not, of course, the foregoing of reading or even, more deliciously, the pure joy provided by the written word, but the leaving to one side of a book before one's finished it whether or not it is to be resumed. In the event, it is usually not.
It can resemble the way that two-year-old form is always being surpassed as better horses appear through the summer season and favourites are summarily turned over because there's always something better turning up.
I think the first book I abandoned was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, given to us by Linden Huddlestone in the third year at school. Grim, it seemed. And dull. I thought I'd take a punt, save myself the time reading it and if we had to write about it, just vaguely discourse about what I thought it would be like. Perhaps one day I'll go back to it and see what I missed. The opposite happened in sixth form French when it turned out, in our first essay assignment on Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale, that I was the only one who had read it. Of course I'd read it, it was sensational.
In common with most people I didn't finish Proust or Stephen Hawking's subsequent account of time. One in search of it, the other apparently knowing what it is.
I read three chapters of Bleak House towards the week- yes, week- allocated to Dickens on the Victorian Literature course at university before deciding that something like The Clash supported by Mikey Dread was more important to me and I'd do Victorian Literature without reference to Dickens. That seems wrong but I came out with a 2:1; I never thought university education was all it was cracked up to be, I did try my best with Middlemarch and, having enjoyed a George Eliot year, the whole job lot, a little while ago, I think I might have had a point.
Books can be abandoned whenever you like. There's no shame in it. You are not compelled to stick with the programme. There is usually something better to do, which is usually a different book. It is not your fault, it's the book's. Or, more likely, you are not part of the demographic it was written for. I'm sure much of the pop music in the hit parade this week is brilliant. I wouldn't know. It isn't aimed at me. But I can talk you through the charts of 1971 like an Antiques Roadshow expert any time you like.
So, in the last few months, I abandoned the biography of Delmore Schwartz when something more pressing arrived; I read all but one of Matthew Klam's stories in Sam the Cat because that's how long it took me to admit I didn't like them; Ronnie Spector's Be My Baby can be usefully read in extracts and is not a literary thing so that doesn't count, and then Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four was filling time most congenially until the arrival of Don Paterson's The Poem. And that is a book that would elbow anything else out of the way.
I wouldn't dare abandon The Poem by Don Paterson. It would be like going to see the Taj Mahal, having a quick glance from the outside but not going inside. My notes on it are already copious and more than I need for anything I can use here.
The way to put an end to the abandonment of books is to only begin those that are essential. The problem is, of course, not knowing if they are until you are a little way in.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
