Diary, and 100 Books

 I've never been sure how diarists managed to be so. The likes of Samuel Pepys or Tony Benn led active lives and yet found the time to write much of it down. So did Philip Larkin but his admirers (for the poems) should be eternally grateful that one of the girlfriends followed his instructions and burnt them, unread.

Surely if you've not done much, you can only say,

Wrote diary about writing diary

but if you're busy you wouldn't have the time.

But today, taking up again The History of Writing I saw the history of civilisation from the perspective of whole cultures developing from one to the next, through consonants more than vowels, not always by any means from left to right in Aramaic, Nabatean, Tifinigh and all sorts of such systems by which people made themselves understood. Whole languages are passed over in a sentence, giving a glimpse of how there's a bit more to communication that 'i before e except after c'.

I realize my reponsibility to the internet that must be on tenterhooks with my chess career not far short of 'trending'. Well, I got to 1990 today, had a shot at an all-time high rating and blew it but remain well-placed to have another go.

Not only that, I saw an Austin 7 in a car showroom, a well preserved example of the first car I ever went in, except that turns out to have been a Morris 8, and then found myself playing dominoes with strangers who were very happy to be friends in the afternoon. Perhaps it is of such contingent detail that life, and thus reports of it in diaries, is made up. 

But if David Bowie made a list of 100 Books, maybe I should, too. It's not Best, it's not Favourite, it is Important to Me, as they some to mind. There's no point listing the Complete Works of 100 writers and I haven't decided yet whether they can only have one each but Selected might have to be allowed in. Let's see how it goes.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners

Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays 

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening 

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare

Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey  

 

John Stubbs, Donne

W. H. Auden, The English Auden

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train  

Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices

Danny Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve

Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, ed. Clive Wilmer

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

 

Simon Jenkins, England's Cathedrals

Maggi Hambling, The Works   

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach 

Haruki Murakami, Clorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 

Richard Yates, Collected Stories

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Albert Camus, La Peste

Andre Gide, La Symphonie Pastorale 

Patrick Hamilton, Rope

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

 

Montaigne, The Essays, a Selection

Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

George Orwell, The Decline of the English Murder 

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch 

Banana Yoshimoto, Lizard

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

A.N. Wilson, Jesus 

William Trevor, Reading Turgenev

George Moore, In Minor Keys 

 

Mark Paytrees, Bolan, the Rise and Fall of a C20th Superstar 

John Preston, A Very English Scandal

Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey

Martin Mooney, Bonfire Makers

Norman MacCaig, Selected Poems

John Donne, Songs & Sonets

Joseph Brodsky, Of Grief and Reason 

Wislawa Symbosrska, View with a Grain of Sand

Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, edited and translated by Robert Spaethling

 

--

 

Well, there's 50. I'll have to owe you 50 more, relax the rules or go a bit deeper. What, no Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Bronte, Edward Thomas, etc, etc. Well, no, not yet but I can hardly claim to have lost faith in poems when there are so many poets there. There'd be not much of me left if they were taken out.

That was interesting for me to do. Whether it was quite so gripping for you to read isn't for me to say. Those who write diaries thinking that anybody will later be interested enough to read them risk flattering themselves. Larkin got a lot of things wrong but he got the poems right and did the right thing in preventing us from having his daily record of himself.