Good tomes, bad tomes

Saturday, 18th July 2009

I hope it's not too late to jump in on the book-dumping debate. Don DeLillo and "Absalom, Absalom" would be on my list too, and Henry James was one of the victims of a recent clear-out of my shelves. I'm even tempted to add "War and Peace", given that I've just failed in my third attempt to read it. As I said before, I'd decided to be even more pretentious than usual and attempt to read it in French as I cannot abide any of the English translations I've tried. It definitely does read better; the language is more musical and much less laboured. But after 400 or so pages I still found myself screaming at the longueurs, especially when Pierre was out of the picture. As I had a similar problem with Anna Karenina, I've come to the conclusion that I'm simply allergic to Tolstoy. (Unlike Turgenev. "Fathers and Sons" gets better each time.) I noticed that Faber & Faber were advertising a talk recently on how to read Virginia Woolf Perhaps I should seek out similar help with Uncle Leo. I'm obviously doing something wrong.

Also teetering on the edge of my list of titles to be dispatched to the charity shop: Philip Bobbitt's "The Shield of Achilles", Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" and Niccolò Ammaniti's much-hyped "I'm Not Scared", whose cover boasts some of the most over-the-top lit crit blurbs I've ever seen. Oh, and if I had my way, the Harry Potters would be on their way out too. (The best books I ever read to my boys were Lynne Reid Bank's "Indian in the Cupboard" series, with "Just William" a runner-up.)

As I don't want to wallow in negativity, I'll just add that a must-read list ought to make room for "The Forsyte Saga". Never having read it before, I'd always assumed it was all middle-brow Victorian sentimentality. How wrong I was. The seventh novel in the sequence has got off to an uncertain start, I admit, the magnificently chilly but ultimately sympatheric Soames having left the stage. The first six, though, were spellbinding. Yet whenever you hear Galsworthy's name mentioned, it's because of the TV adaptations. Why aren't the novels themselves better known?