We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.I like books about books and I like being exposed to others' reading experiences. When I'm perusing reviews on goodreads, I'm not generally looking for plot summaries – which are easy enough to find elsewhere – but rather, I enjoy when someone tells me how a book made him feel; how a reader filtered a book through her own marrow. In a way, The Year of Reading Dangerously is like a compilation of these introspective goodreads reviews, with autobiographical info inserted in order to make plain the connections author Andy Miller discovered between his life and art.
I was instantly intrigued by the notion of “reading dangerously”, and as Miller declared in the prologue, despite changing his mind about the title many times, he felt it was the only way that he could capture his experience, which in a nutshell was: After becoming a father and working drone, Miller realised that he had stopped reading, preferring to do Sudoku puzzles on his daily commute into London. To shake things up, he determined to read 13 “difficult” books that he had at one time or other lied about having read, and once he accomplished that, he expanded his “List of Betterment” to 50 titles. Honestly, I never got the “dangerous” aspect of this task, and I actually felt a bit manipulated by this setup. From the prologue and early chapters, it seems as though Miller had never had an interest in reading and then had an aha moment about the importance of literature in one's life. But then it's revealed that he was the child who preferred to stay inside and read during recess at school, he studied Literature at university, worked for years in a bookstore, and was, at the time of his reading challenge, an editor at a publishing house; someone who spent all day reading manuscripts. Whither the danger? And who uses a word like floccinaucinihilipilification* without defining it, despite a liberal peppering of footnotes?
A potboiling title aside, I quite enjoyed this book. Although he did read his 50 books, Miller doesn't write about all of them, and those that do appear, are generally talked about in pieces – like the vile recipes from The Sea, The Sea that Miller tried to recreate, or a commentary on the middle-brow suburbanism of Charles Pooter from The Diary of a Nobody. I probably enjoyed this book most of all because I agreed with his assessments of the books we've read in common: like Miller, I probably would have enjoyed On the Road more if I had read it in my twenties and understood Middlemarch better had I left it for middle age. I, too, could not engage with One Hundred Years of Solitude, I agree that Dan Brown is a terrible writer, and was encouraged to learn that Under the Volcano was purposefully opaque and author Malcolm Lowry expected it to take several readings to understand.
Miller's writing style is wryly British, with much self-deprecation and quippy asides. And while I can't blame a British author for writing Britishly, there were so many references that went over my head, and especially those about BBC television shows and personalities. The only name he dropped that I remember recognising was Stephen Fry, and amidst all of the obscure musical references, I only caught Neil Young and The Human League. It might be unsurprising to learn that I have zero interest in reading Krautrocksampler, even if it is widely available online in pdf form.
The last thing I wanted to comment on was Miller's evolving attitude towards the blog he kept during the early part of his challenge. At first, he states:
The blog was partly a rolling progress-report on the List of Betterment and partly, like the book group, an attempt to be outward-looking, contemporary and sociable – communal reading with people I did not know and planned never to meet.Essentially, this describes my relationship with goodreads. By writing reviews, I'm leaving a public record of my own List of Betterment and, so far as mostly one-sided conversations go, I find it to be satisfyingly sociable. But only two pages later, Miller writes that he eventually deleted his blog:
Maybe for some readers keeping a blog expedited the thought process. I'm sorry to say I found it a distraction and, as time went on, a chore. Once again, it was something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike reading. You stayed alert for the dominant themes, the telling phrases, about which you could opine wittily but, once you'd found the hook, engagement with the text went no further than it needed to in order to produce copy on time and in good order.I must admit that when I'm reading I love recognising an author's tricks – good and bad – and noting page numbers so I can later find my review's supporting quotes. And sure, that may mean that I spend the rest of the book looking for more of these connections. But that's the only way that I know for reading deeply, and before I started writing my reviews, I did not read deeply; I did not seek dominant themes, or tricks, or connections. How I now wish I had always read and recorded my impressions this way and could look back on my thoughts about Middlemarch or On the Road or even The Da Vinci Code instead of relying on the vague impressions of them that remain in my memory. In a way, pretty much everyone on goodreads could assemble their reviews, add a bit of autobiography, and have a decent book along Miller's line.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, even if it's not my favourite example of the format. A quick read with some interesting insights; especially for the constant reader.
*floccinaucinihilipilification: the estimation of something as valueless.
Without admitting to even having a proper blog on my above goodreads review, I'll note here that my own reading challenge is not dissimilar to Andy Miller's, and while I have tackled some "difficult" books along the way, I wouldn't want to limit myself to them. With some editing, what's here on my blog is what Miller made a book out of, and as my intent is to have at least a thousand books here (343 so far!), hopefully I'll have an even better chance of finding meaningful connections between my life and literature.
And I don't usually add my magical thinking anymore because just about every book I read parallels spookily to something that happens concurrently in my real life. But I did especially note while reading this that I wouldn't have realised Bangor was also a city in England if the main character in Codex hadn't just told me so and I wouldn't have understood the Alton Towers reference if there hadn't been a roller coaster accident there just the other day.
As for the significance of these coincidences, I'll leave that to this Science Guy:
