What a
wonderful problem to have! Books are piling up on the wee table beside my bed,
waiting to be read, while others, written by friends and recently published,
are due to arrive soon.
I often
feel intimidated by people who imagine, quite justifiably, that I might be well
read. You’d think that as a writer I’d have all the classics filed away in my
memory banks, yet nothing could be further from the truth. I read all the time,
but I do it slowly, for a few precious minutes in bed, before I take Lady Dog
for her morning walk.
If a
book is really gripping me, I will stay awake at night to read it, but more
often my sleepy brain is too addled to absorb literature of any kind. Instead I
grab a Guardian Weekend magazine and read of restaurants, pop-psychology,
fashion and modern culture, reconnecting in some way with the London life I
left behind in 1989.
There
is nothing that compares to the feeling of being engaged in a good book: the
excitement of returning to a unique fictional world. While I’m passionate about
film, the book is invariably better than the movie (with the notable exception
of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a good book turned into a
masterpiece on screen.)
When I
first encountered my teacher and friend Iris Leal in 1986, she asked what I was
reading and screamed with horror when I spoke the words: “Stephen King.”
She
demanded I read the great Russian writers and Thomas Mann and a host of others.
She bought me a copy of Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of
Solitude, which opened my eyes to magic realism, and then she ordered me to
read Anna Karenina.
What
Iris didn’t realise was that her well-intentioned exhortations were serving
only to reinforce dark feelings of inadequacy that were pummelled into me at
Public School. It was there, in my teens, that I decided the great works of
literature were beyond me.
When you’ve been told you’re thick often enough, you
start to believe it, but nothing was going to rob me of the joy of reading.
Devouring
Enid Blyton’s stories in the 1960s, read by torchlight under the bedcovers
after lights out, I was hooked. Having consumed every word of every book in her Secret Seven series, l moved on to the Famous Five, then the thrilling leap
to Alan Garner’s magical adventures in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The
Moon of Gomrath and Elidor.
Always
within my arm’s reach, read scores of times inbetween all the other books of
childhood, was Stephen Fennimore’s Bush Holiday, an utterly thrilling story
about a young lad taken to the Australian outback to live on a ranch.
Looking
back now I believe that book led me to the life I live today. The sense of
adventure and glorious freedom I experienced vicariously through its pages
burned bridges in my mind, leaving in tatters synapses that led to security.
I
wanted to live on the edge; exist by my wits.
Next I was moved by Bound for
Glory, Woody Guthrie’s great biography about his life on the road during
America’s Great Depression. My middle class sensibilities were so happy for him
when, at one point in his story, after half-starving himself and being beaten
up, he had the chance to stay in a warm cosy house, have a bath and eat a good
meal.
I
remember gasping out loud in shock when instead he chose to walk away from that
house, because the air inside smelled stagnant.
Couldn't
he have had the bath and meal and then left?
Was
this what being true to your ideals meant? Turning your back on comfort to live
by your own rules?
I
still find that book astonishing, as I do my other two American heroes. Not the
great Faulkner nor F. Scott Fitzgerald for me, but rather the dirty realism of
Charles Bukowski, whose abhorrent language and attitudes attract me for their
honesty. Unashamedly shocking, brutal and hilarious, you don’t have to like
Bukowski but his writing cuts through the crap like nobody else.
Far
from Bukowski’s verbal beatings comes my beloved Richard Brautigan, who writes
the prose of a stoned poet, using words gently and subtly, while offering great
wisdom shrouded in humour.
So
contrasting in styles, both of these American writers offer a stark honesty
that I find irresistible.
Inbetween
these extreme pillars of my bookshelf, I add Galway’s own great Walter Macken,
who’s centenary was recently celebrated in the streets of the west of the city.
No
other writer has enlightened me more about Irish history or shown me such
images of the culture and darkness that pervaded back in the days of
oppression.
Macken’s voice booms and whispers with the comfortable authority of
a man in his own world. It is both a tragedy and a travesty that much of his
work is now out of print.
So
what should I read next? Inspired by Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One
Midsummer Morning I was starting to read Cider with Rosie, but then Dalooney
lent me The Narrow Road To The Deep South, Richard Flanagan’s heart-wrenching
Booker Prize winner.
As yet
I have not started my friend Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (Stinging Fly),
published this summer to great acclaim from high places. Claire-Louise has that
most extraordinary of gifts: her own literary voice, so I look forward to
immersing myself in her unique world of words.
Then
I’ll read my good friend Helen Falconer’s cracking new book,The Changeling,
(Random House), followed by Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha In The Attic, which the
Snapper loved.
After
all that I’ll escape once again to Tudor London with C.J. Sansom’s latest
Shardlake novel.
I
feared that E-books and Kindles were going to kill the printed book, but going
by recent upturns in both retail bookshop sales and the pile beside my bed, the
book is not only surviving, it’s thriving!
©Charlie
Adley
05.06.15
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