Category: Books

I have now read all the great writers!

Or, more accurately, I have now read the last 22 titles in the Marshall Cavendish 54-installment Great Writers partwork that I bought, but did not read, religiously every week for a year in the mid/late 1980s, and which I blogged about last year.

And since those blogs were really about transclass identity and cultural capital, what better way to report my findings than star ratings!

In ascending order:

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe 

★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
H.E. Bates, Love for Lydia
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 

★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
Graham Greene, The Comedians 
EM Forster, A Passage to India 
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady 
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Anthology of Fear: 20 Haunting Stories for Winter Nights

★★★★★★★☆☆☆
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 
Robert Graves, I, Claudius 
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

★★★★★★★★
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim 
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga 
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I will not be taking any questions at this time.

The absurd reading challenge(s) of 2024

Last year, I challenged myself to read (alongside whatever else) a very specific 12.427kg or (I think) 33908.807cm3 of books – i.e., twelve absurdly outsized volumes, of which I will now concede the physical dimensions of Tale of Genji and Vollmann’s Imperial were not necessarily disproportionate. (Unheralded, and at the other end of the scale, I also decided to read one Clifford Simak and one John Dickson Carr per month, even though they were all sensibly scaled A-format paperbacks.)

This year, my only writing-related reading commitment is 200 contemporary short stories about climate change (eleven collections), for which I will also read three older classic anthologies.

So I feel the urge to multiply the challenges this year:

  1. Read all 20 remaining titles in the Great Writers series (which I blogged about quite a bit last month, beginning here)

2. Read more of the trilogies/series that are languishing in all these boxes, still unpacked fifteen months after moving house: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–26 ); Arturo Barea’s The Forging of a Rebel trilogy (1941–46); Michael Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet (1981–2006); Madison Smarrt Bell’s Haiti trilogy (1995–2004), of which I have the first two volumes; Alastair Reynolds’s Poseidon’s Children trilogy (2012–15); Malka Older’s Centennial Cycle (2016–18), of which I’ve already read and liked the first book; and B. Catling’s Vorrh trilogy (2012–18), or at least the unnecessarily large hardback edition I have of the first volume. And depending on how reading Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–21) for 1. goes, I’ll probably read the other Forsyte trilogies: A Modern Comedy (1925–28) and End of the Chapter (1931–32).

3. I will continue to make my way through the stacks of Simak and Carr, but at a slower pace this year. Instead, I will read at the rate of slightly more than one a month, eleven Peter Van Greenaways and four Abraham Polonskys.

All of these plans are subject to change.

And probably doomed to failure.

Especially when thing like this arrive in the post.

My top 13 books of 2023

This year, I have read 304 books (300 of them for the first time):
all of the world …  137 (but only 100 women)
…except straight white men writing in English 136
and multi-authored or otherwise don’t fit 31

And here, in roughly this order, are my top 13:

M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023)
Anthony Joseph, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018)
Karen Joy Fowler, Booth (2022)
Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006)
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013)
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (2014)
Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things: An Autobiography (2000)
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form & Emptiness (2021)
Nick Gilbert, Roadrunner: Radio On, Road Movies and the A4 (2023)
Rachel Heiman, Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (2015)
Jessy Randall, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (2022)
John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man aka The Three Coffins (1935)

The total is higher than usual, probably because fulfilling the the absurdly large book challenge of 2023 meant I overcompensated with a surfeit of graphic novels, novellas and short novels/collections, but for anyone interested, here is the complete list

Anthology of Fear: 20 Haunting Stories for Winter Nights (1988)
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades (2021)
Steve Alten, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (1997)
–. Meg: Origins (2011)
Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017)
Julia Armfield, Our Wives under the Sea (2022)
Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, Angel Catbird, volume one (2016)

Raffaella Baccoloni and Tom Moylan, eds, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003)
Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender (1900)
Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier (2019)
–. That Old Country Music (2020)
Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (2023)
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (2017)
Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1788)
Michael Bérubé, The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and Detachment from Our Species (2024)
Tim Bradstreet et al., Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword, volume one (2012)
Mary Bright, Keynotes (1893)
Edward Brooke-Hitching, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History (2020)
Xan Brooks, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times (2017)
Mikita Brottman, Offensive Films, revised edition (2005)
Eric Brown, Engineman (1994)
John Brunner, The Great Steamboat Race (1983)
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworlds and Catastrophes: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002)
Charles Burns, Black Hole (1995–2005)

James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress (2012)
Italo Calvino, Adam, One Afternoon (1952)
Ramsey Campbell, The House on Nazareth Hill (1996)
Louise Candlish, Our House (2018)
John Dickson Carr, Hag’s Nook (1933)
–. The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933)
–. The Eight of Swords (1934)
–. The Blind Barber (1934)
–. Death-Watch (1935)
–. The Hollow Man aka The Three Coffins (1935)
–. The Arabian Nights Murder (1936)
–. (as Carter Dickson), The Punch and Judy Murders (1937)
–. The Crooked Hinge (1938)
–. The Dead Man’s Knock (1958)
–. The House at Satan’s Elbow (1965)
–. Panic in Box C (1966)
William Carroll, Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema (2022)
James Chapman, Dr. No: The First James Bond Film (2022)
Jason Ciaramella et al, Joe Hill’s The Cape (2012)
Kimberly Cleveland, Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds (2024)
Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, #Misanthropocene 24 Theses (2014)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)
–. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2009)
–. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2010)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1849–50)
Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley, Attila, My Attila! (1896)
Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021)

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Gary Day, Class (2001)
Abigail Dean, Girl A (2021)
Kelly Sue Deconick and David Lopez, Captain Marvel: Higher, Faster, Further, More (2014)
Emma Donoghue, Room (2010)
Gardner Dozois, ed., Best New SF 7 (1993)
Alice Dunbar Nelson, Ye Game and Playe of Chesse, and Other Stories (2020)
Amantine Aurore Dupin, Indiana (1832)

Jennifer Egan, The Keep (2006)
Dave Eggers, The Every (2021)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA (2001)
–. Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream (2005)
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859)
Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet (2015)
Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon et al, Preacher, volume one (1996–7)
–., Preacher, volume two (1997–8)
–., Preacher, volume three (1998)
Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (2019)
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence (2021)
Henrietta Everett, Iras: A Mystery (1896)

Peter Falk, Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life (2006)
Mick Farren, Armageddon Crazy (1989)
Howard Fast, Tony and the Wonderful Door (1952)
Julia Constance Fletcher, The Head of Medusa (1880)
Eric Flint, The Philosophical Strangler (2001)
Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture:  Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017)
Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (2021)
Karen Joy Fowler, Booth (2022)
Julia Frankau, Twilight (1916)
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays To Be Privileged (2020)

Neil Gaiman et al., The Books of Magic (1990–1)
Nick Gilbert, Roadrunner: Radio On, Road Movies and the A4 (2023)
Natalia Ginzburg, A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays (2002)
Tariq Goddard, The Picture of Contented New Wealth: A Metaphysical Horror (2009)
Thomas J. Gorman, Growing Up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women (2017)
Sean Austin Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Fiction (2017)
Alasdair Gray, A History Maker (1994)
Isabel Greenberg, Glass Town (2020)
Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman, Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (2017)

Assad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (2018)
Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1933)
–. Woman in the Dark (1933)
–. The Return of the Thin Man (1935/1938)
Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (1999)
M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023)
Dan Hassler-Forest, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2021)
–. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label (2022)
Mary Hawker, Cecilia de Noël (1891)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Terry Hayes, I am Pilgrim (2012)
Jane Healey, The Animals at Lockwood Manor (2020)
Rachel Heiman, Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (2015)
Elyce Rae Helford and Christopher Weedman, eds, Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema (2023)
James Herbert, The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006)
Werner Herzog, The Twilight World (2021)
David M. Higgins, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (2021)
Natsuo Higuchi, Takekurabe (1895)
Chester Himes, The Big Gold Dream (1960)
–. All Shot Up (1960)
–. Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965)
–. The Heat’s On (1966)
–. Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Robert E. Howard, Skull-Face (1929)
Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man (1963)
Rian Hughes, XX (2020)
Cédric Hugrée, Etienne Penissat and Alexis Spire, Social Class in Europe: New Inequalities in the Old World (2017)
Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre (2019)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
–. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (2005)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Sebastien Japrisot, One Deadly Summer (1977)
Chantal Jaquet, Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-Reproduction (2014)
Stefan Jaworzyn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Companion (2003)
Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain (2021)
Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle (2014)
–. Villanelle: Hollowpoint (2014)
–. Villanelle: Shanghai (2015)
–. Villanelle: Odessa (2016)
–. Killing Eve: No Tomorrow (2018)
–. Killing Eve: Die For Me (2020)
Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs (2019)
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2002)
Ragnar Jónasson, Snow Blind (2010)
Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (2011)
–. The Establishment, And How They Get Away With It (2014)
Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)
Anthony Joseph, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018)
Christina Jurado, ed., The APEX Book of World SF 5 (2018)

