Which books (if any) have you got in the loo at the moment? The term ‘loo book’ has come to mean ‘lightweight/undemanding humour book’ – but does it have to mean that? The three titles currently gracing my own cistern have made me consider the question. They’re Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and Londoners by Craig Taylor. None of them, you’d have to say, particularly lightweight.
It’s not that there isn’t a place in the nation’s smallest rooms for conventional toilet tomes. The best of these can be great books, from theDaily Telegraph’s unpublished letters through Schott’s Original Miscellany to Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? There are even specially-tailored books, the ones you might call site-specific — like Luke Barclay’s A Loo with a View (spectacularly-positioned karzis from Mount Sinai to Zambia), or Mark Leigh’s The Loo Companion. The latter contains such gems as the fact that Psycho was the first film to show a toilet flushing, and a list of people who died on the throne. Of course we all know about Elvis — but did you know about Judy Garland?
The porcelain bookshelf, though, doesn’t have to be reserved for works like these. John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound, former marketing director of Waterstones and a vice-president of the Hay Festival (and therefore pretty immune to the charge of being ‘lowbrow’), is happy to challenge conventional thinking on the subject. ‘What’s wrong with a loo book?’ he asks. ‘It just means it’s something you can read in small chunks. Some of the great works of literature are read in small chunks.’ Some were even published that way; Charles Dickens’s novels, for example. (It’s the 200th anniversary of his birth, incidentally — had you noticed?) The books in Mitchinson’s own loo have ranged from North Atlantic Seafood to the Hindu text The Upanishads. Talking of religion: what about the Bible? Couldn’t you say that’s the perfect toilet book? Maybe the Gideons have been missing a trick all these years — they should leave copies in the bathroom, not the bedside drawer.
Poetry seems well-suited for the toilet. Some philosophy, too — what better way to read, say, Montaigne’s essays? Then there are collected letters, and diaries. (Particularly the second volume of Michael Palin’s, in which he and Denholm Elliott compare their morning ‘rituals’. I’ll spare you the details, but if you want them it’s page 319.) The only problem with larger hardbacks is they tend to need stacking horizontally, which means you always choose the top one. A joy of reading en toilette is that you can have four or five books on the go simultaneously, swapping between them at each visit.
Even fiction isn’t completely out of the question. Novels might be a challenge, though not for Henry Miller, who said that all his ‘good reading’ was ‘done in the toilet’, and that ‘there are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet — if one wants to extract the full flavour of their content’. There are always short stories. And one of my favourite ever loo books was Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook, containing ideas for characters, one-liners, draft passages, day-to-day observations and the like.
The only requirement of a toilet book, as John Mitchinson says, is that it can be read in short bursts. And short, despite our preconceptions about lav literature, doesn’t have to mean insubstantial.
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