Ignorance

I’ve spent the week bemoaning how badly read I am.

I give away books every week. I read, on average, a book a day. And yet I will never read, or come close to reading, all the good novels that will be published this year or any year. That’s a bit depressing.

Never mind the good books published this year, but what about the classics? I’ve got through a fair few of them: the Brontes, Austen, Dickens, George Bloody Eliot…I have never understood the fuss that people make about Middlemarch. Dorothea and her inherent goodness bother me.

And that wouldn’t even begin to dent the canon.

During the summer, for instance, I got very annoyed when Vintage did that big ‘21’ reissue of all their ‘good’ books. I hadn’t read quite a number of them; one I’d actually not heard of. It was the same when Penguin brought out those lovely Essentials books. To my shame, I’d never heard a whisper of Cats’ Cradle. The English Department would have me stoned.

The problem is surely quantity. If you go into a big high street bookshop, you’re surrounded by more books than you could ever hope to read in a lifetime-hell, in two lifetimes, realistically. A girl has to eat. And sleep. And apply glittery eye shadow. There are great books published every week. How can you ever hope to read all the ‘good’ books? And I don’t just mean the ones that get loads of attention. There are that many decent works of fiction in print that you’re guaranteed to miss some of the great ones.

This fills me with a cold sort of fear. What if there was a great book out there, one that had exactly what you were looking for, and you missed it because there are so many books jammed together on the shelf? How awful. What if I’d never read a book by Penelope Lively? Or my beloved Susan Hill? Surely I’d be dead by now.

Then you have literary snobbery, and that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Some of what I read is classified by high brow types as ‘rubbish’. Books are not rubbish. Empty milk cartons are rubbish. My cooking is, by and large, rubbish. Books are not. Books are good things. Any book is better than no book at all.