Read the Worthy


Sreya said to me, when we were discussing this article by Maura Kelly, ‘Read the worthy’. I think I agree.

Read the worthy, man. Whatever the worthy is, because I’ve spent a lot of fucking time reading the unworthy and I can tell you it comes in all shapes and sizes. The unworthy can look like a classic, it can look like a children’s book, like high-concept sci-fi and fantasy, like poetry.

I read The Heart of the Matter a couple of years ago, in Philadelphia when I was staying with a friend of Amma’s, and he gave it to me because I’d spent three days looking hungrily at his books and his bookshelves. I wanted very much to like it, but let me tell you now it was painful. I actually don’t know what he was saying, why he was saying it, or why I should care. Dude, Greene is such a fucker.

I’m not even going to start on the tracts of bad fantasy (fie upon thee, Stephen Donaldson), the terrible crime series (argh, Harlan Coben), the shit poetry (Ms Duffy, you may have had some talent once, but you have killed it since).

Would a good edit really have gone amiss with Anna Karenina? Wasn’t the fire at the end of Jane Eyre a massive deus ex machina? Would Catch-22 really have suffered if there had not been a dead man in Yossarian’s tent? (Ok, perhaps that last was not fair, but I’ve read that book a couple of times now, and most of it just sort of… goes. Yes, the alfalfa farmers are pretty funny, but I didn’t really like Catch-22. There. I said it. Now you can shoot me.)

But let’s look at the other side, yes? To Kill A Mockingbird is the most classic classic ever. Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle remain thrilling in their ability to write crime. Shakespeare wrote such good poetry, man. Such good poetry. Ender’s Game, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, these are sci-fi novels that will last us forever (I read the Guide again recently. It is as good as the first time. ‘It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick’).

Children’s books have always been my favourite. Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake made me see worlds I have been missing since. If there is one reason I read so much fantasy and sci-fi now, it is because I used to read books about giants and girls with telekinesis and girls with magic fingers. The Little Prince actually changed my life, no word of a lie. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was about a land inside a cupboard, and it held me spellbound.

These are books written for children, and if you try and tell me they are unworthy I will punch you in the fucking face. They’re funny, terrifying, poignant, and they can be read by a twelve-year-old. They don’t engage my intellectual capabilities, they make them irrelevant. When I first read Artemis Fowl, I laughed out loud. When I read Artemis Fowl now, I still laugh out loud. That first book is the paragon of what books for adolescents should be: witty, full of suspense, and a nice clean finish.


And I have not even gotten started on books that have been published since about 1985.

So, when someone tells you ‘Read the classics, ‘cause nothing else is worth it’, make them go away. Read Patricia Highsmith, Mohammed Hanif, the lesser known works of Salman Rushdie (screw Midnight’s Children, his best book was clearly Haroun and the Sea of Stories). Read the worthy.

February to March


Read

Fantasy

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

This is so good. It looks like one of those standard sci-fi set in the future novels, but it's really not. Though there's a lot of science, and a lot of fictional science, it's really about the people in the stories. The story itself is about Jean le Flambeur, who is a master thief, and has been broken out of a prison to recover an item he doesn't even remember stealing, and what happens as he slowly tries to regain those memories.

The Minority Council, Kate Griffin

Griffin's fourth book is as good as the first three. At some point I'll write about why urban fantasy is so good, why Griffin specifically writes it really well, and why Matthew Swift is awesome. Until then, suffice it to say that I quite liked this book.


Fated, Benedict Jacka

This was a hard book for me to read, because it was written like a first-timer might written it. Not just in terms of the story, but in terms of the way he narrated it. This is obviously the debut of a good author, but a lot of the ways in which the story was structured was fairly rough. Fated is another one of those stories about a magician living in London, he's got a dark past and some interesting abilities, and if the same story had been written better I would have liked it more. As it is, all I'm left with is the feeling that it could have been much better.


Fiction


Rules of Civility, Amor Towles

This is so good! If there were two books of fiction from this month I'd ask you to read, they'd be Rules of Civility and The Quantum Thief, for pretty much the same reasons. They gripped me from start to finish, and reading them was such a smooth experience. Rules of Civility is about Katie Kontent, a second generation Russian living in New York, and the events of one specific year in the 1930s. It looks at how she, her best friend, and the man they are both semi-involved with, deal with their lives in that one year. Muchly recommended.

The Ripliad, Books One and Two, Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Mr Ripley
Ripley Underground

The first book took a while to get going, because Highsmith had to introduce us to the characters and set them up. The second book didn't have those problems, because we already knew Tom Ripley and who he was. They're really good books because of two things: firstly, that the suspense is set up really well, and secondly because of the growing horror when you realise you are rooting not for the police, but for the murderer. The moment for me happened about three quarters of the way into the first book, when it struck me that Ripley was indeed a bastard, and I wanted him to win.


Non-Fiction, Semi-Fiction, and Self Help Disguised as Poetry


The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is the best book I have read this month. It took me about that long to read it, because it is hard, and he keeps jumping time frames, and the subject matter itself is vast, complex and often depressing. But Mukherjee writes about cancer in a way that I had not thought about before: as a disease that has haunted humanity for centuries, and as one that we have fought, successfully and unsuccessfully, for about that length of time. It is quite literally a biography of cancer, and it is very, very engaging. What I'm saying is, this book didn't win the Pulitzer for nothing. I now want to read about genetic biology.


The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson

This is semi-fiction, because while I have no doubt that everything in the book is factually true, the way he writes it has a hint of frivolity that probably didn't exist when all of those things actually happened. Which is good, because psychopaths are scary, and the way he describes them and how they're tested for would otherwise be morbid and disturbing.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu

This is a poem. Double You Tee Eff. I actually had to read it a couple times, I still don't understand why it says such deep and profound things, a lot of it strikes me as fairly obvious. 'When faced with a stronger enemy, flee'. Thanks, Mr Tzu.

Bought but not yet finished

The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene

This is such a hard book to read. The book itself looks at different views of multiverses and how they might exist, but there's a lot of difficult physics in it. It's got a load of stuff about string theory, energy fields, inflation and other things. I struggle with it every time I go into and come out of the Tube, and while it's nice to understand a little bit about how the world functions and might function, too often I just reach for fiction instead.

A Little History of the World, Ernst Gombrich

This is awesome! It's basically a children's history of the world, and while told very simply, it is clear, and intuitive, and I love it!