Danny Katch, Socialism … Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (2015)
Geoff King, Indiewood, U.S.A.: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (2009)
–. Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film (2014)
William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History (2013)
Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (2002)

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
–. The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)
–. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2007)
Lastesis, Set Fear on Fire (2021)
Victor Lavalle, The Devil In Silver (2012)
Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton, eds, Beyond the Ruins: The Fight Against Environmental Breakdown (2021)
Ann Leckie, Provenance (2017)
Ann Lee, Atla: A Story of the Lost Island (1886)
Jeff Lemire, Essex County: Tales from the Farm (2008)
–. Essex County: Ghost Stories (2008)
–. Essex County: The Country Nurse (2009)
–. Sweet Tooth: Into the Woods (2009–10)
–. Sweet Tooth: In Captivity (2010)
–. Sweet Tooth: Animal Armies (2010–11)
Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly (2020)
Andrea Levy, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994)
–. Never Far From Nowhere (1996)
Julia Leyda, Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious (2023)
Clarice Lispector, First Stories (2015)
–. Family Ties (1960)
–. The Foreign Legion (1964)
–. Covert Joy (1971)
–. Where Were You at Night (1974)
–. The Via Crucis of the Body (1974)
–. Vision of Splendor: Light Impressions (1975)
–. Last Stories (2015)
Saci Lloyd, The Carbon Diaries: 2015 (2009)
Sarah Lotz, The Three (2014)
–. Day Four (2015)

Paul McAuley, Austral (2017)
Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (2017)
Maureen F. McHugh, Mission Child (1998)
Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, Social Mobility and Its Enemies (2018)
Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021)
Barry N. Malzberg, The Men Inside (1973)
–. The Gamesman (1975)
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (2022)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
Robert Markley, Kim Stanley Robinson (2019)
Mónica Martín, The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-Century Cinema (2023)
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (1986)
Pascal Mérigeau, Jean Renoir: A Biography (2016)
Andrew Miller, Dup Steps (2015)
Andrew Milner, Class (1999)
David Mitchell, number9dream (2001)
Michael Moorcock, London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012)
Michael Moorcock et al, The New Nature of the Catastrophe (1993)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020)
–. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022)
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013)
Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah (2022)
Bob Mortimer, And Away… (2021)
–., The Satsuma Complex (2022)
Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch (2019)
Tom Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (2021)
Abir Mukherjee, A Rising Man (2016)
Benjamin Myers, The Perfect Golden Circle, or The Strange Rites of an English Summer (2022)
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (before 1021)

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark (2022)
Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay, eds, IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000)
Violet Nicolson, The Garden of Kam (1901)
Claire North, 84K (2018)
Charlotte Northedge, The People Before (2022)

Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (2009)
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form & Emptiness (2021)

Violet Paget, A Phantom Lover (1886)
Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel (2017)
Hoa Pham, The Other Shore (2014)
Frederik Pohl, Outnumbering the Dead (1991)
Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (2000)
Abraham Polonsky and Mitchell A. Wilson (as Emmett Hogarth), The Goose is Cooked (1940)
Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things: An Autobiography (2000)
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, The Long War (2013)
–. The Long Mars (2014)
–. The Long Utopia (2015)
–. The Long Cosmos (2016)
Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013)
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)

Jessy Randall, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (2022)
Ian Rankin, West Wind (1990)
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (2020)
Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (2022)
Pearl Richards, Some Emotions and a Moral (1891)
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening (2018)
Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels (2022)
Adam Roberts, The This (2022)
David Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (2017)
David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu and Christopher T. Fan, eds, Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Forms and Formulations (2024)
Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction (2022)
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)
Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009)
Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (2023)
William Michael Rossetti, ed., The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. (1911)
Catherine Rottenberg, ed., This Is Not A Feminism Textbook (2023)
Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder (2006)
Joanna Russ, And Chaos Died (1970)

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2000–1)
–. Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2002–3)
Mike Savage, Niall Cunningham, Fiona Devine, Sam Friedman, Daniel Laurison, Lisa McKenzie, Andrew Miles, Helene Snee and Paul Wakeling, Social Class in the 21st Century (2015)
Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (2015)
Kim Sherwood, Double or Nothing (2022)
Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style (1975)
Clifford D. Simak, Cosmic Engineers (1939/50)
–. Time Is The Simplest Thing (1961)
–. Night of the Puudly (1962)–. The Werewolf Principle (1967)
–. Why Call Them Back From Heaven (1967)
–. A Heritage of Stars (1977)
–. Catface (1978)
–. The Visitors (1980)
–. Special Deliverance (1982)
–. Brother and Other Stories (1986)
–. The Marathon Photograph (1986)
–. Off-Planet (1988)
Gail Simon and J. Calafiore, Leaving Megalopolis, volume one (2013–4)
Curt Siodmak, Hauser’s Memory (1968)
Maj Sjöwal and Per Wahlöö, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke (1966)
William Sloane, To Walk the Night (1937)
–. The Edge of Running Water (1939)
Zadie Smith, The Embassy of Cambodia (2013)
–. Grand Union (2019)
–. Fraud (2023)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002)
–. Light Perpetual (2021)
Caitlin Starling, The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021)
Evdokia Stefanopoulou, The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood: A Social Semiotics of Bodies and Worlds (2023)
Mark Steven, Class War: A Literary History (2023)
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm (1911)
Henry and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year Without Summer (1983)
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or, The Murder At Road Hill House (2008)
Michael Swanwick, Griffin’s Egg (1991)
Edwin R. Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886 (2010)
Leo Szilard, The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (1961)

Robert T. Tally, The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (2024)
Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006)
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory (2022)
William Tenn, Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1 (2001)
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (2014)
Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts (2015)

Tomás Vergara, Alterity and Capitalism in Speculative Fiction: Estranging Contemporary History (2024)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (2009)
Éric Vuillard, The Order of the Day (2017)

Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street (2021)
Robert Ward, Red Baker (1985)
Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key (2019)
Rosie Warren, ed., Salvage 13: Give Dust a Tongue (2023)
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (2009)
Tom Watson, Metronome (2022)
Hadas Weiss, We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us (2019)
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990)
Jack Williamson, After World’s End (1938)
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (2014)
Aubertine Woodward Moore, Echoes from Mist-Land: Or, the Nibelungen Lay, Revealed to Lovers of Romance and Chivalry (1877)
Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (2015)

Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, eds, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022)
Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (1958)

Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (2000)

Reading The Great Writers, part six (the last one at last)

Reading The Great Writers, part five

Back when I started this, I was pretty sure

  1. it wouldn’t be listy;
  2. some point would have emerged; and
  3. I would end by announcing my plan to read all the still-unread titles in the series in 2024.

Such optimism!

Looking back, it is funny – to me at least – to see how some of my ongoing work patterns came about. My partner is constantly amused/appalled at how much time I devote, when working on some project or other, to reading absolutely everything. For example, This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook (forthcoming) contains 51 lists of 5 recommended books. I had already read about 140 of them so was confident they were appropriate examples for the multiple dimensions/agendas of the project. But none of the other 115, regardless of their critical reception, made it onto a list until I’d read it to ensure it did what we wanted it to do. Which of course also involved reading and rejecting some titles and then reading alternatives. Add in the reading to select books for the contributor chapters, and the reading for the chapters I wrote, and in total, I read 200 or so books for this one project . Which is part of the reason it took a year and half to complete, rather than the six months I’d imagined. (There are also 35 lists of 5 recommended films or TV shows, but that only involved needing to watch 11 things.)

