The unreadable book club

I woke in a cold sweat. The night oozed black, like warm molasses and somebody was beating down my door. The door wasn’t alarmed, but I was. Sleeping in the office had become a habit but this was way out of office hours. In the dark I pulled on my pants, reached for my trusty forty-five and went to see who it was. It was a broad, the kind of a broad you went overseas for. For this much of a broad you'd need a passport. My jaw dropped, but she helped put it back in place. With her fist. "Shouldn’t we have the introductions first?" I asked. She hit me again. I thought I better invite her in.

Ah, happy days. Who hasn’t whiled away an afternoon, an evening, a flight maybe, with a good old potboiler? Thriller, mystery, crime, romance. Chandler, Sayers, Rankin, Cartland. And many, many more. The airport bookshop is stuffed full of accessible literature and when it comes to the novel, popular doesn’t have to mean poor. There are books and authors for all tastes, but as in all things there are also books and authors for a more rarified palate.

Struggling through Sartre as a teen and later getting to grips with Borges, then failing to do the same with Pynchon and Durrell the elder, I wondered why the most lauded writers had so often to be such hard work. Steinbeck won prizes with books that can be read and enjoyed by anybody; why is it so many awards are handed out to books written only to be examined? And what, you’re wondering, brought this on?

The news that a number of books by J D Salinger are to be published posthumously, that’s what. I have read Catcher in the Rye several times now, most recently just a handful of years ago. Maybe I should have first read it at fifteen but I came to it somewhat later and not by happy accident but prompted by the hype. I didn’t get it, or in the current parlance, I wasn’t feeling it. I felt nothing for the protagonist and struggled to find merit in the prose. So, I read it again and again until I discovered that I was right and everybody else was wrong.

The product of that other great recluse of the era, To Kill a Mockingbird, is still a favourite of mine and I came to that standard late, too. Scout Finch keeps me turning the page when Holden Caulfield makes me want to give up after the first few. Harper Lee is Steinbeck to Salinger’s Rushdie. Yes, I said Rushdie; in my world The Satanic Verses is an unreadable mess, accessible only to Man Booker Prize judges and the publicly pretentious. All those adults reading Harry Potter? At least they’re not pretending to understand something they don’t.

I grew up in a poorly read household and had to grope my way blindly around. I’ve read way more crap than I have high literature and while there are matters of taste and time, I have deduced, like any other form of art, there is also much trash posing as treasure and a lot of it is simply execrable rubbish sold to the elite on the grounds of pure snobbery.  So, look, it is perfectly okay to find some ‘great’ works impenetrable junk. There, I said it.

2987 pages... On your marks, discuss.

With all this in mind, I invite you to form your own Unreadable Book Club. It has a simple format. You pick a book from a literature prize list and set a date for discussion. Then you meet up, spend ten minutes discussing how far you got and scratching your heads as to its message before adjourning to the pub and consigning the tome to the dustbin of your consciousness. Life’s too short, so put down that 'improving' volume and read something for pleasure instead.

Feel free to add your contender for most unreadable pile of crap in the comments box below!