Must Rereads

Those of us who bury ourselves in books are often unhappy creatures desperate to find consolation. We don't merely find it in fictional worlds, but also in reasons and explanations which help to order our chaotic thoughts and instincts, to loosen neurological knots, to reconcile contending passions.

At least, this is the intellectual explanation. The other, perhaps more truthful, explanation is that reading is an addiction. How many of us buy far more books than we have time for? How many of us flick through dozens of books in one evening, never settling, never content, always look for some new novelty, some new bit of knowledge? How many of us fetishise the book itself -- the paper, the foxing, the newspaper cuttings and shopping lists used as bookmarks, the cover, the leather (if we're so lucky), the inscriptions, the smell from the decades marinading in the damp houses of peculiar antiquarians?

I keep many books. Though I feel I must confess that most I keep for reasons other than the writing. I like certain editions, say, or I have fond memories of purchasing the book in some dreadfully unwelcoming bookshop. The genuine test of whether a book is worth keeping is whether or not one re-reads it. By this measure, I suspect I could cull my library to fifty books, if that (with the exception of some reference and textbooks). And I doubt this number would expand much over the rest of my life.

One often sees lists of 'Must Reads', but never 'Must Rereads'. Yet the former would provide a much more interesting and rewarding selection. It would be less vulnerable to fashion, a far more honest assessment of what books people actually find meaningful.

I'll give you my list in a moment. But I feel the need to write a quick preface. When I reflect on the books I love, I feel some guilt. There are many 'Great Books' I have read, and often found interesting, but am entirely unable to love. I see how much other people adore them, how much joy and insight they find, and my inability to understand this can almost feel as if there is a part of my soul missing. One particularly notable example is Dickens. I can see the beauty of his novels. I am attracted to their language. Yet I feel like I'm in some sort of dream where I'm trying to swim in the ocean, but for some reason I cannot penetrate the water's surface.

There are also books I adore which are not generally respected. Sometimes they are books dismissed as genre-fiction or even children's- or boy's-fiction. One example of the latter is Ivanhoe, one of my favourite stories, which even in its time was regarded as a sort of boy's adventure story, a costume drama, one of Scott's less probing works, and is now almost unread (with the exception of Tony Blair, who I believe claimed he kept it by his bedside, though that is not an endorsement I necessarily welcome). I love the story. I genuinely think it profound and full of virtue. (I will at some point write an essay about Scott, why he is of the 'great unreads', and what makes the Waverley novels so compelling.) But there is a part of me which feels guilty for loving this adventure story and being bored stiff by, say, Vanity Fair. One likes to pretend that things like literary stigma don't matter in the end, but truthfully most of us are vulnerable, at least to some extent, to a sense of intellectual inadequacy.

Anyway, off the top of my head here's my list of Must Rereads, in no particular order (and like on Desert Island Discs, it goes without saying that any Must Reread list includes the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare):

Robert Burton -- The Anatomy of Melancholy
Samuel Johnson -- Rasselas
Samuel Johnson -- Essays
Samuel Johnson -- The Vanity of Human Wishes
James Boswell -- The Life of Samuel Johnson
Walter Scott -- Waverley Novels (not yet read them all)
Walter Scott -- Journal

Daniel Defoe -- Robinson Crusoe
G.K. Chesterton -- St Francis of Assisi

G.K. Chesterton -- The Judgement of Dr. Johnson
Jerome K. Jerome -- Three Men in a Boat
Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Eugene Vodolazkin -- Laurus
St Augustine -- Confessions
John Kennedy Toole -- A Confederacy of Dunces
Tomasi di Lampedusa -- The Leopard
Tobias Smollett -- The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
M.R. James -- Short Stories
Simon Leys -- The Halls of Uselessness
C.S. Lewis -- Out of the Silent Planet

Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World

Lewis Carroll -- Alice in Wonderland

Daniel Defoe -- A Journal of the Plague Year

Charles Ives -- Memos

Malcolm Bradbury -- The History Man

The Analects of Confucius

Walter M. Miller -- A Canticle for Leibowitz

Vikram Seth -- An Equal Music

Jorge Luis Borges -- Short Stories

(One notable book series I may have to add is the Aubrey-Maturin novels, the first of which I have just read. I feel compelled to read them all, and I suspect I will end up rereading them too.)

James O'Brien asks an irrelevant question

I must confess that I do on occasion listen to James O'Brien's LBC programme. Possibly for the same reason that I read the Guardian every morning. He represents the predominant worldview, a worldview with which I have no natural sympathy, and so it seems especially important that I study it. O'Brien is an effective and persuasive political commentator. He nearly always finds a way to catch his enemies out (though he also has the rather craven habit of asking his allies superficial or 'prompting' questions, the sort of questions where the interviewee smiles and replies, 'I'm so glad you asked me that question, James...')