Next year I am giving several talks on climate fiction, but at least I’ve had the good sense to look specifically at short fiction. Although not enough sense to come up with a promised sample size of less than 200 stories.

When I’m caught up in such obviously mad behaviour, I tend to think of it as doing due diligence. But really it is a kind broken-ness rooted in class anxiety. The need to feel not a sham. (I think this also explains the earnest tone of much that I write, and the flippancy with which I tend to present my work. Constantly trying to prove I’ve earned my stripes, desperately trying to please.)

(Academic friends, I might sometimes be the dreaded reader 2, I’m sorry, but at least I will have (re)read and/or (re)watched your primary texts before writing my report recommending changes that directly contradict everything reader 1 said.)

***

As I looked back over all those years of reading, I thought I would find myself wishing that it had been easier to find my way. And for sure, there are some things I would rather not have gone through (and I don’t just mean Henry James’s later novels, though they are on the list).

But then I think of all the moments (and days and weeks and years) of kindness and generosity I would have missed out on from all those (often somewhat bemused) teachers, librarians, friends, bookstore workers…

(And all those moments of absurdity, too. I mean, who reads Sir Charles Grandison when there’s no pressure on them to do so?  Who contemplates getting inked with a Moby-Dick barcode? (My professorial inaugural lecture, which should finally happen late next spring, will climax with the utterly inappropriate unveiling of a far more visible and even more absurd tattoo. Just need to work out the fanfare music. (I’ll definitely enter like a boxer through dry ice and dancing spotlights to Rollins Band’s ‘Shine’.) Just need to schedule getting the ink done at the right time once the date of the lecture is finalised.))

Part of my motivation as a teacher and my commitment to working in the less privileged parts of the sector has been to try to make it easier for working class and other marginalised students to find their feet at university, to navigate institutions not designed for them and cultures that are new to them, and to become confident about their own worth. (Although the long war on HE makes that harder every year, as of course has my own becoming-middle-classness and, ironically enough, the cultural capital it entails. Oh, and getting old and being perpetually exhausted by the job.)

On some level, of course, this commitment and motivation is inspired by that Oxford interview wanker. No one should have to go through that sort of thing. But it is much more rooted in the actions of those who, with no obligation to care, cared.

I just read an interview with my friend (and, as this quote suggests, a role model to strive and fail and strive to live up to) Tom Moylan, in which he says

First and foremost, I’ve always considered my primary role to be that of a teacher (with research and writing necessary for good teaching) and not that of an alienated ‘academic’. I consider teaching to be a matter of imparting knowledge in the context of facilitating with compassion a learning process that helps each individual break with their normative development and come to see the world freshly in order to develop a responsible sense of their place and path in that world.

Could you imagine if universities were actually organised to encourage and support us to do that? Rather than making us squeeze it in around all the bullshit?

***

But I guess the real reason you’ve hung around this long – if you have, which of course you have otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this bit – is to find out whether I will read those last 22 titles next year.

The answer was a definite ‘yes’ back when I started thinking about The Great Writers, but now it is more of a ‘probably’.

I’m not sure I want to spend much more of my life grinding through unrewarding books. But the only way to find out if they are unrewarding is to give them a go, and I do already have copies of ten of them (though one is in a box somewhere and thus not in this picture).

Monmouthshire libraries can provide another eight, and my university library another one on top of that.

Which means I’d only have to buy three books:

Greene’s The Comedians, which is fine with me,

but,

oh

for

fuck’s

sake,

James’s Portrait of a Lady and Waugh’s Vile Bodies?

Reading The Great Writers, part five

Reading The Great Writers, part four

Lurching towards, but not quite achieving, a conclusion
But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…

As I mentioned right at the start, this year – by chance – I read two of them, so Darwin’s  The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) are quickly disposed of. See – I’m moving right along. (I’d intended to read all of Mansfield’s short fiction this year, but Clarice Lispector shoved her aside and got right up in my face demanding attention. Maybe next year.) Two others, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Kipling’s Kim (1900–1) I read as background for writing about the ongoing perpetuation of colonial adventure fiction narratives in Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Handbook (2012).

Which leaves 22 titles, five of which I’m surprised by.

Anthology of Fear collects twenty ghost stories originally published between 1824–1914. I have no memory of this book being in the series; if it had been, I would have read it. I can only return to the anomaly of a partwork magazine having 54 rather than 52 issues. Did I miss bonus issues? Did they have to adjust the length of the year to make up for an excess of Daylight Saving or something?

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
This is utterly mystifying to me. I read Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907) for the first time in my mid-teens, and was completely swept away by the latter. It is one of the few occasions I recall being utterly gripped by suspense (was it Stevie who got blown up?). Although Conrad’s posthumously published unfinished final novel was called Suspense (1925), I’m pretty certain he had little actual interest in suspense and that I was applying the wrong reading protocols, but everyone should have that intense an experience the first time they read Conrad. At university, I also read Nostromo (1904) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and since then Almayer’s Folly (1895) and The Inheritors (1901), co-written with Ford Madox Ford. Which is an embarrassingly short list for someone who’s spent 40 years thinking of himself as a Conrad admirer. So maybe it’s not so utterly mystifying after all. Maybe it’s time to bring the others into the rotation – one a year and I’ll be done by the time I’m 70.

(The only other time I can recall being caught up by that kind of suspense was reading Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Could the mysterious helper-figure be Captain Nemo? Surely not, but what if it is?)

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
This is nearly as mysterious. I did not read Eliot until university, when I was blown away by Middlemarch (1871) and only a little less by Daniel Deronda (1876). But then I read nothing else by her for decades. In the last few years, she has been in the rotation: Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), The Lifted Veil (1859) and a re-read of Middlemarch. So I am kind of halfway there.

yes, i know

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
I’m not a fan but I do I find her I-know-best philanthropic condescension of the working class and her terror of organised labour almost as hilarious as it is painful as it is fascinating. I first read Mary Barton (1848) as very distant background for a piece I wrote about Gwyneth Jones in 2005. Gwyneth once described sf as ‘the green lung of the city of science’ so I started thinking about the industrial/rural hinterlands of Manchester, where she was born and grew up and where Gaskell lived, and went looking for representations of that landscape. I’m pretty certain I also read North and South (1854–5) for the same reason so I have no idea why I didn’t also read Cranford.

More recently, I read Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) because it is about whaling. Only it isn’t. Not really.

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1906–21)
A decade or more ago, I bought my housemate the DVD boxset of the 1967 BBC adaptation. It was unexpectedly compelling. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 26-episode series is the way it manages to utterly transform your feelings towards Soames Forsyte, from despising him for his marital rape of Irene to the moment when you realise (many episodes later) that he has become far-and-away the most sympathetic character amongst all these dreadful people. I immediately wanted to see whether (and how) Galsworthy pulls it off. Every second-hand omnibus volume of the much longer The Forsyte Chronicles has since sat in a box unread.

Which leaves 17 titles. Some are easy to explain.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
I have read just under half of Dickens’s novels, some of them more than once: The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–8), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860–1), Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; with the Leon Garfield conclusion). Mostly, it has been for purposes of study. My least favourite module at university was the compulsory (!) ‘Dickens and Wordsworth’ – it was the only one for which I did not receive a first class grade and I hated it so much I’ve always been quite pleased with that.

Drood I read on my own recognisance, back in my teens, because I’d heard there was spontaneous human combustion in it! Simpler times. (And as a kid, I’d loved Leon Garfield’s Smith (1967) and Black Jack (1968)).

Bleak House I read about a decade ago. My partner, who likes Dickens but no one’s perfect, had to go back to the States for a couple of months, so she bought me a copy to read, a chapter a day, while she was away. In return, I gave her Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) – remember, I’m given to big romantic gestures.

She’s never quite forgiven me for sending her off on her own with such a devastating book; and I’ve never forgiven her for giving me a book in which the most interesting character, the London fog, turns out to be just a fucking metaphor.

She so got the better part of that deal.

