someday, maybe

For a considerable time now, something has been growing in my house. It used to be barely noticeable, but now it is barely missable. It used to grow slowly, but lately, it seems to have expanded exponentially. I do not recall ever feeding it, yet it has not only survived, it has positively thrived.

It is my "someday / maybe" pile of books - those books about which I think :

"I really ought to read that someday" or "Maybe I will read that when I have some time"

I have accumulated a sizeable pile of such books through three factors :

• guilt,
• challenge from peers and
• hype.

Here's an example of guilt:

"I read the words, but I didn't really understand what was going on back then. I need to read it again and read it properly."

(See "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.)

Here's an example of a peer challenge:

"Oh ! I've read this. It was so complex on several levels, but I could soooooo see what the author was aiming at. You really must read it."
(See "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger and "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks.)

Here's an example of hype:

"It's a classic."

(See "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkein.)

Let me make something clear right away. None of the books mentioned above are on my someday/maybe list. Here's why.

"Great Expectations" might be a fine book, but the very fact that it was a set text for English Literature O-level (1977-1978) means that - even 30 years on - I am haunted by the experience of being forced to read it, of having to memorise great chunks of it for timed essays and for exams, of being forced to read between the lines to work out what Dickens was really trying to say.

I took "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Wasp Factory" to Kos in 1989 as my holiday reading, and wished that I had not. Despite there being a concensus amongst my peers that these books were The Business, I thought that they were full of crap. Mind you, I was also full of crap, suffering as I was from the runs and being confined to the hotel while all of my buddies were galavanting on the beaches and in the nightclubs. Bastards. Tempted as I was, I never used the books to wipe my bum.

And finally, "The Lord of the Rings." I have tried three times to read this tome - truly, I have - and each time I gave up after about three hundred pages, and each time it felt like I had read three million pages. I found it so dull and plodding that I could never remember who was who, and I kept getting the goodies and the baddies mixed up. I hated the little songs they kept singing and I started shouting at the book when the heroes improbably escaped intact whenever pitted against a massively superior enemy. I could never understand why Gandalf didn't just do some magic and sling the bloody ring into the volcano. Silly old sod.

Anyway ...

This summer, "someday/maybe" became "now/definite", and I am making a determined effort to clear my pile without the use of any ointment.