Freewheeling Andy

I've said this elsewhere on this forum. When I was travelling around Europe on trains as a 20 year old it was a fantastic book, all about freedom and adventure, it was talking to me - or at least the fantasy person I wanted to be, the chilled out hippy type without anything to tie him down. The language and the subject were perfect for me. I went back to it a few years later and it was the most self-indulgent rubbish. It's definitely a book for a time and place in your life, for a particular mood and mentality. I think for most people it's a book to read as a rebellious (aspiringly intellectual) teenager. Most people I know have gone through a phase where it would have been right for them.

I was about 120 pages in when I gave up. Someone told me that it's a book you suddenly get at some point in your life, and it's worth going back to every 5 or 10 years and reading a few pages of it to see if it suddenly makes sense. But I'm wondering if I've not got better things to do with my time.

It's a long time since I read any, but I really enjoyed Ender's Game when I read it. I think I must have read it not long after it came out, and along with Iain M Banks stuff it felt very refreshing compared to the slightly more pulpy or consciously-weird SF of the 60s and 70s that I had been gorgeing myself on at the time.

I read it, along with almost all the other Buchan novels, and certainly all the Richard Hannay ones, as a teenager. They were fantastic teenage fodder, if slightly old fashioned. As mentioned above, it depends a fair bit on coincidence, but that's pretty much par for the course on that kind of book. Great adventure drive, though, which is why it's good for kids. The old-fashionedness comes in things like an obsession with, say, stag hunting. Something that was fairly standard for wealthy men in 1912 (actually, the stag hunting may be a different one of the Hannay novels, but the attitude is there through them all), but seems deeply archaic for most of us now.

Added Iceland, although in fact I'm only maybe 20% of the way into the book.

I'm sure they don't. But so many do (at least on the surface, in terms of the titles) that in my mind the whole genre has become tarred by the same brush, and the whole genre has become innately damaging.

Oooh! Them's fightin' words round these parts!

I'm with Tiresias on the self-help. There are myriad reasons, for me. Even if the book itself turns out to be good, so many self-help books offer "quick and easy solutions" to people desperate for the effortless life, when in fact the solution is to just work hard. It's an equivalent, too often, of the miracle diet. How to find love in 3 easy steps How to become insanely rich, the easy way Your life is a mess, but I can make it better by pointing you at god/mammon/the teachings of my guru etc. The shallowness of the approach means that it both gives people hope that there are simple solutions to difficult problems; it also suggests that the shallow desire for wealth/love etc, is itself a wonder-goal. And, frankly, the titles, the kinds of places you find these books, the pictures of the authors, the fact that they're always being pushed on daytime TV, and so on, tells me that I'm not the audience for these books; but also the audience for these books is absolutely not the kind who need to be told there's a nice, simple, clean way of improving things, the lazy way.

The Human Stain took me much longer than it should, and I kept getting distracted. Now, going through the nested novels, I've started Haldor Laxness's Independent People properly this time, and suddenly it's much easier to read having got through the first couple of pages and into the swing of his writing style. I reckon it could end up being nearly as good a book as it's purported to be.

Finally coming back to this. It took me an age to chew through the second half of the book, and I've no real idea why. It's still a great book, although pretty dense and heavy. But I think it lost some of the verve midway through - the passages were just too long and a tad introspective for my tastes, I think. One of the kys to the book seems to be Roth trying to address pretty much every issue that was controversial in post-war USA - race, anti-semitism, feminism, Vietnam, the prurience over sex (and particularly in the Clinton-era). He does it with a very light hand, but still it just seems perhaps a touch too deliberate.

That's a distinctly less heavy, and a lot easier to read, bunch than the Penguin Classics were. Although I'm not sure I'd want to read Ayn Rand whilst lying on the beach.

That's my solution. Unfortunately the girlfriend wants to use the shed to store things that we might actually use again.

I think you all underestimate how lazy I am.

Generally, I think my tastes are much broader and more catholic now than when I was younger. I think that's a fairly easy experience, because you start off reading liking maybe one or two things which draw you in, and the more you read the more different things you find that you like - and also get accustomed to and learn to like. There's a similar thing with food. But, as with food, too, there are some things I liked when younger which now seem so unsophisticated and bland as to be completely pointless except when in need of mindless comfort. Unlike food, I think there are ideas in books which also seem to appeal to the younger, more "adventurous" mind. I think Kerouac's On The Road was a great example of that to me. I read it travelling round Europe as an 18 year old, and the idea of beat writing, and of upping sticks and travelling, was completely right for the mind of a travelling 18 year old. Now, to the older and more cynical me, it reads like self-indulgent rubbish.

OK. I'm getting sold on the idea. A "What Happened To Andy's Books" blog, for people who've picked them up to reply to. Chances are, I guess, that only 1 in 10 or so would get any response, but it would still be interesting. It might be embarassing, too, given what utter rubbish some of them are.

I quite like this idea. Just leave them on the tube with a "please take this book" post-it note, saying "I thought it was rubbish, but you might like it", or "everyone should read this. it's bloody great" Seriously, quite a lot of the books are in perfectly good condition. None are in great condition because I'm completely apathetic about preserving them. And if any of you wants to pick up a large and random box of books and happens to be in London with a car, you're welcome to them.

If I let people pick and choose, how do I get rid of the rubbish ones?

Bah. The bad consequences of laziness, eh.

Aah. There's the problem. They're all in boxes and there are lots of them and I really don't want to do any work getting rid of them.

Do you want them?

I have lots of books. They've been in storage for 2 years. I've not missed them. Now they're cluttering the shed. What should I do with them? They're not in great condition - some have been swimming in the bath, or in the sauna, or have been dragged under taxis in my bike pannier. The spines are generally mangled. Some are great - Evelyn Waugh, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, Philip Marlowe, all of the Philip Dick short stories. Some are utter rubbish, though - particularly The Book Of Memories by Michael Chabon Is it worth my time and money selling them? I don't think so. Can I give books in such rough condition to charity shops? Probably not worth their while. At the moment I'm inclined to give them away if anyone who might be interested in reading a miscellaneous bunch of things is happy to drive to SW London and pick up 3 large boxes of books and not pick-and-choose and just carry them away. (You might also get a Scalextric thrown in, as it's something else that I don't want and is just cluttering). What do you all think? I suppose I could just keep them in the shed, but that seems like a waste for all kinds of reasons.

The Road is wonderful, but it's definitely not a Western.

Larry McMurtry, I think.

There are many books I've mourned finishing, of course, but just thinking back it's odd that a couple of the ones that immediately spring to mind are genre books - Lonesome Dove, as I mentioned on a different thread; and A Canticle For Leibowitz. Mostly, though, I think the books I mourn finishing, I mourn as for the time and place I was reading them, where everything was just clicking together (sitting on a warm train trundling across central Europe, or staying at a girlfriend's house, or lying in bed in the warmth at the end of a good day). It's sometimes hard to detach the enjoying the book and enjoying the time and place I'm reading.

I've acquired no books this month. And, given the increasingly slow rate at which I've been reading, that is no bad thing.