it a re-read – and already I’m seeing and appreciating things I didn’t first time around. It's also possible that the film has managed to remove any sense of the themes of the book from my mind.

Finally, the most recent tome to join the stack is Redemption Ark, the second part of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space trilogy. I don’t mind a bit of space opera and read the first part a few years ago. Since it’s part of The Other Half’s extensive sci-fi collection, it was an easy pick.

And with just over 24 hours to go, that’s the holiday reading sorted. Perhaps …

There can never be too many books

And so it is that World Book Day is upon us again – and almost gone, at the time of writing.

In an era where, increasingly, digital seems to dominate, it’s wonderful to think about books.

Yes, yes: I know that books can be digital too, but, to me – and many millions more – there is nothing to beat the tactile joy of a real book. Indeed, for billions of people on this planet, the old-fashioned variety of bound paper is all that they can hope to have access to.

Do you remember the joy when, as a child, you managed to read a book on your own for the first time?

I cannot remember the title of the first book I managed like that, but I remember sitting in a small red and white straw child’s basket chair with it, and being so proud when I got to the last page.

Not that long after, I took enormous pleasure in Enid Blyton’s Well Really, Mr Twiddle, which had me hooting with hysterical laughter.

Many years later, I got pretty much the same sense of pride from reading an entire Asterix book in German. Books always offer potential for new moments of personal achievement.

At the beginning of my twenties, I suffered some sort of breakdown after being injured and then chucked out of polytechnic. For ages, I couldn’t read – even much-loved books could not hold my concentration beyond the first few pages.

What revived reading for me was Stephen King. I picked up Carrie in a local bookshop and couldn’t it down. Then The Stand and It, with many more to follow.

I ‘discovered’ Terry Pratchett before he was anywhere near national treasure status, standing in a small sci-fi and fantasy bookshop to meet him once when nobody else was even around.

The result is three very precious signed volumes of the earliest Discworld novels.

Books – among the very first things I’d unpack in my nomadic early adulthood: get those out and it would start to feel like home.

Books, which provide a wonderful pre-holiday ritual when considering what from my buckling shelves I wish to take.

Books, which bring with them knowledge and entertainment.

While the majority of the books that I have bought in recent years have been non-fiction, I still seek out good storytelling too.

Penguin are now releasing the entire Maigret collection, and with new translations that finally do Simenon’s noir novels justice. Those are on pre-order with me.

There are old friends that I have read many times already and will probably read many times more: Jan Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (which I hated at school), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Stephen King’s The Shining (the movie was crap) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, all of which I find new things in every time I pick them up.

I have a few antiquarian (relish that word) books – some up to 200 years old. They are to be treasured and looked after: I feel only a temporary guardian.

And I also rather pride myself on having a collection of books about German history – no! Not that period! – that would, I suspect, count as pretty decent.

I still judge a bookshop on its history section: on whether it is just full of WWII and the Nazis or goes beyond that.

Of course, talking of the Nazis, it’s always worth remembering how they burnt books on Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 – right next to the Humboldt University. That symbolism should tell you something about the power of the written word. And today, of course, we have groups of religious fundamentalists who want to deny people – and women and girls in particular – the right to learn.

Whether in the deepest, darkest days or winter, curled up on the sofa with a good read and a hot chocolate or under a parasol on the beach in the height of summer, is there really anything that can compare to the pleasure that can be found in the pages of a good book?

So let’s celebrate books today – and those who create them and those who read them – but let’s never stop loving books for all the other days of the year.

And PS: make sure you love your local library too.