I started maintaining a list of all the movies I have seen (in theatres that is, movies on television are not worth the effort) since the time I was 15. This has met with sufficient enough ridicule for me to extend this to my other passion – reading. A recent examination of the list confirms what I been feeling over the past few months, a lot of my reading is non-fiction nowadays. I have thinking about this, wondering what might be behind this. Is it a natural growth path in one’s reading habits (I have to do a random survey of friends for this), or is it that a lot of what i look for in reading these days is knowledge and information rather than entertainment. Is entertainment something I have reserved for only movies and television and can books hope to catch up with that. Inherent in this is an assumption that books can’t offer entertainment on the same scale as movies. That assumption sucks.
So I guess I have been reading the wrong books. I am caught in an age and frame of mind where I have grown out of pulp (I recently got hold of Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, couldn’t wait to put it down) have started upon serious reading quite some time back but still even after all these years have not got around to really enjoying these books. Take an example, I read Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs last year. Just could not get myself to enjoy it or understand it. Same goes for Coetzee’s Disgrace. It was named by Observer as the best book of the past 25 years. At the end of it, I was wondering what the fuss was all about. I have always prided on the thought, immodest though it may sound, that my literary tastes are above the average reader. All this hoopla threw me into a quandary and I seriously started to wonder whether something is wrong with me and I started to feel inadequate.
By the way, I did read some other critically acclaimed books which held me in thrall Blind Assassins (Atwood), Life of Pi, Vernon God Little, Cloud Atlas, etc. But these books are few. After Blind Assassins I read another book of Atwood – Alias Grace – which did nothing for me. I was stunned when I read Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, but when I went on to As I Lay Dying, I was slightly disappointed. Into this list come various others - Raymond Carver’s What we talk about when we talk about love, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Le Carre’s The Spy who came in from the Cold, Kerouac’s On the Road, Naipaul’s A house for Mr. Biswas (absolute tedium) etc.; all classics mind you but didn’t engage me enough.
But on the other hand, bar a few, the quality of non-fiction has been relatively high. This I guess is only because my scales for assessment are different. I am looking for insights, information, facts, knowledge from these books and in each of these even half measures are okay. Even if you get “some” insights, “some” information it might be considered fine. But in fiction, “some” entertainment or “some” great writing takes you to boredom.
I guess I have to stop reading works of fiction just because they are on some top 100 list. But if I stop doing that what do I read – I can’t read pulp, at least not often. I can continue to plod on to the next great writer hoping that I can come across a great book – I haven’t yet read Ishiguro, Peter Carey, Philip Roth, Amis, Iris Murdoch, etc etc. But what if I do not enjoy any of them. I can’t stop reading, the thought is even more scary.
Reading a book and not liking it even more painful than not liking a movie. Reading a book takes a couple of weeks for me. And at the end of it, if I do not like it I rue the time spent on it. A movie only takes a couple of hours. I know this is my time pressurized modern self speaking but I am comparing alternative means of enjoyment.
What do I do now. Now where was the list of top 100 books of the century again. I have done 13 so far.
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