Don't judge me for
this, but I spent the last hour sitting in my summer house reading
W.B. Yeats' Wanderings of Oisin. Okay, have you got all the shouts of
'posh twat!' out of your system yet? Good, then lets carry on. While
I was happily glugging cider and wondering what the fuck Yeats was on
about, I realised that it didn't matter, because I could flip back
and forth at my leisure, without pressing rewind buttons, and having
people look at me like some kind of cretin who doesn't understand
that Oisin spends three hundred years dicking about in Faerie because
he saw a pretty girl, while Ireland converts to Christianity behind
his back and then instantly feels his age and falls off his horse on
his return (saved you a read there, thank me later).
My
cat, Kahlo thinks that the wheel of time was way too long, and
hopes that a song of ice and fire gets to the point soon before it goes the same way.
hopes that a song of ice and fire gets to the point soon before it goes the same way.
She quite likes Ian Fleming though, these are her books
obviously,
mine are all far more worthy.
I know it's obvious,
but I really like books. They are the best of all the entertainment
media available. I always used to think I liked books best because
they were convenient, because I couldn't watch telly or listen to
records when I was stoned off my tits in the middle of the woods. But
then walkmans (walkmen? I don't know) did exist back then, and I
still preferred to read a book (at the same time as listening to
records is best if you can though). Nowadays, you can watch telly
right off your phone, so I could sit in the middle of nowhere and
watch anything I like. However, I like books, so I do that instead,
if I'm not staring vacantly at the view, wondering where the dog's
gone and if there's another can of cider hidden in my coat.
I like the medium of
reading much more than watching stuff, largely because I get easily
distracted by my own brain. One stray thought and I'm off thinking
down a rabbit hole of something else, and by the time I get back I
have no idea what's going on. This has become a much bigger problem
with age, as a kid I could be riveted to any movie easily, never once
thinking 'I wonder what it would be like if you actually were a baby
deer being raised by a street-wise rabbit' and coming up with a
gritty alternative version that focuses on Thumper's troubled past as
a child prostitute. Decent, plot-driven TV and film of the kind I
like, will slap you for not paying attention. You will have to
rewind, or just look bemused for an hour or so while you figure out
what has happened. Luckily, there is plenty of TV that you can just
watch and not need to know what's happening, or two minute videos of
people falling over on youtube. I'm not a fan of those though.
The book allows you
to look up, and think about what you have just read, look at the
view, and contemplate things a bit before diving back in to the
story. Theoretically, these days you can pause TV and movies to do
the same thing, but when did you last do that? Never, obviously,
nobody does that. In the same way as nobody rewinds back to the start
because they've forgotten the hero's sister's name, or where the
whole thing is supposed to be set. Although this could also be
because we are usually watching in company, who will shout at you for
pausing it and staring wistfully out of the window with thoughts of
wonder over Ross Poldark's terrible scything technique. Also, if you
are a mum it is perfectly acceptable to keep bombarding the rest of
your family with questions about the bits you have missed/slept
through/didn't understand. However we all riffle back through the
pages to remind ourselves of what we supposedly already know (which
is the one thing I really hate about my kindle, flicking backwards
and forwards is damn near impossible). Particularly if we have made
the mistake of reading half a book while utterly shitfaced, and
discover we can't remember a word of it the next night, resulting in
having to riffle back through half the book before finding anything
recognisable (or is that just me?)
It could just be
because my parents had cases and cases full of books, all pretty good
ones as well, next to their utterly forgettable record collection, in
an age where nobody really had video collections, and there were
only 4 channels of TV that stopped at night-time. So books were the
only things I could grab in my lengthy insomniac nights, and
certainly the only entertainment-on-demand in existence when I was a
kid. Okay, sometimes the insomnia was caused by the fact that the
Secret Seven were engaged in some particularly difficult case, or
that I was worried what would happen to Moley in the wild wood (are
you calling me a posh twat again?) but with a torch, and some very
quiet page turning, I could get back into that other world easily.
Right up until my mum caught me.
There's also the joy
of the stolen 5 minutes, quickly reading a chapter with a cup of tea.
You can't do that with a film or a TV show, well you could, but do
you know anyone who does? The fact that you commence on a book, safe
in the knowledge that it will take you a lot longer than an hour or
two to get through is comforting. The surprise you get when you reach
the end in the first session will always lead you to believe it was a
good book. Although in many cases it isn't, as a second reading will
confirm. Phantom Menace syndrome* applies to books as well.
I know people that
don't read for pleasure. I don't understand them at all, but I know
them, they don't seem happy. I know people who can spend over a month
reading one relatively slim book. I don't understand them either, but
they seem a little happier, although they do watch a lot of telly. It
took me two months to get through Les Miserables, but Les Miserables
is enormously long, wildly tangential, and requires a good deal of
backward page riffling to remember properly. Worse than that, it
inspires a lot of those staring off contemplating what you've just
read moments. It's hard going, but by golly it's worth it. Unlike the
musical, which reduces it to a bunch of catchy songs and
two-dimensional characters. That's a couple of hours of my life I'm
not getting back any time soon.
Don't misunderstand
me, I'm not one of those awful twats who don't own a TV (how do you
possibly find out who these people are? Don't worry, they'll tell
you) I have several, I spend a great deal of my life lying on sofas
and watching movies. TV is great, movies are great, I can lose days
just listening to records and looking at the ceiling. I'm not even
arguing that books are more improving than TV is, breaking bad was a
TV show, and Dan Brown is still writing very popular novels, case
closed. There's a lot of shit out there in every media.
I
made these for books, they got a bit filled with my records, so I
built more,
they don't look as good as these though.
We bought a bigger
house so it would fit all of our books in, we don't regret it. I
spend a lot of my time building new shelves to fit all our books on.
My wife and I buy enormous amounts of books, she prefers huge weighty
non-fiction books on art and photography, which take up an entire
wall of our living room, while I have filled the rest of the house
with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, classic literature, and stuff
that just looked like it might be interesting from the cover, along
with the poetry collection begun by my Grandfather, that I promised
I'd increase and pass on to another generation, I'm doing okay with
the first bit of that, and have tremendous optimism over the second.
Of course I throw a lot of them back into the world via charity
shops, and occasionally leaving them on buses, but the piles get
bigger, never smaller, which is great, because books are great, even
the ones you never get round to reading.
I have devoted most
of my life to pure escapism, sometimes via transcendental music,
sometimes via hallucinogens and narcotics, sometimes via the cinema
screen, sometimes via the simple, beautiful method of cider. But the
only one that works best, and can take me to where I want to be, be
it Ankh-Morpork, 19th century Paris, the Shire or Toad
Hall, is just some bits of paper with ink on. I would not want it any
other way.
George
Orwell also likes books
*as an
impressionable 22 year old, I left Barnstaple Cinema having seen the
Phantom Menace, a film I had waited more than half my life to see,
convinced that it was the best film of the entire Star Wars saga.
After seeing it
again, I quickly realised how wrong I was. How very, very wrong.