Of them all, Hard Times is the one I came closest to liking. Not just because it’s short, although that helps, but because the weekly publishing schedule completed screwed with Dickens’ rhythms and forced him into producing something interestingly different.

So the reason I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities is that I really don’t like Dickens. He’s such a chore, even when he is not literally so.

The reason I have not read the following three books is their authors’ close association – in my head, if not necessarily in reality – with Dickens:

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) – although I did recently crack and read The Moonstone (1868) and The Frozen Deep (1874) and am prepared to forgive Collins his real or imagined association with Dickens,

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
While I’m not convinced of its genius, I have read The Turn of the Screw (1898) maybe half a dozen times, most recently this summer as background for that chapter on horror and class with which these musings began. I quite liked Washington Square (1880) and The Bostonians (1886) – which were on my American Lit module and all right as far that kind of realist novel goes. So I was quite looking forward to reading more by him on The Novel module. So naïve! What Maisie Knew (1897) was a baffling mess: not that I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, but that he should botch it so very badly. Maybe, I thought, The Ambassadors (1903) would be better. Quit laughing at the back.

The Ambassadors seminar was one of those excruciating ordeals. Clearly no one else had read it. Years later, I discovered from his own confession that that included the tutor.

There is not a barge pole long enough with which not to touch Henry James again.

DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
That bleeding module on The Novel. They also made us read Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). I hated the whole night-blooming tumescent bunch of them.

I’d already read The Fox (1923) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) at secondary school, but not ‘the Other Stories’, so by the end of the sixth/final post you will appreciate how fucking virtuous I am being by not lying about it here.

EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
I’ve only read two things by Forster, but I have read both of them several times: ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), which seems a little less remarkable with each go, and the first two-thirds of the first chapter of A Passage to India, which is so fucking irritating I can’t ever get any further than that. Does this make me a bad person? Perhaps. Does it make me want to try something else by him instead? Hell, no.

Wrong Tortilla Flat

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
I guess I’m still suffering Red Pony trauma after all these years, although I did read Of Mice and Men (1937) for my brother’s CSE coursework. I’ve had a copy of In Dubious Battle (1936) lying around unread since I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles (2009), intended as background for the Matewan chapter. And I’ve been to Tortilla Flat, the oldest operating stagecoach town in Arizona, but have not read Tortilla Flat (1935), and not just because it isn’t actually set there (which doesn’t stop them selling copies).

Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
I very occasionally pick up something by Greene – Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958) – and like all right-minded folk prefer his ‘entertainments’ to his ‘novels’. I guess I’ll get to this one eventually, or maybe not, who knows, but I do have a copy of The Ministry of Fear (1943) kicking around somewhere, so I should read that first.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
I loved about two-thirds of The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the admittedly not-great To Have and To Have Not (1937). I loved the first half of A Farewell to Arms (1929), and the first quarter of The Sun Also Rises (1926). I do not love the law of diminishing returns.

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
Late in my teens, I got myself a dirt cheap, second hand, almost complete, 20-or-so-volume hardback edition of the complete Waverley novels. Faded blue, well musty and water stained, it looked grand all lined up on a shelf. Proper handsome. Never read a one of them. Years later, for something or other I was writing (thinking about historical narrative for the John Sayles book?), I read, I think, Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and one other – I cannot remember which for they all made very little impression on me.

Peveril of the Peak

I sometimes ponder reading The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) since I have a fond attachment to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the first opera I ever saw, and when my partner was living in Manchester I was sometimes tempted by Peveril of the Peak (1823) since it shared its name with our favourite city centre pub, but on the other hand it is Scott’s longest novel…

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
I’ve read Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) and bear their author no ill-will so I really cannot explain not having read this as well.

Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
I’ve read Seven Days in New Crete/Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) and bear its author ill-will so that’s that cleared that up.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
I’m not American, so it just really doesn’t loom that large. (Also male, so ditto.)

W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
I’m British, but it just really doesn’t loom that large.

HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
I’m as surprised as you to see Bates considered a ‘great writer’. But since I’ve not read anything by him, who am I to say.

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
Towards the end of 1981, the whole world it seemed was a-flutter over Granada’s 11-part TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1945). Desperate for cultural capital, I tuned in faithfully each week on the black-and-white 12-inch portable upstairs (no one else in the house was remotely interested so no chance of seeing it on the 24-inch black-and-white in the living room). But try as I might, I simply could not figure out what all the fuss was about. Sometime the following year, I got hold of the library’s tie-in (but fancy B-format) paperback and made my way through the dreadful thing. Utterly lamentable stuff.

But someone somewhere recommended the Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61) – probably Anthony Burgess, who lists it and Brideshead in his Ninety-nine novels – as the culmination of the mature Waugh. That might be true since it is certainly long and tiresome.

There was a copy of Scoop (1938) lying around in the book cupboard at the back of our sixth-form English classroom which, bored one day, I picked up (the book, not the cupboard). It rises at times to the mildly amusing. In 1990, BBC2’s Moviedrome season, hosted by Alex Cox, screened Tony Richardson’s 1965 adaptation of The Loved One (1948), which was all right (though I’d much rather Luis Buñuel or especially Elaine May had succeeded in making their versions), which led me to give Waugh one last go.

Bottom line: no fucking way is Evelyn Waugh a great writer.

Here endeth the sound and the fury; tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon anyway) to see if it signifies anything.

Reading The Great Writers, part six

Reading The Great Writers, part four

Reading The Great Writers, part three

Another shorter middle bit
While my experience of reading The Great Writers’ novels had always been a little marred by their layout and print, something far worse awaited at university.

Condescension.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
This was the very first novel we were required to read on my degree (and one of the very small number by women). I had not read anything quite like it before. Despite my forays into ‘literature’ and ‘literary fiction’, I still mostly read genre fiction. I got through a lot of those 180ish-page sf paperbacks, often at a rate of one or more per day, so I was not at all used to having to keep track of large numbers of characters and their relationships with each other. I remember breaking off after several chapters to jot down their names and draw a diagram mapping how they connected to each other.

I remember a fellow student getting a glimpse of it and laughing.

But mostly I remember being the only student in the seminar without a brand-new Penguin Classic, and the looks on (some of) their faces when they saw my manifestly cheap ‘fancy’ hardback. It was that Oxford interview all over again.

When I was growing up, Plymouth was one of just a handful of places that still retained the 11+ exam, the already archaic post-war system for streaming pre-adolescent children into secondary education at technical schools, secondary moderns or grammar schools. It pretended to neutrality but was really a system for maintaining economic and social class hierarchies while allowing limited social mobility for the ‘worthy’ few. We moved to Plymouth right at the end of 1979 and I started my half year at Hyde Park Juniors on the January day the rest of the class were taking the second part of the 11+. So a couple of months later, after which most school places in the city had already been assigned, I had to take an alternative exam. The outcome was I had done well enough to go to a grammar school but there were no places available, so I could either

  1. commute to the anomalous Southway Comprehensive (which also was not quite a comprehensive, either, since it streamed some subjects) on the northern edge of the city; or
  2. apply for a scholarship to Plymouth College, the public (i.e., private) school less than a ten-minute walk from home, not quite opposite my junior school.

No way was I going endure being patronised and mocked as a scholarship boy!

By not going there or to Oxford, I really thought I’d dodged the bullet of class condescension.

After that Austen seminar, I went back to my room in Mansfield Hall and looked at the reading list we’d been sent in advance and at the shelf of books I’d brought with me. Every one of them was second-hand, and most of them editions which were less than infra dig (a phrase I’d never encountered before, let alone heard being bandied about, and had to look up in a dictionary). And some of them were so embarrassingly bulky and mouldering that I went scouring Reading’s second-hand bookstores for replacements, which of course meant it would probably have been cheaper to buy new editions in the first place.

Anyway, Austen. Took me a while to get it. But then quickly became quite fascinated and read all the novels – except, for some reason, Northanger Abbey (1817), which I only got to maybe five years ago. Predictably, I guess, sarky Emma (1815) was my favourite, but I’ve only ever re-read Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), both for things I was writing. Maybe when I’m through (re)reading the Brontes (and George Eliot), I’ll move Austen into the rotation.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
What can I say? It is an absolute monster of a book. I fell in love immediately. So much so that my first tattoo was very nearly the Penguin edition barcode on the back of my neck. (Again, I wish I was making this up but am also quite delighted by my own ridiculousness. And both relieved and saddened that I never managed to scrape together the cash.)

