I’m very tempted indeed by this reading challenge, largely for the following reasons:
1) I have, slightly over-zealously, already used up my holiday allowance.
2) I have, slightly over-zealously, already used up every penny to my name, thus precluding actual international travel.
3) The weather in London is very close to making me suicidal. A bit of escapism could be just what the doctor ordered.
Deterrents include the fact that I already have a reading list as long as this man’s arm, and will be starting a part-time MA course in a few months which will leave me very little time to read for pleasure. Is anyone else taking the plunge? Perhaps if I had someone to hold my hand…
For anyone that is tempted, may I recommend Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America and Henry Miller’s Aller Retour New York, both of which will be published by Hesperus in July of this year. In my view, the best travel writing reveals as much about its author as the place described. That’s very definitely true of both of these works, by men not famous for holding their tongues. I love the following interchange, documented by Brooke as taking place between himself and a young American during his voyage to the land of opportunity:
‘Of what nationality are you?’ he asked.
His face showed bewilderment when he heard. ‘I thought all Englishmen had moustaches,’ he said. I told him of the infinite variety, within the homogeneity, of our race. He did not listen, but settled down near me with the eager kindliness of a child. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’ll never understand America. No, Sir. No Englishman can understand America. I’ve been in London. In your Houses of Parliament there is one door for peers to go in at, and one for ordinary people. Did I laugh some when I saw that? You bet your, America’s not like that. In America one man’s just as good as another. You’ll never understand America.’ I was all humility.
I’m off to trim my moustache and ponder this challenge a little further…
Ellie
Does a travel book have to be a travel book to count as a travel book!? I hate travel books!
But I am just about to start reading Julia Smith’s Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000 (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/showbook.php?id=0199244278). That will have me travelling back to a time and place I know precious little about.
Does such count!?
Hi Mark,
The challenge seems to be fairly broad in allowing any books that refer specifically to a ‘foreign’ place (sure Said would have something to say about that…), as long as the location is an integral part of the book. So that Julia Smith title looks like it’d be perfect.
I’m wondering whether I can include ‘Life: A User’s Manual’. I’ve wanted to read it for absolutely ages, and it IS set in Paris, after all… might be stretching it though.
Ellie
I was planning to reread the Alexandria Quartet this summer. Do you think that counts as four books?
Incidentally, I’m pleased to see that you’re planning to publish a Henry Miller. I think the trend nowadays is either to completely misinterpret him as some fringe member of the Beat Generation, and thus dismiss him as somebody to be read only by 19-year-olds who haven’t yet discovered hygene or real literature, or to completely dismiss him as a foul-mouthed self-obsessed nonentity whose only ability was to shock. While I think that the foul-mouthedness and self-obsession do sometimes stand in the way of his work (and Durrell said something similar to him in a letter, responding to the Rosy Crucifixion), I think the tendency to dismiss him altogether is very much a baby-bathwater situation. His commentary on the conflict between raw humanity and modern living is probably even more important now than it was at the time.
Just so you in the marketing department know what you’re dealing with… a couple of years ago I had a conversation with the fiction buyer of a high street branch of a well-known bookshop chain where I was working. I’d noticed that there weren’t any of his books in stock and, as the shop was in a city with a small but dedicated counter-culture following, I recommended that she get something – even just Tropic of Cancer – into stock. The fiction buyer replied “Henry Miller? No, I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s nothing to do with me. He only wrote plays.”
You can’t see this, Rob, but I just banged my head against my desk.
Incidentally, just found this Miller blog that may be of interest to you: http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/
I’m sure the Alexandria Quartet would count as four books, but I’ve never got my head around the practice of rereading. I’m so painfully aware that, despite all my best efforts, I will not in one lifetime be able to read all the books I would like to read, that to return to those that I’ve already read makes me feel genuinely guilty. Perhaps it’s a confidence thing – I live in dread of that moment when you have to choose between admitting you’ve never read a seminal work and nodding along trying to minimise the appearance of your own idiocy… Although perhaps I shouldn’t admit to these things in public forums.
Ellie
I know what you mean about not being able to read everything you’d like to, but don’t dismiss rereading! Some books are made for it – I thought Foucault’s Pendulum was much better on the second reading, and the Quartet is becoming something of a summer tradition for me. So, is it better to have a passing acquaintance with many such books, or a good knowledge of slightly fewer?
That said, I do feel very guilty when I don’t finish a book. Even if it’s a big lump of worm-ridden compost. Though I’ve paid for it, and it’s then spent the first X hundred pages assaulting me with clanging dialogue, unedited rambles, vacant characters, obvious or banal plotting and cliched or self-indulgent style, I still feel like I’M betraying IT when I leave it unfinished.