The reaction was predictable. He must be lying. "I stop reading Dickens cos it's so boring, therefore everyone else must!" is the cry. It made me wonder: how can anyone know what anybody else's reading habits are like? At university, I was always reading several books a week: the primary texts we were studying; a smattering of secondary texts; and then a novel or two on the side which had nothing to do with my courses. These days, I'm usually reading about ten books or so at a time, at various stages. I read, re-read; sometimes I'm looking at a book for the third, fourth or even fifth time. As a book reviewer, I always have the tome I'm currently working on - at the moment, it's three: a work of fantasy for the TLS; a children's book for the Guardian in the pipeline; and a novel for The Spectator.
Some I've only just begun, some I'm a long way through. I'm reading G K Chesteron's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which I dip into when I can for some prescient light relief. Since I'm giving a lecture soon on Paradise Lost, I'm studying a book about the poem by Loewenstein, as well as the poem itself and the introduction to it in the Penguin edition. I've been reading - or perhaps that is the wrong word; absorbing might be better - The Shorter Pepys for about ten or more years now - a month at a time, savouring his love of pies and his trips down the river and his delight in acquiring new clothes.
Frances Wilson's Guilty Thing is a fabulously well written biography of Thomas de Quincey; I'm drinking it down it alongside Confessions of An Opium Eater, which I'm re-reading. I've been perusing a book by Norman Davies called Vanished Kingdoms, about the kingdoms, large and small, which once dotted Europe; in almost total contrast to this serious work, I'm half way through the second volume of Simon Raven's amusing and louche Alms to Oblivion Series, which I read a few pages of before sleep, as a kind of tonic.
I've been completing my awareness of Henry Green for some time, being half way through the final novel of his that I haven't yet read, Concluding; alongside this I'm dipping into his contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, simply because my old copy of Brideshead Revisited turned up, and I couldn't help but immerse myself in it again. (Funny to think that everyone thought Green would be read long after Waugh.) A biography by Hannah Pakula of Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Victoria, who married the future Emperor of Germany, has been keeping me company in the small hours. Yesterday, I re-read Hamlet, because I'm teaching it next term; today, I'm looking again at Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, each time finding new resonances and mirror images.
Is this bragging? Or is it just part of the way that I read? Reading, to me, is so much a part of life, that I would not be able to live without it; and that, of course, feeds in to writing. Why roll your eyes when someone says they're reading something "difficult"? Why not, instead, try it yourself? You never know - you might find something worthwhile. There's many books on the shelves, and one of them, somewhere, will set your soul on fire in a way that Dan Brown never can.
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