Bad Book Habits
I have many. First, the bad book habits I don't have. I don't crack spines (something that will drive me beserk; it's also the reason I only lend out my more pre-loved books), I don't dog-ear pages. I don't use a highlighter pen on actual books. Or a real pen, for that matter, unless I'm writing a note in the front of books I give as presents that ensure that the receiver can never palm them off on someone else. One I read about someone who, instead of using a bookmark, ripped out the pages of books as he read them. I didn't just wince, I cringed. And then I went to hug my enormous illustrated copy of Heine's Buch der Lieder. No-one will ever hurt my books.
No, I have three less devastating physical Bad Book Habits.
1) Leaving them in my handbag while I merrily trip around town. This is the number one reason why my favourite books end up looking a mess. The plastic stuff they put on the cover wrinkles and gets grubby, a bit like an ageing plaster (and by ageing I mean more than, oh, three hours old). The corners near the spine get gently crushed. There's an impression of my purse logo in the front or back cover. And then there's an impression of my head in a bog wall somewhere in one of many, many Yorkshire city centres. One more book (in this case, my well-travelled copy of And There Was Light) has battle scars. It's all my fault. Alas.
2) Taking books into the toilet and/or bathroom. Face it, they're pretty boring places. Nothing whiles away the time like a good book when you're engaged in necessary bodily maintenance activities, particularly if you, like me, have feet dextrous enough to hold a sponge. Unfortunately, my hands have once or twice inexplicably failed in their duty during a particularly hot bath, and a book has fallen face-first in the water. It produces an interesting crinkly effect in the pages but also renders the book unclosable. Farewell to thee, Notes from a Big Country. (NB. I have not yet suffered any similar incident with a toilet bowl, but I did once place the book on the tank, only to have it fall off at a crucial moment. I deftly trapped the book between my head and the tank, and extracted it with a grace perfected by my yoga habit. However, no bowl contact. Thank goodness.)
3) Unusual bookmarks. I took a trip through War and Peace again, and frankly I was appalled. Pierre's conversion to Freemasonry was marked by an aqua blue Penguin wrapper with an expiry date sometime last millennium. A piece of string heralded Boris' visit to Tilsit. The Rostov's flight from Moscow had an Andalusian postcard (dated 1996 or so) to commemerate it. A book about Tchaikovsky's personal life was even worse. Viscount wrappers, lots of 'em. I don't know what it is about neurotic, homosexual Russian composers who wrote some really killer music and had an unhealthy interest in teenage boys that made me want to eat mint fondant biscuits, but there were thirteen of them in there in addition to a note recommending I read Resistance by Anita Shreve and an opera ticket to see The Barber of Seville. The book, needless to say, smelt like a biscuit tin.
To be fair, yes, there was a lovely cat-themed bookmark in The Water Babies and a jaunty plastic Siamese with bendy legs wrapped around a page in Three Men In A Boat, but I must say, in my youth, I must have owned about 700 bookmarks and yet I still used biscuit wrappers and airline napkins. The law governing this must be some variation of Sod's law. Whenever I need an actual bookmark because I've found a fascinating book passage, there's nothing to hand but a pipe cleaner or discarded clothes label. Whenever I've just bought a nice shiny bookmark, I put it randomly in a nice-looking book so I can admire it, and then when I need it it looks like it might already in use.
I have to mention at this point that the most kick-ass bookmark I've used is a peacock quill - for the flamboyant and/or eccentric reader.
And on to bad reading habits:
4) Forgetting about books. I have a ton of books. At least, I can confidently say I own enough books to balance out my weight on a scale, and I intend to increase the number of books I own (because God knows the alternative is unthinkable as long as chocolate exists) until I am flung off the scale entirely like the projectile of a trebuchet - where the counterweight is entirely books.
This also makes it very easy to forget about books. I have so many they all blend together, and I'd love to know why every single book set on the continent during WWII has the same colour scheme. They are all brown; they blend into one another. Now I know I've read Children of Freedom by Marc Levy, but did I read the aforementioned Resistance (I did... I think)? I've read the first half of Suite Francaise twice for this reason, because I took two very similar-looking, similarly-themed books to Vienna with me and the panic that ensued when I couldn't find my hotel made me forget which one I'd read.
