A Short History of Reading

..bought.
More than that, if I don’t like them, I don’t have to finish them.
The ultimate luxury.
I have been a prolific reader and buyer of books. I buy books for myself and
books for my friends with the intent, apart from giving my friends pleasure,
of borrowing them sooner rather than later. It is a new bookcase every year
in our house, despite recycling books through friends, relatives and op shops.
But exceptional books, like exceptional wine, are few and far between. Books
that age well and require re-reading do not come that often. Like wine I tend
to follow the vintage of writers, hence my collection of the works of Haruki
Murakami and Michael Chabon.
I come to authors from a variety of sources. Murakami was recommended by Reader’s
Feast where I buy most of my books. They have a good member club where every
few months you get a voucher for 10% of the cost of the books that you have
recently bought.
Chabon I bought purely on the title “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”
and I have been working my way in reverse through his catalogue.
Neal Stephenson, the patchiest writer of science fiction and historical fantasy,
was recommended to me at an IT analysts conference in Sydney when I mentioned
my love of the founder of cyber punk, William Gibson, and his Sprawl trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
Of all of Neal Stephenson’s output I prefer ‘Snow Crash’ (a
book that started out as a computer game) and ‘Cryptonomicon’ probably
one of the better post modern novels and stunning introduction to the history
of cryptography. However Stephenson has one signal fault – he doesn’t
know when to stop, or, often, how to stop.
Gibson is, by contrast, a master of style with a straight line to Dashiell Hammett’s
hard-boiled detective style of the ‘Maltese Falcon’ and Sam Spade
novels. And you have to like a writer who can reference Melbourne and indirectly
Chopper Read in his Japanese set ‘Idoru’.
There is an inordinate amount of Bill Bryson, whose light touch hides very clever
writing, some of which I have used when I have had to speak in public. From
‘Made in America’ I tailored an ubiquitous introduction as to the
fact that we are congenitally unprepared for the future, using his description
of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower when they landed on the shore of the
Americas with the aim of settling.
“It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to
a life in the wilderness. They packed as if the y had understood the purpose
of the trip. They found rooms for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet
and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes
and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or
house or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s
manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shop
keeper and a hatter – occupations whose importance is not immediately
evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment”

I do have books that I have bought and read so that I can become vaguely
acquainted with literature. Like most people who went through the practicalities
of Art School, I acquired an access to the other arts through friends and
their study notes. I have read and enjoyed all of James Joyce, until I was
stopped by ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ at Page 119.
I have read Proust’s ‘À la recherché du temps perdu’
twice with increasing but, I am sure, incomplete understanding. I have struggled
with Thomas Pynchon’s variability, wondering how a person can write
the ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and then peculiarities such as ‘Mason
Dixon’.
I used to read my daughter Elizabeth when she was young. She had all of the
‘Lord of the Rings’ read to her over many months as her bedtime
story before she went to sleep. I read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’,
that wonderful of story of redemption with the two most famous bookend paragraphs
of writing starting …
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age
of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…..
And ending
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is
a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
When I tried to read Pynchon’ s ‘The Crying of Lot 49”,
a wonderful complex weaving of history and improbability, I had to stop because
it was too difficult to read out loud. The cadences were too chopped, the
sentences lacked flow. Yet it still remains a wonderful book to read, despite
parts which are now historical relics of sixties pop culture.
You have to like a book which can reference a detailed description of a performance
of an imaginary Jacobean revenge play ‘The Courier’s Tragedy’
(by the fictional Richard Wharfinger, whose events and atmosphere mirror the
events surrounding it.

Still, after all of this cultural grounding, her favourite book was ‘Hurray
for Pig”