Reading

Just the day for staying inside, away from storm Darragh, curled up warm with a good book. In my case its 'If He Hollers Let Him Go' by Chester Himes, his ground-breaking debut novel from 1945 about what it was like to be black in America during WWII. It was re-published in Penguin Modern Classics just last month, and I bought it (along with 'The Crazy Kill', same author, same imprint) from my local Waterstone's, when I ought to have been addressing other priorities, as will become clear later on.

Anyway, reading. I've covered this topic a few times down the years on the Dead Good Blog. Link here to the one where I recounted my memories of not being able to read and what prompted me to learn: Be More Book . It also lists my favourite twenty novels, if you're interested.

I devoured books as a child (we had no television until I was ten), loved English at school, took English Literature for A-level and went to Warwick University where I read English and American Literature. Professor Bergonzi in his inaugural lecture let it be known that the primary purpose of our being there was not to pass exams, get a degree and a good job, but to acquire a deep love of literature that would make us voracious (but discerning) readers for our lifetimes. Talk about preaching to the converted.    

I must confess I did read off piste quite a lot, like the complete works of Nabokov when we were only supposed to read 'Lolita'. Ditto Thomas Mann when all that was prescribed was 'Buddenbrooks'. The same with George Eliot when all that was required was 'Middlemarch'. And everything by Kurt Vonnegut, who wasn't even on the syllabus. I could go on... I ran with authors I enjoyed (Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Zola, Hardy, Huxley, Kafka, Pynchon, Updike, Austen) sometimes to the detriment of writers I should have been reading but didn't much like. It was probably the precursor of binge watching TV series (not that I do). I'm sure Bergonzi would have understood.

I haven't even mentioned poetry, but that was an abiding love over those three years as well, especially Keats, Blake, Donne, Yeats, Eliot  and of course Homer, Dante and Shakespeare..

John Keats enjoying a good read

In no time at all I had graduated, gone off to Exeter University to learn how to teach and then to a comprehensive school in North London where I set to, enthusing children to be as excited about reading as I had been at their age.

Those of you who've bought my recent poetry collection 'From The Imaginarium' will know from the foreword that I was shocked to find some of the kids in my classes were illiterate, fourteen and fifteen year olds who couldn't read. It's the reason why I'm donating some of the proceeds from sales of the book to the National Literacy Trust. For those few years that I was a teacher, I read a great deal of children's and teenage fiction that hadn't been around when I was young, by the likes of Richard Adams, Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, Helen Creswell, Alan Garner, SE Hinton, Gene Kemp, Judith Kerr, Ursula Le Guin and Mildred Taylor. You might recognise some of the names if you have children of a certain age. Of course we read to our own children when they arrived and encouraged them to love books in the way we did.

Curiously, my father-in-law who taught English at Durham University made a proclamation on the day that he retired that he would never read another novel as long as he lived, which was a good few years and he stuck by his decision. I could never understand that. It seemed like such self-deprivation to me and there were so many great novels published in his retirement years.

After moving out of teaching, I worked for Kodak until I too retired. Along the way I picked up various long-service awards and for one I elected for a complete set of Arthur Ransome's classic  children's novels in hardback, all dozen of them from 'Swallows And Amazons' through to 'Great Northern'. I'd read them all as a boy and re-read them when my own girls were young. So now I'm reading them for a third time, one every year or so, and will pass them on to my grandson (who's not even one yet) in the hope that he may enjoy them in turn..

I suppose nowadays I read approximately a book a week. You won't be surprised to hear that I keep a 'reading record', have done for years, just the title, author and date when read. Some of my favourite books I've read several times, Hermann Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game' being a good example. 

The pile of books waiting to be read doesn't seem to grow smaller, but I don't have a problem with that, and I'm sure Penguin Books doesn't. Reading has been (and long may it continue) one of the greatest pleasures of my life, so Professor Bergonzi was spot on. Sadly he died in 2016. He wrote over thirty academic books, including one about his friend David Lodge (whose humorous novels I love), and he wrote one novel himself. 'The Roman Persuasion' which I really ought to add to the waiting pile I suppose.

there is no shame in piles of to-be-read books

Reading is such a wonderful activity to be able to engage in, almost anywhere. And what a communication process it represents - the ideas from the mind or imagination of one person captured in coded signs pressed in ink onto pieces of pulped tree (I don't do e-books) so that the experience can replicate and resonate in the mind or imagination of another person. Fabulous. If that's not a kind of magic, I don't know what is.

The other week I went into Blackpool town centre on a particularly frustrating shopping expedition to buy myself a new pair of jeans. It used to be so easy, lots of shops, lots of brands, plenty of choice and everything fit comfortably - not the case anymore, on any count. Walking back from town I thought that buying jeans was comparable in a sense to Eliot's measuring out life with coffee spoons - and this poem was the result. It's in here by virtue of it mentioning books, those novels of Chester Himes I named earlier. And just to avoid any ambiguity (because some were confused when I first shared it), the numbers refer to waist sizes, not ages.😉

In Which The Poet Goes Shopping For Jeans But Buys Books
Just part of the index 

by which I measure life -
shopping for jeans.

I remember 30 

studious Warwick University
ditched the velvet loons
for some rivetted Lee Coopers
from C&A then coffee in the round
at the Lady Godiva café
nights of sex and essays

I can recall 32 

wedding bells impending 

fatherhood a decent job

high-waisted Hard Core denim
from that shop on the ramp
between the florist and vintner
days of wine and roses

I revisit 34 

cool black Levis
from an American store
in a US mall man of substance
wife and kids along
road-tripping California
evenings round the pool

Oh but 36 is a shock 

the weight sits on 

and nothing quite fits right
I end up buying an LP
(they call them vinyls nowadays)
and two new books instead
I may look for jeans online

I'll sign off with a musical bonus from 10,000 Maniacs, a song about illiteracy. Just click on the title: Cherry Tree

Thanks for reading, S ;-)