One question he often asks Leave supporters is, which EU law would you like to be rid of? This has proved extremely effective, and it suggests a lack of sense and judgement of those calling in than they cannot quickly and easily dismiss it for the fallacy that it is. Rather, they indulge his question, either speaking in empty political slogans or by describing the most obscure and ridiculously trivial of EU regulations. They all remind me of the miserable man in one of Chesterton's essays who (seemingly unknowingly) repeats all the empty opinions he has read in the newspaper -- in a 'blaze of catchwords' -- as if they were their own deeply-held beliefs.

Neither the listeners calling in nor Mr O'Brien realise that the question is irrelevant. There are many United Kingdom laws I oppose, but that does not mean I want to end parliament. It takes the most unjust and intolerable of laws to make people oppose a governmental institution. Most of the time people tolerate bad law, blunders, even corruption, so long as the political machinery keeps working and some good, at least, is done -- and moreover some bad is avoided. Opposition to the EU is down to a lack of faith in the process. It does not matter much whether the laws are good or bad; a majority of people don't care for or about the system that produces them.

It matters how a thing is done. It matters whether a shop is noisy and ugly, even if it supplies all the goods one might need. It matters how your boss treats you, even if he pays you well. It matters where your house is located, even if it's the most splendid and comfortable of houses.

People voted for the European Union because of various prejudices (and here I use the term in a non-pejorative sense as literally a pre-judgement, almost an instinct), and they are trying to justify their decision postjudicially, as it were, by the economic and empirical standards that their opponents have imposed. You would have had a hard time asking a Roundhead soldier or a proud Saxon which specific law(s) he opposed. The differences are deeper, necessarily rooted in generalities. The Brexit vote was a proxy vote for many things, an opportunity for those with various grievances to dissent. It never was about specific EU laws or regulations. It was about home, affections, tribes, loyalty, political fidelity -- things which you either 'get' or you don't. If you forced me to live with someone else's family, I may get to live in a mansion, I may be ten times better off, I may have more freedom, but nonetheless I would much rather return to my own family. It would be hard, if not impossible, to give an empirical reason for this, but that doesn't make it any less true. The only people who would not rather return to their own family are those who have fallen out with their family, or whose family is broken and even unloveable. Perhaps this is how many people feel about Britain. I may even sympathise with them. But what I think is wrong with Britain is also wrong with the EU, probably more so. And besides, it's very hard to change a institution as enormous and as fundamentally misguided as the EU. Britain is smaller, has the great fortune to be an island, and has a political tradition worth building upon. We will not be 'great again', but we can be a modest, decent and ordered nation if we alter our course.

The Tyranny of Silliness

If one wades through the popular YouTube videos one will quickly notice a common theme: silliness. Each one features fast, jerky shots (usually with some sort of inane music in the background) of a person making a silly expression or gesture, and adopting a daft tone of voice, as if they were entertainers having a nervous breakdown on some dire children's television programme.

One can take random examples from the 'trending' section of YouTube to illustrate this:

Or

When most people look at or listen to recordings from the 1940s, say, they think the people sound silly. The pitch of the male voice is too high, the enunciation too precise, the accent too plummy. Yet modern man and woman hears their own absurd, graceless speech and think it is normal. Of course, it is not so much silliness they identify in the voices from the 1940s, but rather their own discomfort. The old voices sound silly to moderns because those old voices were serious. They were learned, hierarchical, dignified, from a time which was far more serious. When moderns laugh at these voices it is a laughter to alleviate unease. Indeed, the tyranny of silliness we face is a result of the fear of the serious, the discomfort one might experience in the presence of seriousness and serious people, and therefore feeling entirely out of place. The brain spasms, and a trite phrase, 'yolo' or 'lols' perhaps, is ejaculated; the phone is removed from the trouser pocket or handbag, and the person exits the world and enters their unholy sanctuary of social media, comforted by its triviality and silliness, which requires nothing of them but laughter and likes.

Of course, while they are patently silly to many around them, they do not consider themselves silly. They have almost reverted to a semi-animal state where they are not fully self-conscious. One example of this phenomenon is pop music. In the typical pop music video, a person in daft clothing, spouting the most uninspired and crude lyric (which they think is meaningful), will bop about nonsensically, usually with a very glum look on their face. It is this glumness which is most revealing. They think they are serious, or at least the very least not silly. One of the most obvious features of most popular music (so obvious most people seemed to have missed it) is its complete lack of a sense of humour. It has gone through eras of flared trousers, psychedelic t-shirts, ripped jeans, tracksuits, oversized 'bling', pseudo-hooker outfits, mohawks, mullets, and worn it all with a straight face. The most frightening thing about the tyranny of silliness in which we live, is that the silliest people take themselves seriously, and moreover they are taken seriously by most others. The pop star is an idle, he or she is revered; any semi-literature, uninformed pronouncements made on a political or moral issue are considered to have weight.

As I wrote here, we really do live in an inverted age.