The tattoo that got away: 0140390847 

For my first essay on my American Literature module – which anthology-wise was thoroughly Norton not Heath, so Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, early Henry James and our token woman, Emily Dickinson – I decided to develop an angle on Moby-Dick by holding it up alongside Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which I also read for the first time. Quite why I thought Moby-Dick could not sustain a 1500-word critical treatment on its own, I have no idea. Maybe Melville’s encyclopedism was contagious.

I read Moby-Dick half a dozen times over the next decade, a couple of them for teaching. After my MA at Warwick, I returned to Reading for my PhD and a couple of years in a row I taught the same American literature module – literally the same, completely unchanged – I’d studied five or six years earlier. Each time, at some point in the first seminar, I advised the class that it was a really big book but they would only need to read so many pages per day to have it under their belts by the time we got to the two weeks we would spend on it. And each week, I updated the increasing page-count if they were to start from that day. Of the 25 students I taught over those two years, not one of them took my advice. But more than half skipped class during the Moby-Dick fortnight… Their loss.

A few years ago, we went to Inverness for our Xmas/New Year’s break, and I decided to read Moby-Dick for the first time in at least 20 years. Once again, I was utterly smitten. Fortunately, it was fucking freezing outside, and the days were much shorter that far north, so my partner didn’t really mind that I basically sat and read it in 4-or-more-hour chunks.

At the start of lockdown, I decided to read all of Melville. Breezed through Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), both of which I’d previously read and this time liked even more.  And I finally got through Mardi (1849), which had defeated me several times before, and which this time broke me of Melville for a while. However, I’m determined to bring him into the rotation – Redburn (1849) is cued up for 2024, which means I should get to my Moby-Dick reward-read around 2030 or 2031 (depending on what I do about the short stories and poetry). I seriously cannot wait. Such are the schemes of mice and men.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
I must have read a version adapted for younger readers at some point, because parts of it were already familiar. I have not reread it since I taught it in 1996 at Exeter University on an American Literature survey course which was very Heath, not Norton, in its orientation. I feel no particular desire to read it again.

Except.

How the hell you abridge Huckleberry Finn. Surely, I can’t be daft enough to track down a children’s version and read it alongside the complete text.

Reader, that’s precisely how daft I can be.

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
We read this on the Literature, Film and Television module alongside the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford. The one good thing about Fitzgerald’s novel is that it is quicker to read than it is to sit through the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford.

And it turns out, a quarter century later, quicker to read than to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So that’s two good things.

But it is even quicker to watch Elliot Nugent’s 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, which regardless of the liberties it takes with the novel, but also mostly because of them, makes it way better than Fitzgerald’s effort.

Which is to say, I not only don’t like the novel – the ash heaps and big googly eyes are fine – but am mystified by its critical standing. It’s right down there with JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1945–6) and that whiny little fuck Holden Caulfield, the literati’s Danny Rand.

Not a still from the 1985 BBC adaptation of Tender is the Night

However, being a dutiful student, I also read Tender is the Night (1934) and re-watched the 1985 BBC mini-series adaptation – I saw the initial broadcast of it because of: a) flailing around re. cultural capital, but also really b) Peter Strauss (i.e., Wolff aka Spacehunter, of Adventures in the Forbidden Zone fame) was in it.

I’d found a cheap paperback Gatsby to switch in for my Great Writers version but did not keep it once we were done with Finals. Of course, a few years later I found myself teaching on an updated version of that module, and equally inevitably, the one bit that had been kept unchanged was the block on Fitzgerald. His estate has made a (very small) fortune from me, and I resent that.

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Our 18th Century Literature module was an intoxicating brew of bawdiness, wit, humanism, misanthropy, scepticism, formal experimentation, moralising, mockery of moralising, refusal to moralise, baby-farming and horse-people. Fortunately John Dryden died in 1700, so there was Alexander Pope instead, with The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728). There was Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) and Gulliver – so I finally learned how to pronounce Houyhnhnms. And for novels, there was Tom Jones, which I liked most of all, with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) a close second and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) some way back in third place. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), trailing the field by quite a distance, was in danger of being lapped. Which makes it all the odder that rather than reading Fielding’s brief spoof, Shamela (1741), or any of his other novels, I voluntarily ploughed through Richardson’s breezeblock response to Fielding, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and his other doorstop, Clarissa (1748). Of them, I remember nothing beside their immensity.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Our module on The Novel gave us Austen, George Eliot, later Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence and Hardy. See, I told you it was a devotedly Leavisite department!  (Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence will return in part five.)  I found Tess a bit meh, not Far From the Madding Crowd meh, but meh nonetheless.  Jude the Obscure (1894–5)  seemed stronger, undoubtedly because Jude’s struggle for and with social mobility struck a chord. Also, pig pizzles being lobbed over hedges always puts me in a cheery mood. But it was The Woodlanders (1887) that won me to Hardy’s corner. That and him not being James or Lawrence. (I eventually got to write about The Woodlanders in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture – alongside Groot, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, because I’m nothing if not classy.)

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
This wasn’t actually on my degree. It’s best shot was the Modernism module but, although that somehow (and somewhy) devoted two weeks to Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920),  there was only room for one woman, which was Woolf, represented by one novel, which was  Mrs Dalloway (1925), but I liked it so much I read Lighthouse and The Waves (1931), too.

And that was it. My degree was over. More house moves – Plymouth, Coventry, Reading, Reading, Reading, Exeter, Exeter, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, Bristol – and my parents wanting to reclaim some space in their own house (the nerve!) and somewhere in all of that The Great Writers (and many other books) found their way to charity shops.

But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…

Which I realise is not much of a cliffhanger, but it’s the best I can muster right now.

Reading The Great Writers, part five

Reading The Great Writers, part three

Reading The Great Writers, part two

Another shorter middle bit
Of the 54 titles in The Great Writers series, I had already read 15 – and I read another 13 in this edition: six before going to university and seven at university.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
I remember finding the opening and the section when Jane tries to make a living away from Rochester a bit of a slog but loved the rest unreservedly. Apart from the preachy ending, which I still hate.

My English degree was in a staunchly Leavisite department, so it was kind of odd that we were required to read any books by women, but even odder was the fact that the only Bronte we read was Villette (1853). Of which I remember nothing apart from the rude bit about blowing cigar smoke into an open desk. But over the last few years, I’ve been reading/rereading all of the Bronte novels, one a year. Only have Shirley (1849) – which has sort of taken the place of The Caine Mutiny in being permanently in my suitcase for travel delay emergencies – and Villette left to go before finishing by returning once more to Jane Eyre. And that ending. Which might not bug me so much any more.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
It turned out I would never ever come to like Dickens beyond an occasional passage here and there but having already read A Christmas Carol and for A-level Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), I guess I thought I’d give Great Expectations a go. After all, it is one of the shorter ones. And there was clearly some trick to learn before you could ‘simply adore’ Dickens and then move on to the Russians. Top marks for the cake and the prison hulks, but nothing much else.

You can only imagine my annoyance when it was one of the set texts in the first year of my degree so I had to read it again. It never occurred to me to just skip that week. For a long time I would have blamed that on my protestant upbringing – work hard, be dutiful, take responsibility blah blah – but it was just as much a twisted FOMO: a fish out of water, with no real sense of how middle class environments functioned, I had no idea if or when the necessary clues would drop so I always turned up. My fear of missteps was greater than my anxiety about having to deal with other people. (More about my whacky adventures in Dickens-land – and the crazy dialectics of dutifulness and rebellion – to follow.)

The absurd 2023 stack of outsized books

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
I assume the reason I read this one more or less immediately was that it comes in short sections. One of the skills developed as an autodidact reader is the ability to read anything, and one of the strategies for doing so is to divide books into pages-per-day to get you through them. It’s how I read William T. Vollman’s Imperial (2009) and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (before 1021) this year – and probably a couple of others in my 2023 plan to get through one physically outsize volume per month – and it’s a real gift when you have a stack of academic volumes to get through for some project or other. But it is also a curse in its capacity to strip any joy, even pleasure, from the process of reading. And it makes it hard to stop reading things once you’ve started, no matter how awful they are.

