Being well read...

I find these Penguin book covers very pleasing.


Anyway, I was just watching a programme on BBC4 about British novelists in the 20th Century.  I knew it would be good - and indeed it was.  The Beeb do that kind of thing better than anyone else.


I have read quite a lot of the books they talked about - because, well, I am a rather well read lady.  When I was at university I set about the task of becoming well read, without quite realising how futile this can prove to be.  You forget books you see, that's the trouble.  That's why any good book demands to be read more than once, or even more than that.


In the programme they mentioned 'A Passage to India' - which I have read and pretty much completely forgotten.  Same with 'Brave New World' and 'Mrs Dalloway' - forgotten, forgotten.


Much better to read fewer books better than embark on a futile quest to become 'well read'.


I suppose if you look at the list I am well read, as it goes. Tolstoy, Cervantes, Laclos, Defoe, Dickens, Forster, Waugh, Greene, Kafka, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Steinbeck, Hardy, Powell, Melville, DH Lawrence, Golding, Burgess ...


And that's before we get to Ulysses, which I've read twice, and Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time', with its million and a half words... and I read every one... and it still didn't seem as long as some much shorter books.


Like 'The Odyssey' - promises so much but boring as shit.


Like 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' - I gave up halfway through, so confusing and complicated.


And 'The Man Without Qualities' - Robert Musil's enormous brick of a novel.  I'm sorry but it defeated me - it was just boring.


Proust on the other hand was vivid, gorgeous, gossipy, beautiful and actually full of sex and jokes.


So yes, I am well read - but a lot of those books I honestly can't remember.


Overall the writer I have enjoyed reading most is definitely George Orwell.  I've read pretty much everything he ever wrote - and it's all wonderful.  He was the master of the plain prose style, the guvnor of putting words together to produce a soothing, edifying effect on the mind.  My favourite.


Oh... and Milan Kundera - he deserves a mention.


There are still gaps in my reading too.  Never read : 


Dostoyevsky
Milton
Balzac
Flaubert


But I have read and enjoyed Jacqueline Susann, Ian Fleming, JK Rowling, Stephen King, Noel Streatfeild...


You know it's really hard to write clearly, to write a popular novel that lots of people want to read.  I know, I wrote an awful novel once - it's not easy.


So, my conclusion is that becoming 'well read' has been enjoyable - and I have by no means finished yet...  but I would probably have been better to read some of those books twice instead of ploughing on and on through the classics with pedantic glee.


What can you say to all this?  Maybe quote Philip Larkin at this point and just say 'books are a load of crap'.


Or maybe that other great poet, Morrissey : 'there's more to life than books you know - but not much more'  ?