If you felt I was a little mean criticising Mark Radcliffe's perfectly entertaining book below then I guess it's because I wanted a 'list of betterment'; a list of music to listen to from the obvious (Beatles' Sgt Pepper or Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks to the more challenging like John Cage's 4'33" or Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge) to illuminate an era and educate the mind. Andy Miller's The Year of Reading Dangerously is such a book. It is a book about reading - reading for edification, amusement and enrichment. Reading, like travel, broadens the mind. Perhaps even more so because it enables us to learn from someone else's imagination, or experience, things which might be quite dangerous were it not from the distant safety of our sofa, bed or train seat. Spoiler alert: these experiences can still sometimes be quite powerful, even life changing.
Despite being mildly obsessive compulsive I've never suffered from the trainspotter or twitcher's top ten or top 100 list syndrome. If you asked me what my favourite painting, piece of music or novel was I would really struggle because there are so many, they change and it would be rude to leave anyone out. In any case there is always an invidious self-consciousness that leads us to suggest things we don't really like but feel we ought to like or would be more comfortable other people thinking we like. That dilemma is at the heart of this book. It features a list of books put forward by a literature graduate who confesses to having pretended for years that he had read a certain book, or would purchase them because he felt he ought to, without really wanting to read them. Instead he went for the quick fix - the newspaper, the puzzle or the magazine review that allows us to feel educated by second or third hand knowledge. With an increasingly short attention span related to internet browsing the long form book is certainly being challenged - in the same way that blogging challenges traditional journalism.
Well, fear not faithful reader, this book will cure you. It isn't even important whether you go off and read 'War and Peace' or any other of the so-called classics which get a rave review. So does Julian Cope and Douglas Adams. This book works simply on the level of autobiography, social comment, nostalgia (for childhood reading) and life-affirming self-deprecating feel good humour. It will also increase your appetite for reading, for living and maybe even for writing - in whatever form the music of words takes you.
