What's that you're reading?

As I've got older, I've got better at abandoning books. Nowadays, I can decide that I'm not enjoying a book, and put it down. I can decide that it's a pile of poop, and deposit it in the nearest (and most appropriate) waste receptacle. In short, I can acknowledge that this particular work is not worth expending my diminishing number of minutes of existence upon. How long does a page take to read? Thirty seconds? A minute?

A book takes up a lot of your life. It has to earn the right to do that.

As a younger person, I felt guilty if I struggled with a book, or if I was tempted to give up on something because I didn't like it. (Mental. I know.) There was something of the Protestant work ethic in this, some belief that a book had innate worth, in and of itself, and that -- just because it existed, and because I had picked it up -- there was some kind of unspoken contract that I had to fulfill -- as if I had committed myself to it, and couldn't let it down. Not staying the course was an insult -- to the book, to the author, to the bookshop/library, to the world of letters, to language, to humanity, and to God h/er/imself. Jesus: guilt, guilt, guilt.

I remember when this started to change: Slowly Up the Ganges (or was it Down?), by Eric Newby. I'd been reading a lot of travel books, pining for exotic locations while travelling to work through a leaden London in winter. I understood (received wisdom, to which I was often in thrall) that Mr Newby was the doyenne of travel writers...the Ur travel writer. But I just didn't get it: I didn't like the prose, I didn't feel, see, hear or smell the places he wrote about, and I couldn't warm to his voice, or to him. So I put it on the shelf in stack 3, sector 7, with a bookmark between pages 38 and 39.

And it sat there and mocked me for my lack of application, and for my failure to consummate the relationship. I was weak, lazy -- a dilettante.

Gradually, it sunk to the bottom of the stack. Eventually, after a couple more aborted sallies, I thought, I'm never going to read this -- what's the fucking point? I don't like it. So I gave it away. I'll say that again: I gave away a book. I was twenty-seven years old. It was my first time. I'd finally done it, and my sense of shame began to diminish. It took a long time, though, and a lot of arm-wrenchingly heavy house moves, before I finally culled my immense library of books that you will never read again, you nana-head.

The books I've read that have totally gripped me, and resonated ever since, are relatively few. I've read thousands -- Christ knows how many -- books, but I bet there aren't that many that I can look back on and say That book still lives vividly in my imagination. The first ones that spring to mind are:

• Cat's Eye (Attwood)


• Bomber (Deighton)


• 2001, A Space Odyssey (Clarke)


• Still (Thorpe)


• Fingersmith (Walters)


• David Copperfield (Dickens)


• Unless (Shields)


• Tarry Flynn (Kavanagh)


• Austerlitz (Sebald)


• Remembrance of Things Past (Proust - the first volume of the old Penguin translation)


• The Prussian Officer (Lawrence)


• Holocaust (Gilbert)


• Titus Groan/Gormenghast (Peake)

Actually, there are quite a few, and I haven't started struggling yet - those all came easy.

What I'm searching for as a reader is that book that you can't wait to get home to read, the book where, as you near the end, you keep seeing how many pages are left because you don't want it to end. The book that takes you into a complete world, or whose protagonists grip you and engage you. Those books seem increasingly rare to me -- maybe I'm getting jaded. There have been a couple in the last year or so -- Austerlitz, The Emigrants, Any Human Heart.

I can't wait to find the next one.