THE BEST DARNED THING YOU’VE NEVER READ

The 'finished reading' stacks (part 1)

This is a house of books. They’re everywhere you look, some neatly placed on bookshelves, others piled up in various parts of the place, either waiting to be read or having been read and waiting to find a more suitable home. Perhaps, if the house started to fall down, the books might make a suitable alternative shelter, although the rain would probably ruin them, of course, so I’d never allow that. Maybe it’s the books that are holding the place up? I will take a book down off a shelf later on, if I’m feeling brave enough, and if I’m still here tomorrow, then you’ll know.

I sometimes see the houses of ‘ordinary people’ being interviewed on television and there isn’t a book in sight and it confuses me. Some might ask me how I live with all these books, but I will counter that I don’t understand how anyone can live without them. Other times, I watch shows about how to sell your house and am told that one of the things likely to turn off any potential buyer is having a load of books on display. They scream ‘clutter’, apparently, unless of course they just say that you’re trying to tell the whole world how ‘clever’ you think you are, which is, apparently, just another way to alienate everybody. How me owning books ever became transformed into my attempt to put people down and somehow ‘diminish’ them is a complete mystery to me. Maybe I should look up the reasons, but I haven’t got a book about that. Never-the-less, this modern world can sometimes seem to be turning into a very strange place.

I can see some of them now, all around me, stacked up on pretty much every surface. All those books that I’ve been told I should really read by someone who already has, so I went out and got a copy, and all those other ones I really just fancied reading, bought, and then haven’t quite got around to yet…

Just from here I can see a copy of a book of three Martin Crimp plays I was lent several years ago and which I definitely know I’ve read two of the plays out of. Beneath it is Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father” which I’ve definitely already heard on the audiobook CD someone lent us once, which is why I decided to go out and buy my own copy. Underneath that in the pile are two books t’beloved told me that I really should read, “The Lucifer Effect” and “Scenes from a Revolution”, and holding them up is a book I really fancied and ordered off the internet which is about the British Empire and called “Outposts” and beneath that at the bottom of that pile is the Dylan Thomas Omnibus that I blagged off my mother when she’d finished with it after they talked about it in her literature group a few years ago.

And that’s just one pile, a pile in fact that I keep meaning to return to (it stood at the bedside for quite some time before being relocated) if it wasn’t for the fact that every time I think about it, there’s another newer, fresher book that comes along to catch my eye and tempt me. I know for a fact that downstairs “The Book of the Moon” which I bought last week is my latest current reading and I’m just halfway through the first section, whilst Alan Coren’s “69 for 1” is literally on the brink of moving into the ‘finished reading’ stacks, before I make another attempt to carry on (for my third time of trying) with reading the latest volume of Clive James’ “Unreliable Memoirs” which is proving a beast to clamber through the first chapter of. But then, the latest paperback volume of “The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” series has already been consumed by the beloved and now sits there in the living room just daring me to pick it up, so I’ll probably read that first, and I know the latest Mark Billingham is out in paperback any day now…

Then there are the gift books that are sitting in the Christmas present pile, which has merged with the latest birthday present pile and the selection from the previous Christmas. Lovely, beautiful volumes bought with thought and care and a knowledge of my passion for things historical, scientific or entertainment based and yet which remain unread, and of course there are a certain number of other volumes I’ve acquired for myself over the last couple of years just because my finger was hovering over that oh-so-tempting “One Click Ordering” button that catches my eye during the occasional lonely lunch break which are craving my attention.

What about all the books that I’ve been told about and not yet acquired…? Or all those guide books we bought on holiday…? And the further ones we got when we got back because we’d become interested in all the things we’d been exposed to whilst there…?

And there is a whole stack of reference books I’ve asked for and been given or acquired by other means whenever my latest obsession overtook me. A few years ago I was working on a play about the First World War and bought a stack of books about that, which led to a parallel interest in the Second World War and how it seemed to be an inevitable consequence of the first and so more reading needed to be done. Meanwhile, the anniversary of the moon landings came and went in 2009 and I got hugely interested in all things NASA related which led to a fascination with the planets in general which became a thirst for knowledge of geology and then the whole history of the Earth which transformed into both an interest in the weather and in paleontology and all of these topics have a wide range of reference materials some of which I have acquired just to get a bit of background knowledge and few of which I actually ever seem to get around to actually sitting down and damn well reading!!!

I really should just buy a book, read it, then go and buy another one, but, oh no, now they’re piling up to the point where, if I’m really lucky and manage to keep the heart pumping for another thirty years, there probably wouldn’t be enough time to read the books I’ve already got, not to mention the ones that I’m likely to want to get during that thirty years, especially as there’s still a fair few of those season box sets on shiny disc still wrapped in cellophane and waiting for us to find the 22 or so hours it’ll take to consume each of them, and I haven’t even mentioned the chunky thrillers I bought cheap in the remainder bookstore a couple of years ago…

When I was younger, it didn’t matter. I always felt there’d be plenty of time, I could put a book on the pile knowing that I would probably get around to it one day. “Yours to own forever on video” meant I’d be able to watch my favourite films as many times as I jolly well liked. Now most of them get viewed once because I’ve got a sense of having no time to waste (and there’s always something else to watch anyway), especially as I now want to fit in all the writing of my own words instead of sitting down and reading everyone else’s. But then, when I can never seem to find any actual time to do any reading any more, how can I expect anyone else to either? This does rather negate the point of actually producing them, but I persevere. I think it was John Humphrys who once said that one of the things he’d learnt as he got older was the wisdom to be able to leave a book unfinished if it really wasn’t interesting him enough, and I suppose the rule is true for all other forms of the written word.

There’s a whole megagoogolplex (or something) of words pouring out of us all every day, in newspapers, books, magazines and even little places like this, and nobody has the time to actually sit down and read the blooming things. Maybe if our silicon culture manages not to corrode and corrupt, just a few of all those words will remain for future, wiser generations to pore over and decipher and wonder at what we were all wittering on about. I even read some of my own witterings back to myself the other evening and didn’t find it all to be complete nonsense. Even if I do say it myself, there’s some pretty reasonable stuff in here, some of it that’s barely been glanced at if you look at the numbers, but then that should come as no real shock to me any more. Even so, I quite surprised myself, to be honest, when I discovered that I've been known to talk some sense occasionally. They don’t know what they’re missing out on (he muttered with a kind of ironic half-smile...). This might very well not be the best darned thing they’ve never read, but I’m doing the best I can…