It’s probably also why/how I always have several books on the go simultaneously: currently, Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan’s Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022), Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre (2019), Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music (2020), Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg’s Toussaint Louverture:  Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017), Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia (2017), Michael Moorcock’s London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012), Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor (1959) and Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).)

From the fact I remember no details of Pepys’ sex life, I assume this was an abridged and bowdlerised edition. No coded records of his tireless efforts in the cause of masturbation. Makes you wonder why they even bothered.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

To be honest, I was a little disappointed. Unlike Albert Lewis’s 1945 film adaptation, the book did not contain the delectably naughty George Sanders – nor, sadly, did de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885) and Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), which also lacked Nigel Bruce (although the former novel is quite a hoot). I guess this Sanders deficit is why, unlike so much other sf/horror/fantasy from the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, I’ve never re-read it. But I suspect I missed quite a bit.

To be honest, though, Wilde always disappoints me a little. Perhaps I’d conjured too strong an image of him from Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde (Ratoff 1960) and/or Peter Finch in The Trial of Oscar Wilde (Ratoff Hughes 1960). When I finally read Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) in preparation for introducing a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 adaptation a decade ago, I remember finding the film much more impressive than the play – despite it being silent and thus denying us both Wilde’s dialogue and Ronald Colman’s delicious voice.

Anthology of Romantic Poets and Anthology of the War Poets
I have no idea what these actually contained. I assume primarily Byron/Shelley/Keats and Owen/Brooke/Sassoon. We’d read some of the war poets for O-level English, along with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, John Betjeman, Charles Causley and, shockingly a women, albeit the ambiguously gendered Stevie Smith (hmm, a suspiciously high proportion of poets with Devon or Cornwall connections; there must have been some kind of fix).

Other than that, my pre-university education in poetry consisted of dirty limericks, Poe and the Central Library’s copies of The Rattle Bag (1982), co-edited by Hughes and Heaney, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (the 1954 edition, with the four 1861 books plus Cecil Day-Lewis’s selection of 229 additional poems, including, quite scandalously, some Americans). Oh, and another postal book club come-on, Helen Gardner’s The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950 (1972).

I wonder what Thomas Hardy selections are in those anthologies? At my Oxford interview, we had to write an essay on an unseen poem, which turned out to be ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (1912). Little did they suspect, I’d already seen (and written about) it! Mwa-ha-ha!

While my experience of reading The Great Writers’ novels had always been a marred by their ugly layout, unattractive typeface and heavy printing on thin paper, something far worse awaited at university.

Condescension.

Reading The Great Writers, part four

Reading The Great Writers, part two

Reading The Great Writers, part one

A shorter middle bit
Of the 54 titles in The Great Writers series, I had, it turned out, already read 15.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
One advantage of aspirational Protestant parents convinced of the value of reading is that abridged and unabridged Pilgrim’s Progresses are put in front of you before you are ten years old.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
In the first year of junior school, our teacher (Mrs Eaton) would end every day by reading a few pages of Alice in Wonderland to us (I remember someone spotting the caterpillar in the famous illustration was, it transpires famously, the wrong colour). But that was way too slow a pace for impatient little me, so I got a copy of it (and Through the Looking Glass (1871)) out of the village library.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
I got an abridged paperback version in a red leatherette-effect cover from Trago Mills in the mid-70s (also The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)) but have no idea (in either case) when in the intervening years I first read it unabridged. But I do remember already having experienced that feeling of relief when you finally get through the Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan and wash ashore in the Land of the Houyhnhnms (even if I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to pronounce it).

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Again, I remember an abridged version (and of Dracula (1897) in the same imprint) in the mid- 70s. Sadly, though, I remember nothing about their undoubtedly cheap and nasty bindings – or, in either case, of when in the intervening years I first read the book proper.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes courtesy of Basil Rathbone and, especially, Nigel Bruce, whose mere presence in a film still cheers me up. I remember seeing The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and the way too-scary The Scarlet Claw (1944) and being terrified by the Creeper in The Pearl of Death (1944), presumably all part of a late-70s early evening weekday season on BBC2. Somehow there was a copy of Hound in the junior school library, and then around the turn of the decade I got one of those cheap hardback omnibus editions of all the Holmes stories and novels as an Xmas gift, which I devoured.

In fact, I loved Holmes so much back then that one day in 1985 I feigned illness so I could stay home from school to finish reading Cay Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984), which I’d started the night before (it was probably my first brush with Fu Manchu outside of those Christopher Lee films), and the following year I stayed up late watching Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper/Freemasons in Murder By Decree­ (Clark 1979) rather than revising for the next morning’s Biology O-level exam.

HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
In the first term of my final year at junior school, I read an extract (the protagonist diving underwater to escape the Martian heat rat) for a comprehension exercise – and raced to the school library. But it only had a copy of The Invisible Man (1897); my memory is of a paperback tie-in with the 1975 TV series – just a picture of David McCallum on the cover – but as there was a novelisation of the pilot episode by Michael Jahn I now wonder if I read both and have jumbled them up.

The village library didn’t have a copy of War of the Worlds, either, but Xmas was not far off. Nor was my Jeff Wayne album tie-in copy (which finally fell apart about a decade ago.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
I seem to have gone through a nautical phase in the late 70s.  Possibly because of Gulliver’s Travels, the Frankenstein frame story, Ursula K Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea (which I did not like and tbh still don’t) or Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875) – both of which I’d read in bowdlerised abridged versions – or RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), the first chapter of which I doggedly read half a dozen times as a child, without ever getting any further. But it was more likely because of Willard Price’s Southsea Adventure (1952), Underwater Adventure (1954), Whale Adventure (1960) and Diving Adventure (1969), from a series which briefly, but only temporarily, took that special place in my heart reserved for The Three Investigators (1964–87) series, which had already dislodged Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (1942–63) and Adventure (1944–55) series (I never could stand The Secret Seven (1949–63)).

But, my god, the black spot! That really put the willies up me.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s–1840s)
I asked for a big paperback omnibus of Poe for my fourteenth birthday (it contained everything except Eureka), and then worked through it a story, poem or chapter of Pym per day (for years, the only bit of Pym I could actually remember was the great big disappearing dog). But it is only since I had a panic attack during an MRI scan in 2020 that I have developed claustrophobia. And although I have never had a nightmare about being buried alive, I did later that year wake up screaming from a dream in which I was trapped in a small space below deck, in full costume, with Ridley Scott filming me as the lead in his grittily realistic live-action Captain Pugwash reboot. I wish I was making this up, but I am also pretty impressed at myself that I don’t have to.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
We’d read an abridged version of A Christmas Carol in at secondary school, and I was so offended at being deemed incapable of reading the full text that I got it out of the school library. I think it must have been in the second year, because I had a very combative relationship with our English teacher that year. We got off to a bad start when she selected John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (1933) for us to read as a class. Everyone hated it (which in retrospect I realise was probably just me and a couple of other little gobshites who joined in). We protested so much, she dropped it and picked something else for us to read. I forget what, but we were heady with victory and could smell blood.

Sometime around then I got into a stupid row with her, which she ended (or so she thought) by saying ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you read Ulysses?’.

So I got a copy out of the Central Library and did just that. One chapter per day for two-and-a-half weeks, understanding almost none of it. Once I was done, I took it into class, dropped it casually on my desk and asked if she had any other recommendations.

I was fourteen. Forty years later, I am still appalled at what an awful little shit I was.

It is also very difficult to reconcile these memories with the crippling shyness from which I suffered, the frequent terror of speaking, the incomprehension of other people, who were all so fucking weird – either terrifyingly random or so predictable they were even scarier. But I was also a cheeky little bugger, with a tendency to brinksmanship and a self-destructive edge.

