The Baton

The lengthy ram­blings that follow are the fault of Rob Annable, who passed me ‘the baton’. The baton used to be a less-​irritating-​than-​usual weblog quiz meme all about music, but, some­where along the way, it mor­phed into being all about books.

Books Owned

I think I have some­where around 800 books, but this depends on whether the three or four large boxes in my cup­board marked ‘Books’ actu­ally con­tain books. Either way, that’s not very many, and I’m con­stantly wor­ried that I don’t read enough.

In the six months when I was with­out a tele­vi­sion, I reverted to being the vora­cious reader I used to be as a little child, and got through a good three or four books a week, sev­eral, fun­nily enough, picked up after read­ing about them on the weblog of Peter Lind­berg, who passed the baton to Rob. But since I bought a telly, I’m back to slump­ing in front of it, flick­ing through a mag­a­zine (Heat or The Wire) and idly won­der­ing whether Craig is actu­ally going to rape Anthony on Big Brother.

Since folk who’ve been passed the baton in the past have detailed their rig­or­ous shelv­ing sys­tems, I’ll reveal mine: absolute chaos. When I did a quick count of the shelves in the hall to esti­mate how many books I have, the first four books I was faced with were A His­tory Of British Social­ism by Max Beer, The Over­coat And Other Short Sto­ries by Niko­lai Gogol, Ricki! by Robert Wal­dron (yep, that’s a biog­ra­phy of Rikki Lake!) and Oryx And Crake by Mar­garet Atwood. Which, I sup­pose, is fairly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of my read­ing habits.

Last Book Bought

Erm, I’m not really sure. From the pile by my bed, it looks like it was either Dot In The Uni­verse by Lucy Ell­mann (a slightly histri­onic but very funny novel about a series of rein­car­na­tions dis­guised by a cover that makes it look like shit chick-​lit) or The Afflu­ent Soci­ety by J.K. Gal­braith, which is one of a fairly large number of books I own in order to better under­stand eco­nom­ics, but never get around to reading.

Last Book I Read

Again, I’m not sure, becuase I have a habit of read­ing at least two books at the same time. So it was either The Enchant­ment Of Lily Dahl by Siri Hustvedt (which like all her books starts well but ends, if not quite poorly, then less well) or Jonathon Coe’s excel­lent biog­ra­phy of B.S. John­son, The Fiery Ele­phant. Books I’m cur­rently read­ing include:

1. The Unfor­tu­nates by B.S. John­son - a lovely sur­prise gift that is so unbe­liev­ably fuck­ing good I’m read­ing one of it’s 27 unbound sec­tions each day to make it last as long as possible.

2. The Inde­pen­dent Group: Mod­ernism and mass cul­ture in Britain, 1945-59 by Anne Massey - I’ve read this before, but picked it up to check some fact or other and got stuck in it again.

3. The Prophet Armed: Trot­sky 1879-1921 by Isaac Deutscher - this one will take me absolutely ages (it’s rather dry) and then I’ve got two more 500-page vol­umes of Deutscher’s Trot-​fest to go. Read­ing Martin Amis’ won­der­ful Korba The Dread in Budapest has sparked off a bit of a com­mu­nist his­tory and biog­ra­phy jag.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me

Fun­nily enough, two of the five I would’ve picked are men­tioned in Rob’s baton post, but I’ll leave them in.

1. The Hitch­hik­ers Guide To The Galaxy by the late Dou­glas Adams would prob­a­bly make it onto a list like this drawn up by anyone of, roughly speak­ing, my gen­er­a­tion. I read it when I was very little and loved it, and I’ve read the series more times than I should’ve since then. The radio series is also on my iPod at all times, for falling to sleep to when I don’t have a radio to hand.

2. The Secret His­tory by Donna Tart is, frankly, a load of hack­ish crap, but it’s another one I’ve read far too many times, because it makes me nos­tal­gic for the time I first read it, when it was hap­pily and excit­edly passed around among friends, and we all thought we were very clever and glam­orous, just like the pre­ten­tious little tits that make up the cast of characters.

3. The Waste Land - A Fac­sim­ile & Tran­script of the Orig­i­nal Drafts Includ­ing The Anno­ta­tions of Ezra Pound is a book I only got my hands on last year, having first bor­rowed it from a teacher when I was in the sixth form. The Waste Land is, I believe, the best poem in the Eng­lish lan­guage, and one that points you in the direc­tion of the high­est of high­lights in the his­tory of lit­er­a­ture, Eng­lish or oth­er­wise. This edi­tion lets you see it being writ­ten, live, so to speak.

4. Col­lected Fic­tions by Jorge Luis Borges, trans­lated by Andrew Hurley - a bit of a cheat pick­ing an anthol­ogy, I sup­pose, but I love this book so much I keep all my favourite pho­tographs of my friends and family inside it’s covers (sen­ti­men­tal­ist that I am!). I don’t know where to start explain­ing why I like Borges, so I’ll be vague and just say that when I first read him, I knew that he was my writer, the one against whom all others are judged. Some­thing like that, anyway.

5. The Fer­mata by Nichol­son Baker - I could’ve picked any­thing by Baker to go here, really, but since this is the first book of his I read it just pipped The Mez­za­nine or Double Fold. Like Borges, I just plain love the way Baker writes: if I could write novels, they would be like his. (This is the reason why my friend Hannah inter­rupts me when I say, ‘Ooh, I’m read­ing this great book…’ to mock me with, ‘…yeah, yeah. It’s about a small pile of salt dream­ing about quan­tuum mechan­ics, isn’t it?’)

Two hon­ourable men­tions that might have made the above list if I’d been writ­ing it on another day: some­thing or other by Paul Auster and Edward II by Christo­pher Marlowe.

I’m passing this on to…

Glasgow’s Squarespace-​powered weblog­ging crew, com­pris­ing Donna, Genna, Mike D., plus Pat. I think I’m meant to do five, but I don’t know any more folk with weblogs, so if anyone wants to take up the baton and post their answers here, let me know.

Update 10/08/05: Mike has taken up the baton. I love the order­ing of books into cat­e­gories like spir­i­tual hippy druggy crap and zeit­geisty gen­er­a­tion x-ables!

Posted at 6pm on 01/08/05 by Jack Mottram to the books category.
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Tags: books, borges, eliot