Burn Before Reading

Sweary

I knew I had to be prepared for visiting ye ould breeding grounds this week; County Galway can generate such cumbersome states of mind. Which is why I brought novels with me! Classics, indeed. Modern masterpieces that have inspired, enlivened and comforted so many. Surely be to God they’d work on me?

I’m not a great reader, believe it or not, mostly because I find it difficult to accept that I couldn’t have done better than whatever author’s under my beady black spotlight. Most readers like to curl up on a sofa, or a window seat, or in bed with a good book; I cushion myself on my ego, and it covers me over and blinds me. If I’m not grabbed … positively accosted by the first page, I’m slamming the covers faster than a beatnik as managed by Louis Walsh. My ego may render me insufferable in the eyes of many, but at least it keeps me moist during droughts.

No good writer would be who they were if they didn’t have a passion for reading, says my common sense, so in my defence I must state that I devoured novels as a younger, less cynical crone. In a house without a PC, Sky television, or even a car, there was little else to do apart from count thistles or play chicken with vaguely poisonous-looking berries. I’ve completed my training, as far as I can make out. I’ve read enough, and I read it all before I became discerning, and ruined.

Still, I feel safe enough around classics to give them a whirl – after all, a thousand English teachers can’t be wrong (something Batt O’Keeffe would be wise to remember). I had to bring something to read for the days I was due as penance in Galway; Mam’s gaff is still without a PC, Sky Television, or a car. I chose to bring One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and A Kestrel For A Knave.

I read Heard It In The Playground, Mysteries of The Unknown, and A Gentle Touch And Other Pony Stories.

Oh, it weren’t my fault, honest it weren’t! My mother’s house is scattered with shite books – Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, out-of-print school readers, torn picture dictionaries, airport novels so trashy no one in my family would admit to having actually bought them. And shite, disposable books, especially those from your childhood, are very hard to resist peeking through. Then skimming. And consequently drinking – tearing through words like a runaway train, gulping badly-edited, plotless drivel, thirsting for nonsense, diversion … respite from complexity, and common sense, and art. For fuck’s sake, I got through Garry Kilworth’s “Hunters Moon” in an hour (Watership Down with foxes, essentially), only to discover the last ten pages had fallen out and been lost. And it bothered me. I howled.

I take comfort in believing I’m not alone. There must be many of us out there with artificially dog-eared copies of A Clockwork Orange or No Country For Old Men, brought along on holidays with lofty, well-meaning intentions, and forgotten about for a copy of a Martina Cole fished out of the apartment complex pool (if it were the real Martina Cole, I’d leave her in it). How many of us bright sparks have fought over Heat magazine in doctors’ waiting rooms, or cried with delight on finding an old Sweet Valley High book during bedroom redecoration? Had I found one of my old Malory Towers books (the plots of which I looked up on Wikipedia the other day; what a pile of arse!), I may have just short-circuited and lobotomised myself with joy.

Still, I have decided to refuse myself the shame you might think due to me. I may have spent my time in Galway up to my elbows in clap-trap, but at least I didn’t succumb to the copy of “Don’t Tell Mummy” I found in my mam’s sitting room. Badly-written fluff or teenage guff is one thing, but misery-lit is only for the terminally banjaxed.

Maybe next summer.

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