Andy Miller - The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

Originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Fourth Estate.

THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY. Copyright 2014 by Andy Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN 978-0-06-144618-4

EPub Edition December 2014 ISBN 9780062100627

14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Alex, love Dad

THIS BOOK CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.

Homer, The Odyssey

Whats the point of going out? Were just going to wind up back here anyway.

Homer Simpson

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 Millers 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 Dont 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 Dont 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 Brooklyns 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 ). Further activities and interests will be made abundantly clear in due course.

It may come as a relief to learn that the books 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 couldnt 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 ) whenever he or she likes, thats why we have included it. However, my list differs from others in one crucial regard: it is neither a prescription nor a set of numbered instructions. Rather, it is the inadvertent by-product of the process described in these pages. It is the cast left by the bookworm.

Fig. 1: Profound misconception of the work in the mind of uncomprehending reader.

(courtesy BodyParts3D, made by DBCLS)

Fig. 2: The reality.

(courtesy Gary Houston)

The Year of Reading Dangerously emerged from an honest attempt to read a number of books which, for reasons which will be divulged later, I had succeeded in dodging during an otherwise fairly literate thirty-seven years on Earth. If you glance through the titles and are surprised at the omission of certain novels or authors, or certain types of novel or author, it is because either I had already read them or I did not want to. Likewise, if you are unconvinced by a particular non-canonical choice, it was not an attempt to be unorthodox or provocative but simply intuitive intuitive and honest. At a certain point, if I felt like reading The Silver Surfer, say, or The Epic of Gilgamesh, or something by Henry James, Julian Cope or Toni Morrison, I did so. There were no quotas. This selection of books, therefore, does not constitute a deliberate or alternative canon. If you scan Appendix One: The List of Betterment, and think to yourself, hang about, where is Updike, Woolf or Trollope? Martina Cole or Jules Verne? Thats not the novel by Cervantes Id have chosen... What about Ulysses? The Catcher in the Rye? Girl With a Pearl Earring? How can this list be taken seriously when it finds no place for my favourite authors or at least those writers I consider indispensable?, then I respectfully suggest you write your own book unless your name is Andy Miller, in which case you have probably already done so.

Above all, wherever possible I tried to avoid bad faith. First I lived this book. Then I thought about it for ages. Then I wrote it down.

So the List of Betterment represents a diary rather than a manifesto; a ledger, not an agenda. I am not urging you to read all the books in this book there is no need, because somewhere in the back of your mind you will already have a tentative list of your own, the contents of which are drawn from your curiosity or enthusiasm or guilty conscience, rather than mine.

What kind of a book is The Year of Reading Dangerously? To the extent that we are governed by the laws of copyright and fair use, it is a work of literary criticism. It is also a memoir and a confession. I have not tried to explain these books solely in terms of their relationship to other books; instead, what follows is the story of an attempt to integrate books to reintegrate them into an ordinary day-to-day existence, a life which was becoming progressively less engaging to the individual living it. In this book you will find footnotes, emails, personal reminiscences, blog extracts, recipes, potted biographies, strong opinions and jokes. You could conceivably use it as a reading group crib, though I dont advise it; you might receive some strange looks across the savouries. This book also contains strong language and a Tweet, for which I apologize in advance (the Tweet, not the cursing). Please note: although I read fifty great books in a year, I have not talked about every single one of them in these pages. This is either because I had too much to say or too little. I have attempted instead to give you a sense of the journey, its highs and lows, rather than laboriously describing each one of the rest stops. This is a book, not a blog; and the great books I have chosen to write about here are the ones which encapsulate the major themes and recurring motifs of my year of dangerous reading. Also, Perennial told me they didnt have enough paper for all fifty.