My Life in Books, Part 3

At University

I'm a staunch believer in judging books by
their covers when they look like this.

A book which has always stayed close by during my University Career is Evelyn Waugh's fantastic novel, Brideshead Revisited. On first reading I was struck by Charles Ryder as a character who ends up pretty far outside his comfort zone, his monotonous life in Paddington with a stoic and ostensibly uncaring father, and quite by chance ends up amongst the very foppish and aesthetic world of Lord Sebastian Flyte et al. At least this is how it first appears. Charles' hero worship of Sebastian has been translated into something overtly homoerotic in the recent film adaptation of 2008, and whilst I think this is a possible reading of their relationship, I think it is more interesting to see Charles' slow realisation that the Sebastian he wants to be, and the Sebastian he wants Sebastian to be (stay with me!) are very different to what he actually gets. Charles then, in my opinion, is looking to imitate the ghost of something created in his own mind out of an almost desperate need to fit in somewhere. The reason I think this book has such a lot to say about the nature of University life goes beyond the first part of the novel, and even wonderful quotes like 'time spent on a good 2:1 is time wasted, you either want a 3rd or a 1st'. I'm quoting from memory so this is probably wrong, but I laughed when my personal tutor (who is a rather prolific writer on Waugh) told me that Waugh himself graduated with a 3rd. Anyway, as I was saying, I think it goes further than this, in that the subsequent disappointments of Charles Ryder's life seem an awful culmination of disillusions formed in the 'arcadia' of his early life. Its all terribly depressing of course and I've barely touched the surface with my little blurb, and so I strongly the reading of this novel, followed by the viewing of the almost immaculate 1981 ITV series and finally by the purchasing of a bear named Aloysius.

Guilty Pleasure

This is rather difficult as it happens, because I am of the rather romantic opinion that nearly all reading is a bit of a guilty pleasure. It is something you can't really share with anyone, it is an entirely solitary experience, rather mirroring the method of production! (For an interesting discussion of this see Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude)

The Little Prince,
Il piccolo principe

However, my guilty pleasure is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. I feel quite guilty about calling this a guilty pleasure because it really is wonderful, perhaps it is status as a 'children's book' which makes me feel a bit abashed. But, at the risk of sounding horribly cliché, it has a lot to offer to all ages, who might find themselves identifying with the peculiar people inhabiting the planets the Prince visits on leaving his own home planet. The illustrations are beautiful, the message is a non-didactic one and it leaves you with a gentle comforting feeling with the slightest touch of melancholy. What more could you want? It is also a story which I will always associate with Torino as I think it was the first book I read in Italian, and sometimes, if I couldn't sleep at night, I put the French audio book version on my ipod and fell asleep to that, usually getting startled around the point where the fox arrives because he had a peculiar way of saying: "Je suis un renard". Incidentally, this is the only book on my list where I own a pair of matching pyjamas. 

This is the part where I am supposed to recommend one of the books I've chosen which I thought would be quite difficult, but now it's come down to it, I'm going to recommend Brideshead Revisited. Such decisiveness on my part is most of the ordinary, so I'm taking this as a sign of it being the right choice. And with that, dear readers, I conclude my life in books, and hope very much that you have enjoyed the journey.