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Best Books of the Year So Far
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Best Books of the Month
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It would be oh-so-reasonable to expect this volume to be a virtuously inspiring summary of books we’ve all been told we should read because they’d be “good for us,” but that we haven’t quite gotten around to --- this past year, or any other year. And to be fair, there is a sprinkling of that fine sentiment in Andy Miller’s THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY.
But the emphasis in this absorbing chronicle of a British editor-writer’s personal literary journey is not so much on how long or how many; it’s on the danger, specifically the dangers of confronting and dealing with the unknown. Miller really means what his book proclaims on the cover. After all, he’s claiming in the subtitle that the 50 great books he read during one intense year just before turning 40 saved his life.
Great, you might be thinking --- another mid-life crisis tale full of whiney regret, self-recrimination and promises to be future-fulfilled. But it’s not that, either.
What Miller managed to do on his collegial pilgrimage through a book a week (and a few confessed “supplementary” titles) was let the books and their authors vicariously review him. And if that isn’t the ultimate exercise in creative humility, I don’t know what is. The moment I got the gist that this phenomenal effect was actually happening, I found myself turning pages in the addictive way some folks eat barbecue potato chips (crisps to one from Miller’s culture).
The first thing we all need to know, and that Miller finds various ways to suggest, is that there is really no definitive list of the 50 “greatest” books in all of human history (and we can’t know yet what aliens are reading and writing). He gives his own at the end, just to keep the conscientious happy.Read more ›
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The Year of Reading Dangerously is like a column, or a blog, written by a chatty librarian--a bookworm--that answers the proverbial question: Have you read any good books lately? Is like? Strike 'like.' Actually, similes aside, that is exactly what it is. And I loved it. For that very reason.
Andy Miller--no, not that Andy Miller, but the one who works in the book trade in the UK, and keeps a blog at i-am-mil-i-am dot com. That Andy Miller. He is married and his wife Tina and their kid, little Alex, are getting along quite well, thank you, but it's just that for a boy who has loved books all his life, if you asked him if he had read any good ones lately, he'd have to say, 'not me, personally.' Plus, a lot of the books he claimed to have read, he hadn't. Not personally or even impersonally. He had not actually read them, per se, not to put too fine a point on it. So, he has like this epiphany, where he knocks out a few books--The Master and Margarita and Middlemarch--then he makes a list of about a dozen books that he has been going around claiming to have read, that he feels he should read, for the sake of personal betterment, and dubs it The List of Betterment.
Anyway, here is that original list:
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov Middlemarch - George Eliot Post Office - Charles Bukowski The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - Patrick Hamilton Moby-Dick - Herman Melville Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy Of Human Bondage - W.Read more ›
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When I first came across this title, I was immediately intrigued. Here, I suspected was the story of a man who improved his lot by following a reading plan. Well, that much proved true. I also suspected that his list would be one to emulate and that he would encourage that path. Not so much on that idea. What I did take away from this book was the encouragement to make my own list of a betterment, not follow the author's list. Sure, some of his titles might find their way on my list but many of his choices as "great books" were instead odd, idiosyncratic choices that had been stacked around his house for a decade or longer. I guarantee that Harold Bloom does not have "krautrocksampler" on the Western cannon. But most of us do have boxes or shelves of books that we bought but never got around to reading. Like the author, I too have claimed knowledge of the contents of those unread books. Thanks, Andy, for giving me the push to tackle those "unread" titles.
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To be fair, I am fond on most books that are about books. Mr. Miller also has the advantages of being of my generation, with a similar life situation to my own, and clearly a similar sensibility in books. (And, as I am a bit of an Anglophile, he has the advantage of being British and appreciating Brit Lit.) So—no surprises—I enjoyed this book.
The framing story of his travel through books is that, overcome with the responsibilities of job and family, Mr. Miller has discovered that he is not reading for pleasure in the way that he used to. In fact, he is claiming to have read books that he has never read. To right this wrong, he puts together a list of ten books that he wants to read, which quickly becomes expanded to fifty. Over the course of the next year, with the support of his wife and child, he plows his way through the fifty books and rediscovers the joys of reading. Along the way, he recounts tales of his life as they relate to his reading. All in all, it is a pleasant stroll, and Mr. Miller’s energetic writing is well strong enough to keep us going.
Of course, the real attraction is bickering over books. A glance through appendix two, “The Hundred Books That Influenced Me the Most”, shows considerable overlap is our reading: Seuss, Schulz, Monty Python, Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Doyle, Orwell, Shakespeare, Greene, Fitzgerald, Dylan, Eliot, Dickens, Proust, Hardy, Dick, Nicholson Baker, Chekhov, Tartt, Waugh, Roth, and more. And yet, I cannot but be shocked at the authors he still has to read (as described in appendix three, “Books I Still Intend to Read”): Chabon, Anne Frank, Stephen Hawking, Hilary Mantel.
But it is in the body of the text that I have taken under the most advisement.Read more ›
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This item: The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
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