The former would probably now be considered social anxiety and fortunately have some apparatus of understanding and support. But alongside the latter, I am more inclined to think of it as class anxiety. The terror of social mobility, of transclass social non-reproduction. Plus puberty.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
I know I had already read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1945) because my brother, a couple of years older than me, was doing his CSEs in 1983 and he bribed and/or bullied me into writing his English Literature coursework essays for him. I remember him being annoyed at having to copy them out long-hand so no one could prove he had cheated. But later he was so delighted to have outwitted his Secondary Modern, which had been so quick to (mis)judge his abilities. Not that this triumph necessarily proved them wrong.

Somewhere in that confluence of events, I read Huxley – probably just to make a smart aside in one of those essays, a foible I still have.

Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) and Island (1962) would have followed in pretty short order, and I remember the this-is-not-a-sequel disappointment of Brave New World Revisited (1958). Thanks to an Orwell essay, I’d have read Zamyatin’s We (1924) around the same time, which quickly led me to his The Dragon and Other Stories (coll.1966) and Islanders and The Fisher of Men (coll.1984), which in turn got me to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) not long after.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
My posh mate Rob was reading one of the Tales, I forget which, for his A-level English, so I picked up a cheap complete Tales and slowly worked my way through it over a couple of years. This long slow read led to a classic autodidact’s lack-of-cultural-capital moment when I was interviewed at Oxford University (the first and possibly still the only pupil from my Comprehensive ever to even apply to Oxford or Cambridge). Asked what I was reading that was not on my A-level syllabus, I mentioned I had recently completed the Tales. Surprised, the interviewer asked whether I was reading it in translation or in ‘Middle English’. I had never even heard of ‘Middle English’ and had no idea how to reply, so he filled the awkward silence by lecturing me, a state school upstart, on how I could not claim to have read Chaucer if I was only reading a translation. His disdain was palpable; I withered beneath it. The interview ground to a halt. I was not offered a place at that College.

However, I had read Chaucer in Middle English! And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And Pearl. And Sir Orfeo.

I’m pretty sure this is a case of biting off my own nose to spite my face when I’d rather be punching his, but because of that wanker’s class contempt, I have never voluntarily read any other Middle English, not even Piers Plowman (just a couple of shorter poems I was obliged to read in our first-year survey course at university).

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
This is one of those books I saw in Penguin but picked up in a cheaper US paperback (with yellow edges) at my local independent bookstore, In Other Words, on Mutley Plain in Plymouth. Which was also where I bought Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, The Essential James Joyce (containing Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (19116) and excerpts from Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)) and the three omnibus editions of Chandler novels I still have. It was also where I bought my girlfriend Jane a copy of Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (1984), the sequel to Sisterhood is Powerful (1970). I have always been given to big romantic gestures.

I spent a lot of time in that shop. It was a haven during some confusing times. They were always welcoming and kind. And once they noticed how careful I was with books, and how unable to afford them, they were fine with me popping in on my way home from school and reading books in half-hour chunks without buying them. At Xmas, they would give me mulled wine, even though I was clearly underage. It was also one of the places where I started to piece together a political education by reading –  The Communist Manifesto, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Mutual Aid, Bakunin on Anarchism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, A Room of One’s Own, The Dialectic of Sex, The Female Eunuch, Intercourse, The Wretched of the Earth, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, goodness knows what else – but also just as much by enjoying their generosity, conviviality, community.

Mind you, all I can really remember of Far From the Madding Crowd is finding Bathsheba Everdene really irritating – oh, and the bit about punching holes in sheep to let out trapped wind.

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Wuthering Heights was one of our lower-Sixth A-level texts, and I remember being really angry at the implausibility of Nelly being able to witness certain events. I was so furious – don’t ask me to explain the logic, presumably something to do with narrative perspective –  that I was driven by rage to read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and then (obvs) John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (1930–6). I was clearly broken in some way, and not merely in terms of the unthinking misogyny clearly underpinning such a response.

I’d been reading and protesting my way into socialism and anti-racism, and had been hanging out with a bunch of self-proclaimed anarchists from Plymouth Polytechnic. They knew a student I knew from my parent’s church, and had seen me in her company somewhere, so assumed I was way older than actually I was. (Reader, I did not disabuse them.) But any feminist education would still have been a year or so in the future, courtesy of Jane.

I broke with those anarchists over their refusal to do anything in support of the great miners’ strike. There were really just middle-class wankers who liked to sound radical while smoking dope. Jane was a much better influence.

Oh, and I long since changed my mind about Wuthering Heights (it is probably now my favourite Bronte novel, so much more bonkers than anything her sisters ever ventured) and am less convinced of Brunner’s genius (though I still read him, most recently The Great Steamboat Race (1983)), but remain steadfast, forty years later, in my opinion that The 42nd Parallel is the best volume of Dos Passos’s trilogy (it provided, along with a quote from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks and another from Billy Zane, an epigraph to my The Cinema of John Sayles: A Lone Star (2009)).

William Shakespeare, Comedies and Tragedies (1590s–1610s)
I have no idea which plays were in these volumes. But in 1986, The Oxford Shakespeare was published and I got a hardback copy as some kind of come-on from a postal book club (I think – I can’t imagine being able to afford it otherwise). But like Ulysses and The Canterbury Tales, I worked through it steadily, a play a week, then some poems until I was done.

In 1991, I took that volume into my finals exam on Shakespeare; it was an open-book exam, and we were supposed to leave our copies of individual plays behind to be checked for notes, but the invigilator took one look at this immense pristine tome I’d lugged up to campus and said not to bother as no one in their right mind deface it by writing notes in it.

But what, you are undoubtedly thinking, of the other 39 titles?

Reading The Great Writers, part three

Reading The Great Writers, part one

The lrb; or long, redundant beginning

This spring and summer, I spent several months reading for and writing a chapter on ‘Class and Horror’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Horror. It was the first time I’ve dived deep into critical/theoretical work on class for probably the best part of twenty years. One key shift is the now general acceptance of the need to incorporate Bourdieu (or Bourdieu-like) work into models of class, which meant I found myself thinking a lot more about social and cultural capital. The other key trend was hardly new: marginalising/excluding Marxist traditions of work on economic class, often in favour of Weberian or neo-Weberian approaches, which is odd given how very little Weber actually said about class, but also for other very obvious reasons not remotely odd.

I also found myself baffled (i.e., not remotely baffled but fascinated) by social scientists who present social mobility as an absolutely incontrovertible good (even if the only argument they can muster is that it improves GDP) but are at the same time appalled by the notion of absolute social mobility. Even though it is the obvious end-point of their social mobility enthusiasm, they devote absolutely no words/time/energy to imagining what meaningful equality might look like. Instead, they just brandish terrifying (that is, hilariously clichéd) images of totalitarian states. Harrison Bergeron, eat your heart out! It’s almost as if their main interest is maintaining a slightly tweaked and marginally more palatable status quo (and securing future research income streams from similarly committed funding bodies).

Anyway, the point is, I found myself engaged in autobiographical ponderings about social capital, cultural capital and autodidactism.

I come from a dirt-poor West Midlands working-class family. I was born in Staffordshire but we moved to Devon when I was four years old, which further limited the already negligible social capital to be derived from my now attenuated extended kinship network.

My parents were Methodists (which is why I have absolutely no idea how to gamble although I did, after no struggle whatsoever, overcome teetotalism). And they were aspirational, at least to the extent of wanting a better life for me and my brother and of taking on a crippling mortgage to own a home rather than rent a house (they were so ripe, sadly, for Thatcher). Their new circle of church friends – middle class folks from the wealthier parts of the village – obviously lived in a different world to us and, despite many kindnesses, were defensive of their relative privilege. While my dad left school aged 15 and with no qualifications, they were mostly graduates from middle class families. Thus they had higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital, the latter of which was often deployed against my ‘uneducated’ dad. Especially when he did things like trying seriously to discuss with them that bit in Acts about the early church sharing all things in common. They were really not up for that! (In this mid-1970s context, my dad was quite radical in trying to square a Co-op/Labour upbringing with the evangelicalism into which he had fallen, which was only just then turning from a vaguely countercultural centrism to the pronounced right-wing attitudes that now define it – and which shifted my parents’ politics: they cried when Callaghan lost in 1979 but have voted Conservative ever since, albeit with growing disillusionment over the last decade of unignorable Tory corruption and incompetence.)

