Dave's Progress. Chapter 27: Confessions of a Bibliophile.

Before all of you scream out and say, "My God! I would never have guessed!" and start daubing my house with insults and threatening to beat me up, I should remind you that the word in my blog title is "bibliophile", not the other kind of "phile" which goes around molesting children. I only say this because there was an incident in fairly recent history when, in the UK, a paediatrician was mistaken for a paedophile, simply because people didn't understand the difference in meaning of the two words. Needless to say, people marched to her house demanding that she be thrown out of the neighbourhood. So, I reiterate, I am a commited "bibliophile", which, according to the OED is a "lover or collector of books". So, having cleared that up, perhaps I can tell you what it is like being a voracious reader and collector of books.
For a start, one always seems to have the wish to have read everything. But, I can assure you, one thing you will never run out of is things to read. Just as you think you are well educated and have a fairly good overview of the major traditions in fiction (yes, I restrict myself to fiction, mostly novels), something else will pop up or rear its head and you will say, "My God! I never read that. How could I go on living without having read all that". So, I am forever looking around to find things I have not yet read. At the moment just a few pop into my head, like Georges Simenon, Marcel Proust or Mark Twain, all of whom I have yet to make a proper stab at.
And then, of course, there is the distinction which seems to be there between the so-called "classics" of literature and "popular" fiction, a distinction which leads Stephen King into a frenzy of self-justification. Indeed, many books I read because it appears that somehow it would not just be entertaining, but it would actually be "good for me". That they might, somehow, infuse my mind and soul with a new-found civility. The only problem is, half these books are so long that you may, in fact, die before you've finished them. Take, for instance, Marcel Proust's masterpiece "Remembrance of Things Past". It has two volumes, both of which are over 1000 pages long. And not just that, they are well over 1000 pages long. If you thought "War and Peace" was a struggle, just try this one. Indeed, you may end up thinking, "I wish I could regain the time I spent reading Proust". At least even Victor Hugo's gargantuan "Les Miserables" was only around a thousand pages all done. What about "Anna Karenina", around 900 pages. Or for the truly unreadable, ever dipped into James Joyce's "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake". In fact, I think I remember a reader's group, based in New York, who tried to read "Finnegan's Wake", and after three years they had got to page 69. So, why not try instead that master of the popular, who nevertheless, in my opinion, can write a good book, Stephen King. Indeed, if all else fails, why not try "Misery", which I think is an extremely clever book as it is not only a crime/horror story, but a very disquisition on what so irks King and what I have been trying to talk about, that is the distinction between "high" and "popular" art.
Surprisingly enough, though, most bibliophiles don't do too well when they are included in books themselves. Just think about Casaubon in George Elliot's "Middlemarch", whom the heroine, Dorothea, mistakenly marries. He is dry, not open to experience and forever preoccupied with writing his own "masterwork" which, at the end of his life, he comes to realise was a study in literary misadventure. Or, for example, in later novels like Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith", where the heroine's bibliophilic uncle is nothing more than, really, a purveyor of pornography; a dirty old man. So, it would seem that books are trying to tell us something about book lovers. Indeed, there would seem to be a schism between the so-called life of the mind, which books encourage, and the sheer, unadulterated, unfettered living of experience. Somehow, it would seem, that even a committed bibliophile would have to try to find a balance between the two, or risk becoming another Casaubon. Or perhaps, it is as simple as that eternal pessimist, librarian, and most loved of English poets Philip Larkin says in one of his poems- "get stewed- books are a load of crap". Thanks for that Philip, I shall certainly consider it.
That's all for now from your normal, average, paranoid and delusional man.