PARTHURBLOG

Just behind me, on the floor in front of the chair that my great-grandfather made, is a pile of books.

To be more accurate, three piles of books, about 9 per stack. It’s my fiction hoard that won’t fit on the shelves in the hallway, where we keep our fiction.

Over my left shoulder are two more stacks, standing guard in front of the shelf that’s home to oversize art books. They, in turn, are beneath my photography books, poetry books, sociology and political books, history and current affairs books.

If I raise my eyes from the keyboard for a moment (I’ve never been able to master touch typing) there is a shelf of reference books:
two regular dictionaries;
two crossword dictionaries;
a synonym finder;
a Roget’s Thesaurus;
Schott’s Almanac 2009;
two volumes of ‘Passing Time in the Loo’;
a couple of David Wallechinsky’s massive compendia of trivia;
a dictionary of Latin phrases;
a dictionary of human thought;
a compact version of ‘The Times Atlas of the World’;
a rhyming dictionary;
a couple of books of quotations.

Valhalla

Walk out of the study, across the hall and into the family room, and you’ll find music books, travel books, film books, card game books, puzzle books and the Children’s Britannica.

In the loft, four shelving units house most of our hardback fiction, biography, Eastern philosophy, psychology, science and craft books.

Even the kitchen has a three-shelf unit, stacked with cookbooks and gardening books.

I shudder to think how much I have spent over the past forty years amassing this collection. Actually, I don’t – because I no longer think about it. I tried that a few years ago, in the hope of worrying myself into a stop, but it didn’t work. I continued to buy more than I read.

And yet the list of things I discover I am supposed to have read grows ever-longer. Today I found a ‘1001 Books to Read Before You Die’ website, which categorised the selection into centuries. Of the seventy-or-so from the 2000s I own six and have read one.

Which set me thinking about earlier masterpieces that have escaped my purview: huge swathes of C19th classics shouting for my attention; warehouses of postmodernism demanding my time; giants of the Great American Novel standing defiantly, looking for a literary fight.

A fight that I will never win.

Each time I turn up a list of the books I should have read, I discover titles of which I have no knowledge. By writers I do not know.

Here’s an example; Time Magazine’s All Time 100 Novels (although it only goes back to 1923, the year Time was first published). This list includes Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather), Their Eyes Were Watching for God (Zora Neale Hurston) and Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone). All US novels, but that’s not the point. Taking the editors’ choices at face value, they are among the greatest ever written – and I’ve never heard of them.

I used to find this thrilling; now it just induces guilt.

Guilt that I consume my fair share of pop fiction (even highly respected crime writers like George Pelecanos and Richard Price are, let’s face it, hardboiled entertainers). But also guilt when  I am reading books that are suppose to be good for me – like Mark Thomas’ very funny polemic about Coca Cola, and Ben Goldacre’s attack on the media’s treatement of science and health.

While I’m trying to get to stay ahead in my understanding of the modern world, a little voice (which is getting ever louder) keeps saying:

“What about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? What about Dickens or Hardy? Or Austen or Bronte? Even Bellow or Updike?”

My elder son is putting me to shame. Like many young men in their late teens, he’s a fan of horror, and so is returning to original sources – he’s halfway through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Shelley’s Frankenstein next on the bedside table.

I’ve read neither.

And I’ve reached a stage where I notice that there are more unticked boxes on the list than there are ticks. More gaps than fill-ins. More ignorance than bliss.

Nirvana

And so I have a request of the book trade.

Please stop.

Given that publishers don’t make any money, that only James Patterson and Jacqueline Wilson earn anything from public lending rights, and that we’re all going to spend another fortune moving our paperback collections onto Sony Readers or Amazon Kinders (like we did with VHS-to-DVD, and we’re expected to again with Blu-Ray), can we just press the pause button for a little while?

The sum total of human wisdom, love and folly has already been well documented. There is no need for yet another variation on any of the well-worked themes. We’re done.

If there are, indeed 1001 masterpieces to read before I die, then I don’t need any more. That’s enough, already. Do the maths: 300 pages per book, 500 words a page; that’s 150 million words I have to get through.

Well, I’ve checked my diary, and I’m busy for the next 30 years. So please stop.

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