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.