It's my year of 'reading loads of books'. The target is 100. Here's how I got on with numbers 21 - 25.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Reading new books is tiring. You have to learn all the character names and key yourself into the author's writing style. And sometimes there's a load of world building to take account of, and you have to remember the rules and priorities of the universe you're in. Exhausting.
All of which is to excuse myself for going back to a book I've read dozens of times, and know like the back of my hand. I decided to read all the Hitchhikers books again, on the very reasonable grounds that I hadn't read them for a while, and they would make me happy.
Hitchhikers is a foundation text for me. I think I saw the TV show first, when I was very young, and was instantly won over by its mad stream of big ideas, outlandish characters and clever humour. Not to mention that it started with the outrageous idea of destroying the Earth in the first episode.
Then came the book. I think my mum lent me a copy, which she had in turn borrowed from someone else. And that's the one I've still got, more than 40 years on. So if that's yours, I'm very sorry. I'm not sure you'll want it back - it's sort of falling apart. And that's because it's been loved so very, very much.
Reading it again, I was startled at how well I knew the text. My brain ran ahead of the words, autocompleting the lines from memory before my eyes had caught up. Adams's prose seems so light and effortlessly witty, which is testament to the real work he must have put in - it's not easy to make things look that easy. It's also suprising, coming back to the book, how many deep, clever ideas explode from the pages, in among the daft wordplay and frivolous nonsense. It's an amazing piece of work, and part of my soul forever.
The Bullet That Missed - Richard Osman
Another fun one. I love Osman's writing style, and yummed this up in no time. This is the... third, I think, of his Murder Club books. I was initially reluctant to read them, I recall. Insanely, I think there was a kind of snobbery at work in my thinking. "Why would I want to be like everyone else and read these immensely popular books?" As if I was some daring, independently minded reader who read nothing but the most esoteric and unusual things.
Well, his books are good. He has a great ability to quickly sketch interesting, memorable characters. Which is good, for me, because when I'm reading I tend to instantly forget who everyone is and why they matter. Also true in real life, if I'm honest. I'm not what you'd call 'focused'. But yeah, Osman's characters are a delight, and I think it's down to his great eye for small quirks and details.
I'm currently writing a book, and one of the things I'm interested in is, 'how much description is too much?' Like, should I be constantly describing the way characters move and speak? Will it help to establish them in your mind if I give a running commentary on how they fumble unwrapping a packet of Digestives, or enjoy the chorus of This is a Low by Blur, or shift in their chair trying to get comfortable? Is that fun? Or is it maddening fluff that slows things down and gets in the way? Agatha Christie seems to do none of it, and I didn't have the first clue who her characters were, which suggests I definitely should do it. But Charles Dickens, conversely, goes on forever, waffling about minute details, and it made me so furious and bored that I threw his stupid book across the room. So there's clearly a point where it becomes too much.
Anyway, the answer is 'do it as much as Richard Osman does it', which is to say, a small, perfectly judged amount. This book is great and I loved it.
Invisible Women - Caroline Criado-Perez
This book has been sitting by the bedside for quite some time, on the special shelf called 'Things to read when you have the concentration span'. Well, it turns out I basically never have the concentration span, so the only thing to do is read it anyway and hope for the best.
This is a really good book which does an excellent job of arguing that the world is designed by men, for men, and while that's excellent if you are a man, there's are apparently all these other non-men who are having a terrible time. The book looks at all sorts of areas, from medicine to employment to the way we test seatbelts, and shows how the standard of 'normal, regular design' is in fact very lopsided.
So I liked this, because I'm very into learning about our blindness to ingrained assumptions, if only so I can be more pedantic when arguing with Doctor Who fans on the internet. Plus I suppose I am, by definition, part of the problem - creating the world around me in my image and thinking 'what a very fair and normal place'.
I did find, however, that I wasn't very engaged with the data itself. I'm fascinated by the idea that the statistics underpinning social struture are flawed, because the methodology used to gather them is inherently one sided. And I'm interested in what needs to be done to rebalance that. But the numbers themselves... I'm afraid to admit my mind started to slide off them. Turns out I'm more interested in ideas than facts. Please try to forget this character flaw, and just remember that I'm an amazing feminist, and very sensitive, and ever so brave.
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Look at this! Proper literature. Like I should have read on my English degree. Or read before I started it, probably. I seem to remember my lecturers often making reference to famous, classic novels, on the quite reasonable assumption that people signing up to a degree in literature would have read them. And everyone in the class would nod and say things like, "Ah yes, typical of the themes to be found in her other works" and I'd just chew my pen and think, "Please don't ask me anything. Marillion did not write a song about this one."
So, here we are with my first Austen. And it's good, isn't it? Even though it's a book, and not on TV, and it's quite long, and it's set in the past when things were more boring. Am I being flippant? Only a little. I have always avoided these books, with a quite lazy prejudice that assumed they'd be slow, unrelatable and reliant upon incredible levels of concentration.
What I found, of course, was an incredibly human story, populated by very recognisable characters. Their world is utterly unlike mine in many ways, but the psychology of the characters is instantly recognisable. There's an incredible wit to the writing that made me laugh out loud, and a pulsing energy to the conflicts, difficulties and victories the story throws up. At one point I gasped, out loud. "What's happened?" asked the wife, expecting some kind of zombie based event or explosion. I tried to explain: "Old Auntie Evil Tossface had demanded that Elizabeth Whatsername be quiet, and Elizabeth has said no! Amazing!"
It takes quite some writing to make me realise that an act of disobedience, in this social circle, is basically the equivalent of Darth Vader throwing the Emperor down a shaft in Return of the Jedi. Bravo.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams
The second of the Hitchhikers books is also great. It's more or less the same book, really, based on the same source material as the first, that being the initial radio shows.
There's a little bit more of a sense in this book that Adams is trying to work towards something of a plot. Which is not his strong point. He's much more of an ideas person than a 'plot' or 'character' person, and the book feels a little more laboured as a result.
It's still incredibly enjoyable, though. Reading it again became a kind of archeology into the layers of my personality. Arthur Dent was a good figure of identification for a young adolescent. As he wandered around the galaxy, clad in his dressing gown and wondering why nothing made sense, I was wandering into my teenage years, wondering much the same thing.
And, yes, sometimes I actually went wandering round the streets in just my pyjamas and dressing gown. In my satchel were a peculiar collection of items, including, of course, my towel. Through the city I'd go, marvelling at the alien world opening up. Because of Adams, it was OK that it made no sense. That was all part of the fun. It didn't need to. You could just accept things on their own terms, and try to have fun, and love everything.
Ahhh. What books. What a man.
That's your lot for now. I know, it goes so fast, doesn't it? But look -
Here's what happened last time, with books 16 - 20. Why not read that?