The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life Read Free Page A

about it, the rest is time off.
    Andy Miller
    The Garden of England
    Summer 2013

I
    â€˜Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.
    What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.
    Such a life has not been granted me.’
    Michel Houellebecq,
Whatever ( Extension du domaine de la lutte )
    â€˜I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world – this world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.’
    Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

Book One
    The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
    My life is nothing special. It is every bit as dreary as yours.
    This is the drill. Every weekday morning, the alarm wakes us at 5.45am, unless our son wakes us earlier, which he sometimes – usually – does. He is three. When we moved into this house a year ago, we bought a Goodman programmable radio and CD player for the bedroom. The CD player, being cheap, is temperamental about what it will and will not play. When it works, which it sometimes – usually – doesn’t, the day begins with ‘I Start Counting’, the first track on Fuzzy-Felt Folk , an arch selection of children’s folk tunes on Trunk Records. (For a few weeks after we got the CD player, we experimented with alternative wake-up calls, from Sinatra, to the Stooges, to Father Abraham and The Smurfs, but the fun of choosing a different disc every night quickly turned into another chore, one more obstacle between us and our hearts’ desire – falling asleep.) ‘I Start Counting’ is a lilting and gentle song, a scenic shuttle-bus ride back to Morningtown, and the capricious CD player seems to like it. So we have settled for ‘I Start Counting’. ‘ This year, next year, sometime, never . . . ’
    But on those mornings when the CD won’t take, the radio kicks in instead. These are the days that begin at 5.45am not with a soft dawn chorus of ‘I Start Counting’, but with the brutal twin reveille of Farming Today at ear-splitting volume and the impatient yelling of our only son, who has invariably been awake for some time. ‘Is it morning yet?’ he enquires, over and over again at the top of his lungs. We lie there, shattered. Someone somewhere is milking a cow.
    I stumble downstairs and make a cup of tea. In the time it takes for the kettle to boil, I put some brioche in a bowl for my son – his favourite – and swallow a couple of vitamin supplements, cod liver oil for dry skin, and high-strength calcium (plus vitamin D) for bones. The calcium tablets are a hangover from a low-fat diet I put myself on four years ago, wanting to get in shape before Alex was born, one of the side effects of which, other than dramatic weight loss, was to make my shins ache from a real or phantom calcium deficiency. The pains soon went but the tablets have become another habit. At that time, my job was making me miserable. For too long I compensated by eating and drinking too much, wine at lunchtime and beer in the pub after work, with the result that for the first time, in my early thirties, I had become a fat man with a big, fat face. I shed forty lbs. and have successfully kept the weight off, so that now, combined with the effects of sustained sleep deprivation, my face is undeniably gaunt.