WHY do we have to endure lists of people’s favourite books? The end of every year brings a simpering litany of sycophants slapping backs so hard it feels like a tuberculosis convention. What about books we hate?
Me, I bear a particular grudge against those Russians. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for a start. I’ve waded through thousands of pages of tight print seeing off these tomes but every time I start to talk about them I sound like I’ve contracted early Alzheimer’s. The fact is I have no idea what any of the characters in any of the books are called, with the merciful exception of Pierre in War and Peace. You can see the different names on the page but, verbally, they all morph into a single name: Somethingavich. “Yes, I really liked that, you know, the prince. That one who was the cousin of someone with a… the one who marries that woman.” What is the use of reading a book you can’t talk about? Or, to be honest, brag about?
Then there’s that damned Joyce nonsense about the wake. Thanks to an innate stubbornness I polished off Ulysses in under a decade and then decided to have a crack at the riverrun thing. It sits on my shelf mocking me every time I pass, chortling to itself about my inadequacy. “You can’t read me! You can’t read me!” No I can’t and I hate you for it, you snotty little Faber.
And TS Eliot. Naturally, I despise him for being a disgusting anti-Semite and a fascist sympathiser. But these misdemeanours pale into insignificance compared with his penning The Waste Land, an impenetrable mass of typing, full of pointless allusions to things no one with a life has any interest in or knowledge of. But instead of instantly transferring it to the Waste Bin, otherwise reasonable people stand in awe of it. Presumably because they can’t understand a word. On the same basis, any book in Serbo-Croat would be an instant classic. Mr Eliot’s output is rivalled only by those ruddy Metaphysicals who seem to operate somewhere between poetry and crosswords.
And I wonder if anyone who claims On The Road is a marvellous book has ever read Kerouac? It’s like being dragged by the hair across an entire continent by some rather dull low life. Then, by way of an encore, we do the same ruddy thing again, except this time by a slightly more southerly route.
Not to mention The Wind in the Willows. I felt under an obligation to like it because it was given to me by a kindly aunt when I had German measles. My guilt at loathing the garbage postponed recovery for months. I’m still not sure I’ve got over it. The book, not the measles. There’s a rat holed up with a mole that moves entirely out of its habitat to live with a badger in the middle of a wood down the road from a mad toad. With that sort of thing thrust upon you in infancy, it’s little wonder I experimented with acid. “It was the books that made me do it, officer.” These are the reads I want to know about. These are the lists I’m looking for. Bad books that cheese you off.
Chris Proctor
