guilty secrets

Current work: Revisions
Listening to: Anna Nalick
Reading: next on TBR pile

Very interesting survey here about ‘guilty secrets’ for World Book day.

I was a bit surprised at the idea of people claiming to read books they haven’t, in order to impress someone. Um, why? There’s no shame in not having read a book; and it's pointless joining in a conversation with an uninformed opinion. If you read three books a week, that’s 156 a year – or 7800 in an average lifetime’s adult reading (50 years). Bearing in mind that (according to the London Book Fair) 100,000 new books are published each year in the UK (my publisher alone produces more than 720 a year)... There just isn’t enough time to read every single book in existence. So what’s the big deal? If I haven’t read a book, I’m always interested to know what my friends enjoyed about it and whether they think I’d enjoy it (or not, in which case they’re saving me precious reading time for something I will enjoy). But bluffing it... Nope. You'll be found out and look much more of a fool.

The list of books people use to bluff/boast about was interesting.

• Ulysses by James Joyce – read it, but Joyce is really not my cup of tea (and I’d be quite suspicious if someone raved about it, especially if their normal reading tastes would suggest otherwise – Joyce isn’t a particularly accessible author because of his stream-of-consciousness style)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – read it and loved it (the nineteenth century is one of my favourite periods)
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking – borrowed from the library and enjoyed (because I like nerdy stuff)
• The Bible – there’s a big gap in my education here
• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama – not read, and would need to look at it before I decided whether to read it or not (I don’t buy a book just because the author is famous – for ‘new to me’ authors, I look for a subject that interests me, and then read the first couple of paragraphs/a bit from the middle to see if I like said author’s style, and if the answer to both is yes I will read/buy it)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie – read as a teenager and enjoyed it
• War and Peace by Tolstoy – read as a teenager and enjoyed it, though I preferred Anna Karenina - and at the time I preferred Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy (this was my Russian phase, and I was a bit, um... pretentious about it. Actually, it was a European phase, as I also read a lot of German, French and Italian novels and poetry, some of which were in the original. Better qualify pretentious as 'very')
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (not read, but I did read his book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ back in the 90s – OK, but not that impressive. I preferred Wilson's 'The Diversity of Life'... and I also like Robert Winston's style)
• In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust – read bits of, in my teens (see above re my European phase)
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon – read bits of, in my teens
• 1984 by George Orwell – read it, and it upset me terribly (am trying to remember if it was one of my A level texts, as I did my A levels that year; I did ‘Brave New World’ for O level, and that upset me hugely as well – actually, so did ‘Erewhon’, and I cannot handle William Golding, so perhaps I should just admit that I prefer utopias to dystopias. And yes, I have read Plato. I did Classics A level, so I read a lot of very interesting books which could make me seem immensely pretentious. I admit that I was - terribly so - in my teens and twenties, but I’ve grown up a bit now)

Then a rather leading question: are there any books I wouldn’t admit to reading? (No. Reading’s a huge pleasure and I have eclectic tastes. But if anyone’s a closet M&B fan, do go and vote for us. You’re part of the silent majority. An M&B is bought in the UK every three seconds, and that doesn’t include second-hand sales.)

Then we have the really guilty stuff:

• Do you ever turn to the back of a book to find out what happens in the end before you have finished? (Er... yes.)
• Have you ever bought a book for someone else and read it first? (Have to qualify this one. Either I buy people a new copy of a book I’ve already read and enjoyed because I think they’ll enjoy it, too – or, if it’s new to me and I can’t resist reading and then still think they’d enjoy it, I’ll buy them another copy and keep the one I bought originally.)
• Do you turn the corners of pages over to keep your place? (Absolutely NOT. I always use a bookmark - if one isn't to hand, I will scribble the page number on the back of my hand, or just memorise the page number until I can lay my hands on something that will do as a bookmark. And I read my books carefully so the spines stay in good condition with no creases. I only lend books to people who will treat them with similar respect.)
• Do you find that if you buy extra shelves for your book collection they fill up in a matter of weeks? (Umm. Yes. And it drives my husband crazy. I have a TBR bookcase. And at the moment I'm angling for a new bookcase in my office. Two, actually. But I will make do with one.)
• Do you ever throw books away? (No. But I do give them to friends whose tastes aren't the same as mine and might enjoy them/charity shops, when DH forces me to weed my shelves. What happens to the space created? Er: see answer above...)
• Have you ever stayed up too late because you couldn’t bear to stop reading a book? (Absolutely. In fact, I did this last night because I was enjoying ‘A Winter’s Tale’ so much.)
• Have you ever written in a library book? (No. I annotated my own copies of some books during my degree years, and I do have to resist the urge to correct typos. But I don’t write in other people’s books.) (Hmm. Lightbulb...)

Enquiring minds want to know: are you guilty of any of these? Do you think they’re even grounds for guilt?