The other pernicious influence is The Internet, which explains why I have been finishing fewer books recently. Why devote energy to reading one book when I could read, like, a million blogs? Or hopping round Youtube. (I love Youtube. I started out watching a video of Itzhak Perlman playing some Tchaikovsky piece, which linked to him on Sesame Street - what a wonderful program it was! - and I thought "Hmm... yes, I do vaguely remember some chap with crutches playing Beethoven on the violin. Beethoven! Heavenly! I loved Sesame Street, you know. I wonder if they've got that pinball animation, recently rehashed on Family Guy where Stewie was in the bubble, that they always used to play?". Upshot was, three hours later I was watching a video of a cat sitting serenely on an automated vacuum cleaner in action.) I mean, how can a book compete with a breakdancing toddler or the Christmas episode of Mr Bean? It can and it must. So it will. Because I don't ever remember feeling that heartbroken when Youtube told me that Gabelstaplerfahren was no longer available, whereas, like I said, seeing a mutilated book almost reduces me to tears.
5) Buying books and not reading them. I think this relates to something that Chris Baty, the inventor of Nanowrimo, said. I bought his book about completing Nano, and in the part about writing lists of what you do and don't like in novels, he mentioned the 'literature-as-self-improvement' concept. Basically, people buy literature they don't enjoy because they think that, like Bran Flakes, if they aren't enjoying it, it must be good for them. Rubbish, sez he. Books are there to be enjoyed. They're entertainment.
Sadly, that message hasn't even filtered down to me, yet. I still buy stuff based on the idea that everyone's read this, it's a Penguin Classic, I can't possibly be considered well-read if I don't read this - and remain ill-read and £2 poorer for having shelled out on a book I have not yet read. Lessee... I bought The Go-Between by L P Hartley, and still haven't read it. At least not past "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Which is, if you didn't know, the first sentence. At least I don't do this with books I buy new - that would be a phenomenal waste of dosh - but it is so frustrating to realise I've read all my 'literary kink' fiction first - i.e. the fun stuff that features a theme I enjoy reading about, and now I've got to read something with an orange cover.
I'm not saying I hate all the classics, or that I think I won't enjoy reading the Hartley book. But... many of them are just not my thing, and I wish I could admit that. Same with more modern books that everyone else has read and I feel I have to read to keep up with the Joneses. Lord of the sodding Rings, for a start. I tried and failed to read it. I think I have an allergy to fantasy names. Fred = good, Frodo = bad. And Chocolat, by Joanne Harris. A friend of mine's mother said I might like it. I might still like it, but unfortunately it's on the bottom of a very tall pile of books I am disinclined to dismantle. And one of these days I swear I will read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (I liked the TV special), but as yet...
6) Style over substance. Skim reading. To me, these issues amount to the same thing. If I find an author whose writing style I love, I'll read almost anything I can find written in that style. (Same with artists, for that matter - I'd rather have a mediocre Friedrich than a really good Rembrandt or Picasso. Caspar David F rocks my socks, and that's an end to it. Should it be?) I used to be a lot worse about this. Style was all that mattered when I was six. I loved Watership Down because I was reading a really long book, really really long, and it had all these pretty descriptions of nature and the rabbits had OMG their own language!!... so obviously I didn't get anything like the blazing obvious World War II parallels. And when I read the book again when I was a teenager, I got it. And I think I got a lot more out of it when I was eighteen, and supposedly 'too old' for the book (there's more rant fuel), than when I was a perhaps-precocious kid. I technically knew how to read - that is, translate those funny page-squiggles into words with some sort of meaning - but I didn't know how to read a book. I could read how to not incinerate myself instantly with an oven, but the finer (or cruder) nuances of the human soul? Totally lost on me.
7) Kink reading. Not what you might think. Basically, what I mean by 'kink' reading is choosing books based on just one element, regardless of quality. As I sense that this entry is approaching truly gargangtuan proportions, this concept is pretty much covered in the Wittgenstein entry with my ill-considered purchase of The Crown Prince - the 'kink' is obviously the presence of Paul Wittgenstein.
All right, NEXT time I'll talk about a book I've actually finished, or a film I've watched, or a piece of music I've particularly enjoyed.