So I grew up with no economic capital to speak of, and very little social or cultural capital. But my parents’ aspirationalism bought into the post-war promise of social mobility (I am old enough to have benefitted from those limited openings, which have in real terms been whittled down to nothing since the 1980s) and thus they insisted on the importance of education and of reading. However, the latter, amply supported by school and especially public libraries, took place in something of a vacuum: limited cultural capital meant I had little idea of what to read.

Which I only really began to realise in my mid-teens, thanks to Rob. An extremely middle class friend met through church stuff, he was a couple of years older than me, went to a grammar school and was the most flamboyantly camp person I’d ever met: he ‘simply adored Dickens’ and, he declared, flaunting a Penguin paperback of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was ‘reading the Russians now’. How did he know about these things? They were simply part of the atmosphere in which he grew up, at home and in school. (He urged Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) on me, and something green-covered from Grove Press, but it only very slowly dawned on me that this was a kind of courtship: that he was using books – and cultural capital – to hit on me. Last I heard of him, he moved to South Africa at the turn of the 90s to become a croupier at – unforgivably – Sun City.)

In the absence of such social and institutional networks for inheriting the kinds of cultural capital Rob enjoyed, the only real alternative for me was autodidactism, with all its perils and pitfalls – and potentials for embarrassment: at some point in my mid-teens I asked Plymouth Central Library if they had a copy of ‘Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) – I’d read, rather than heard, about it somewhere so only knew how to pronounce one of those five words. (It took a couple of decades before I could start to enjoy mispronouncing ‘archipelago’ as if it were a kind of sausage.)

Plymouth Central Library, the location of my chipolata embarrassment

Autodidactism took many forms:

  • Discovering Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) and trying with the aid of the library to work through its list of titles. A quick google of the contents page shows there there are still forty-odd of them I’ve not read. Andrea remains constantly appalled at me for never having read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), as now does my mate Dan since she blabbed to him this summer. But I did finally read Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1952) last year in Brazil in the old densely-packed A-format paperback that had travelled tens of thousands of miles in my luggage over the years as my emergency back-up should I be ever stranded in an airport or train station with nothing to read.
  • Watching The Great Philosophers (1987) on TV and reading Brian Magee’s book version and then finally finishing that copy of Betrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I’d got bogged down in a couple of years earlier.
  • Randomly picking up second-hand Penguin classics (or the usually cheaper imported American paperbacks of the same titles).
  • Seeing a Vincent Price movie and setting out to read all of Poe.
  • Hearing Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness so starting to read Conrad.
  • Watching The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), reading Malcolm Bradbury’s book version and turning them into reading lists….

Lists. All the time lists. And following up those leads in libraries and second-hand bookstores. (New books were things you received as gifts.)

Just in case any of this makes me sound adorably (or agonisingly or absurdly) precocious (or dunderheaded), let me be clear: I had not exactly left childish things behind.

I still regularly re-read my full set of The Incredible Hulk Weekly and my stack of movie novelisations (though some passages in Arthur Byron Cover’s Flash Gordon (1980) were definitely not intended for the younger reader).

And although I stopped buying second-hand Doctor Who novelisations with number 68, Terrance Dicks’s An Unearthly Child (1981), I carried on rereading my until-then complete set. And reading the new ones until, I think, number 113, Terence Dudley’s Black Orchid (1986), even though that entailed humiliating returns to the kids’ section of the library I’d eagerly abandoned half a dozen years earlier (and even though I’d freakishly stumbled upon, read and had the veil of illusion torn away by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), the first proper academic book I’d encountered).

I was also, like every adolescent male I knew, although perhaps more assiduously, reading James Herbert and Richard Allen and Sven Hassel, and exercising an even less discerning penchant for Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (1981–82) novels and Guy N. Smith (probably more for the knee-tremblers in alleys and doorways than the slime beasts and giant crabs). I’d given up on Agatha Christie after reading all the Marples I could find (I never liked Poirot) but was starting to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett by about 1983. I discovered Mick Norman and Mick Farren, as well as Michael Moorcock (except Elric, could never get into Elric) and grumpy oddball Peter Van Greenaway. Curiously, although my mate Stewart was a huge fan, I never got into Stephen King, and I still find his fiction utterly unengaging. But I did get totally into JRR Tolkien in 1980. And out again completely by 1984 or thereabouts, after many re-reads, even of the appendices and The Silmarillion (1977). I gave up on David Eddings and Raymond Feist by 1985, the year I also ditched Frank Herbert: I was sufficiently loyal to slog through Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) but had been bored since at least God Emperor of Dune (1981). But the overlapping and intertwined story of my autodidactic route through sf and fantasy – similarly thrilling-yet-full-of-pathos – is something for another day.

Such omnivorous reading – more accurately described, in my case at least, as flailing around – is I think, characteristic of the autodidact. (By chance this morning, I read Michael Moorcock’s 2011 memoir-essay ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’ and recognised a little something of my own childhood in his ‘I learned from reading and not knowing what was respectable literature and what was not. I read everything.’) But it also resembles the ability to access both high and low culture now often attributed to middle class privilege, so perhaps this is not a story of autodidactism and cultural capital after all, but of ‘How I Became A Class Traitor’.

My local library was located just across the park on the top floor of Pounds House

The strange thing is, the sense of being an autodidact has never gone away, even though I’ve been in formal education, as student or teacher, every year since the age of five. Apart, that is, from 1987–88, when I took a year off between A-levels and university (because I was so disgusted by what I witnessed during my Oxford interview, but that too is another story). For about 14 months, I toiled as a motor insurance claims handler for the Co-op Insurance Service and the Cornish Mutual Association. I was less than mediocre. I never got beyond processing windscreen claims, and every day I hated that my job mostly consisted of getting claimants to use language that implied their broken windscreen was made of toughened rather than laminated glass, which meant they were liable for the cost of the replacement’s upgrade in quality, even if there hadn’t actually been one (not that this was how my role was described to me). As careers go, it was clearly not for me.

And all these years later, I still don’t drive. Which would have probably undermined my prospects for advancement.

Around that time, Marshall Cavendish published the Great Writers partwork. It was an image-heavy magazine, with broad brush historical context and biographical commentary on that issue’s author(s), accompanied by a hardback edition of a novel or collection or other book-length work. The books came, with no apparent rhyme or reason, in red, navy blue, bright blue, black, brown or green covers. Each bore a vaguely illustrative image and ever so slightly embossed fancy gold writing. They were cheaply produced in Spain. I can’t remember whether it was published weekly for a year or fortnightly for two (either way, there seems to have been 54, rather than 52, issues). I purchased it – but did not read it – diligently.

The magazines and later the books were discarded years ago, during the many moves between rented accommodation familiar to any student and early career academic. But by chance this year I read two of the books included in the series for the first time – Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) – which started me wondering how many of the 54 volumes I’d actually read during the intervening 35 years.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is the complete list of The Great Writers (not in order of publication). As you will see, ‘greatness’ is largely a function of having been dead long enough for your work to be in the public domain (although that does not explain the Bates, Forster, Greene, Hemingway, Huxley, Maugham, Steinbeck, Waugh, Wells or Woolf titles).

  1. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
  2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  3. HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
  4. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
  5. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
  6. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
  7. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
  8. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
  9. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
  10. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
  11. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
  12. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
  13. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
  14. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
  15. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
  16. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  17. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
  18. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
  19. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1794)
  20. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
  21. EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
  22. John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (probably just The Man of Property (1906)
  23. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
  24. Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
  25. Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
  26. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
  27. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
  28. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  29. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
  30. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
  31. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1)
  32. DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
  33. Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories (1920)
  34. W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
  35. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
  36. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
  37. Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s/1840s)
  38. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
  39. William Shakespeare, Comedies (1590s–1600s)
  40. William Shakespeare, Tragedies (1590s–1600s)
  41. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
  42. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  43. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
  44. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  45. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
  46. Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
  47. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
  48. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
  49. HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
  50. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
  51. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
  52. Anthology of Romantic Poets (early 1800s)
  53. Anthology of the War Poets (1914–8)
  54. Anthology of Fear (twenty ghost stories from 1824–1914)

I had, it turned out, already read 15 of them…

Reading The Great Writers, part two