The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life
A funny, scrupulously honest account of one man’s quest to reverse 20 years of lies and read the books he’s always claimed to have read.'I loved the writing and the characterisation, oh, and the plot – yeah, all really pithy. Really great': sound familiar?Andy Miller has been living a lie. But then again, who hasn't? How many books have you claimed to have read but never actually finished, or started, or even heard of? Books you've really wanted to read, or should have read, but never had the time, or the inclination? Tackling the canon single-handedly, Miller decides to rectify his twenty odd years of lies and silence his nagging guilt and become the literate man he's always claimed himself to be.The Year of Reading Dangerously is an inspired and witty tour of literature from all genres: classic, cult and Dan Brown. A comparative reading of The Da Vinci Code and Moby Dick somehow seems inevitable, the Charles Arrowby cookbook becomes a terrifying possibility and an explanation of the curious unreadability of Catch-22 is attempted. We travel from the mires of inaccessibility, incomprehensibility, commodification and confusion to moments of enlightened, ecstatic wonder. It becomes unavoidable to consider how we buy, borrow, steal and generally use and abuse books for our own complicated ends.Written with characteristic sharp and honest humour, The Year of Reading Dangerously is an affirmation of the pleasure of reading and a challenge to everyone who loves books but has forgotten how to read. Out of serious enquiries into commercialism, mediocrity and our literary prejudices emerges a very funny account of one man's attempt to read more dangerously.
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Fourth Estate
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This Fourth Estate paperback edition published in 2015
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Andy Miller 2014
Cover design © Leo Nickolls
The Andy Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007255764
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007375257
Version: 2015-02-10
For Alex, love Dad
‘I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.’
Homer, The Odyssey
‘What’s the point of going out? We’re just going to wind up back here anyway.’
Homer Simpson
Contents
Exclusive Excerpts from the Blog of ‘Leonard Bast’
Appendix One: The List of Betterment
Appendix Two: The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most
Let me begin on the back foot and linger there awhile.
This book is entitled The Year of Reading Dangerously. It is the true story of the year I spent reading some of the greatest and most famous books in the world, and two by Dan Brown. I am proud of what I achieved in that year and how the experience changed my life – really altered its course – which is why I am about to spend several hundred pages telling you about it. However, the book you are holding has not always been called The Year of Reading Dangerously. I started out with that title but then had second thoughts. For a while The Miller’s Tales seemed like it might work. After that, I briefly considered Up! From Sloth, then The Body in the Library. Other possibilities included Hunting Paper Tigers, Real Men Don’t Read Books, Memoirs of a Born-again Pessimist, Croydon Till I Die and Bast Unbound. For about five minutes, it was called Outliars. Then there was Against Nature II: Resurrection, which was followed by What Are You Staring At?, which in turn gave way to We Don’t Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin (To Have a Good Time). After one particularly difficult morning, I amended the title page to F**k the World, I Want to Get Off. Finally, however, that first thought prevailed and I turned back to The Year of Reading Dangerously, or, to give it its full title, The Year of Reading Dangerously and Five Years of Living with the Consequences.
Because there are a lot of Andy Millers in the world, several of whom are writers, I also contemplated a change of pen name. For the record then, this book was not written by Andrew Miller, the bestselling novelist, or Andy Miller, winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize for poetry, or Andy Miller, the television scriptwriter, or A.D. Miller, whose thriller Snowdrops was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker prize and whose Christian name turns out to be Andrew. Nor was it written by Andrew Miller, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Andy Miller, guitarist in the Britpop band Dodgy, Andrew Miller, the Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, Andrea Miller, founder of Brooklyn’s Gallim Dance company, nor any of the hundreds of Andy Millers on Facebook, especially the one who counts ‘Women bringing me sandwiches’ amongst his activities and interests. Each of these Andy Millers has something to recommend him – or her – but none of them is me. So for this book, I have decided to stick with Andy Miller because that is the name of the man who wrote it; I make my own sandwiches (see here). Further activities and interests will be made abundantly clear in due course.
It may come as a relief to learn that the book’s subtitle has remained immoveable throughout and that, by and large, it is factually accurate: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life.
The backbone of The Year of Reading Dangerously is a list of fifty books; I started out with just a dozen or so but then found I couldn’t stop. In an age of communications overload, we seem to find lists like this irresistible. As we are called upon to consume ever more information and broadcast quick and decisive opinions, so we are drawn to this basic method of data-handling: directories of best and worst, top hundred countdowns, another 1001 things to do before you die. The reader is at liberty to flip to Appendix One: The List of Betterment (see
