Falling Back In Love With Books

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Andy Miller is the most engaging of writers. 'How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life' made me giggle to the point of annoying those around me (always satisfying). Its starting point is that having once been a book-nut, fatherhood and the general travails of the daily grind (earning money, lack of sleep, lack of time etc) had gradually whittled away his love of reading, in the process compounding his already dangerous habit of talking (knowledgeably) about books he hadn't read...

The honesty of what Andy Miller describes about himself and his quest shines through. He never pretends for a moment that what he set out to do - namely, to read fifty great books, including and especially ones that he had pretended to have already read - was plain-sailing. On the contrary. Several of the 'great' works he tackles, such as George Eliot's 'Middlemarch', prove extremely difficult to get into. Some he almost gives up on. But he persists, sometimes arriving at moments of blinding epiphany - suddenly 'getting' why the book is great - and sometimes arriving at a point where he can describe, most lucidly, why the end result does not work for him. And it was this that I liked particularly: the reaffirmation, almost lost in our busy entertainment-and-knowledge-on-a-plate world, that reading can and often should take EFFORT in order to release its treasures.

His chapter on Michel Houellebecq's 'Atomised' was especially brilliant. Never - NEVER - have I loathed a book more than I did 'Atomised'. But Andy Miller loves and 'gets' it. The chapter takes the form of a fan letter he writes to Michel Houellebecq, a letter both so amusing and so acute in outlining the book's virtues that I got to the end thinking that I might almost return for a second look myself. Almost...(But at least I HAVE read it).




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