RECENT BOOK BUYS / WHAT I'M READING (PART I)

  

Some time around the end last year I noticed that I was starting to slip a little with my book reading.

Actually, if I'm honest, that's not true. I've been noticing it for the past couple of years, I'd just got into the habit of ignoring it. And it hadn't slipped a little, it had slipped a lot. A helluva lot.

Why was I ignoring it? Dunno really. Laziness I suppose. Come evening I'd fallen into a pattern of sitting in front of the TV, watching films and TV series* and just switching my brain off. I knew I wasn't reading much lately, it hadn't passed unnoticed (I've always been a veracious reader, never without a book on the go), but I was doing nothing about it. I was annoyed with my apathetic attitude, but did nothing about it.

I started to notice that my wife, who was never a big book reader - reading one every now and then when the mood took her - was reading more books a year than I was. But still I did nothing.

What made me do something about it in the end? I think it was my birthday back in September. We had a few days away down in Cromer booked for just after my birthday, and we'd bought the new Terrance Dicks Doctor Who novelisation hardbacks to take with us and read while we were away (we had all of the novelisations in them except for The Five Doctors in one of the hardbacks and The Wheel in Space in the other, so we bought them for those). I was determined to actually pull my finger out and start one of these books while away glamping. This, coupled with the fact that for my birthday I only got one book as a present - Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Inside the Art & Visual Effects - when I normally get three or four, shocked me into the realisation that even my family and friends were noticing I was hardly reading.

So, I was determined to start the Terrance Dicks novelisations.

Which I didn't.

Not in Cromer, at any rate.

I did start reading again as planned. Just not the Terrance Dicks books.

No, I started reading the Terrance Dicks books in a glamping hut in Northumberland in October. But down in Cromer last September I ended up buying Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd and read that instead (I also bought The Box of Delights by John Masefield with it, but more about that later).

You see, at school my reading was so advanced that I progressed quickly through all the reading levels and was onto adult fiction before I'd even finished junior school. Although wonderful in one way, it had its downside...advancing to an adult reading level so swiftly meant that by a very young age I had pretty much turned my back on children's books. For most of my life I had gone without experiencing some of the most important, classic books written for a younger audience.

In the last decade I have vowed to put this right, and am systematically reading all those books I missed out on as a youngster.

Hence buying and reading Worzel Gummidge while in Cromer.

Worzel Gummidge ended the reading drought. And since late September I've read 13 books.

Well, I've finished 12, and I'm currently making my way through No.13 - the factual book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer - which is a behemoth of a book, an absolute monster. Totaling 1,245 pages, and with print so small that, if it were normal print size, would undoubtedly bring the page count to over 2,000 pages. And because of this it's taking a while to get through. So I'm reading other books alongside it - one book for reading upstairs in bed, the other for reading downstairs in the mornings before I start work.

The first four Terrance Dicks novels followed my reading of Worzel Gummidge. Beginning with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, followed by The Abominable Snowmen, The Wheel In Space and The Auton Invasion. Then I paused with the Dicks novels, not wanting to over do things, instead moving to another classic novel (not only loved by children, but cherished by adults too)  -  Watership Down by Richard Adams.

I'd been meaning to read Watership Down for years - the 1978 animated film being my 4th Favourite Movie of All Time - so I knew that I had to move it to the top of my To Read Pile as soon as I got back into the rhythm of regular reading. And I'm glad I did. Richard Adam's classic became my favourite novel read in 2021 (and probably one of my 10 Favourite Novels of All Time...it's been a while since I made a Top 10 list, so I'll need to think it through before saying for certain).

Speaking of my To Read Pile: it was, by this time, starting to get a little like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The less I was reading, the more it was growing. It had, by September of last year, almost grown completely out of control.

Something desperately needed to be done.

As I once more began to exercise my reading muscles, my appetite for books grew more acute. And now I am truly feasting again. I've been buying great armfuls of books again, despite the fact that I already have a veritable Mount Everest awaiting my attention.

And it hasn't gone unnoticed by others.

This Christmas I got a total of 5 books as presents. On top of the ones I've been buying.

The To Read Pile is now not just leaning, it's causing the floorboards to creak with the weight.

Some of the books I bought myself are Joyland by Stephen King, Holiday by Stanley Middleton, The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, Halloween Kills novelisation by Tim Waggoner, . Books I received as presents include The Star Wars Trilogy (Star Wars by George Lucas, The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut, Return of the Jedi by James Kahn), Later by Stephen King, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

* Not actual TV, of course. I watch classic series from the 1960s, 70s and 80s on DVD and blu-ray. Current British TV programmes are so god-awful at the moment that it's practically impossible to sit through an evening of that tripe without having a frontal lobotomy first. If you're not into endless crime dramas where the title is named after the main Detective character, or series starring Joanne Froggatt in which she plays a woman who is running away from her troubled past (almost always involving a violent husband / boyfriend / man [*yawn*]) or Coronation Street that has now become so ridiculously and absurdly tangled up in storylines about gangsters, money-lenders and people being beaten to death on the cobbles that its like some bizarre comedy show parody of itself, then there's absolutely no point in watching ITV (or The Crime Channel, as it should be renamed) as it offers very little else. And as for the BBC, it stopped being worth its licence fee long, long ago!