Tonight:
4°c
Nick Hornby has thrown down the gauntlet to the Poet Laureate: "One of the most depressing things I have ever seen was Andrew Motion's list of 10 books he felt all kids should have read by the time they leave school. It included Ulysses and The Waste Land. It was insane."
Insane might be putting it too strongly. And yet I have some sympathy with Hornby. Believe me, I have tried to read Ulysses a number of times, at school, at university and even on a beach holiday, without success. Never have I got beyond 100 pages.
And then I thought I'd cracked it. You read it from back to front. It was so much easier. The last chapter containing Molly Bloom's soliloquy, written from the viewpoint of Bloom's adulterous wife, includes one of the longest sentences in English literature at 4,931 words long. You just go with the flow and let it wash over you. Try it. It worked for me.
But the real problem is this: if you don't read Ulysses at school, when will you find time to read it? In adulthood there are too many demands on your time. Stop-start reading is never quite the same as reading a book in one sitting. When did you last read a book in one go? There are so many easier and more agreeable novels to read later when you are short of time - High Fidelity, for example.
I have always thought books should have "read-by ..." stickers on them, rather like sell-by dates: "Best read by 18" or "A must read by 13". Much better to experience certain books at an impressionable age when they can leave an indelible stamp on you and haunt you for life.
Lock yourself away with Dostoevksy's Crime and Punishment when you are a young man and it's far easier to empathise with the murderous student hero, Raskolnikov. And immerse yourself in Anna Karenina by 25, say, before you get too cynical about love.
One of the most surprising regrets of middle age is to discover authors one would have relished as an angstridden teenager: Stefan Zweig, for example, who committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 and wrote some of the most plangent prose of the century.
I would have lapped up Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet when I was listening to Leonard Cohen in my student bedsit. Now I am middle aged, I can only take one paragraph at a time. It's so bleak and solipsistic; I feel I have outgrown it. I have certainly outgrown Leonard Cohen.
So all you kids out there: get on down with Pessoa. He's the real deal, the man with the misanthropic touch. And far more depressing than the spectacle of Andrew Motion recommending Ulysses to kids.
