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TPQ: What are you currently reading?
MP: Bob Spitz's biography of the Beatles. Style is a bit clunky at times, as he tries to be a writer, and it takes about 300 pages just to get to Love Me Do, but it's a good read nonetheless. Detailed, but not obsessively so, like Mark Lewisohn's doorstop; and Spitz mostly treads a measured path through the competing versions, so this account may represent something approaching a sort-of 'truth' ... maybe. Read it alongside Ian McDonald's brilliant, spot-on evaluation of the music, Revolution In The Head.
TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?
MP: Best: At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. I still wonder at the endless hyperbole, and 'quare conundrum' stuff, engendered by The Third Policeman, when his first novel is far funnier, and more inventive. And much less of a slog.
Worst: Chariots Of The Gods; Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Daniken. He was imprisoned for embezzlement, fraud, and forgery, but we mustn't let a marked inclination to fantasise in his personal life lure us into concluding he might do just the same in his writing.
TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?
MP: Just William series by Richmal Crompton. The funny, middle-class childhood to which I still aspire.
TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?
MP: Crompton. She also wrote a series about a younger, slightly lesser William, called Jimmy. Her William output was under contract to a publisher, so in order to write William tales for a well-paying newspaper she reinvented him as Jimmy.
TPQ: First book to really own you?
MP: A tie: Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan / Dracula by Bram Stoker. Behan got me all fired up, then Stoker scared the hell out of me.
TPQ: Favourite male and female author?
MP: Male: Auberon Waugh. I'll never forgive Polly Toynbee for the vicious Guardian obituary / hatchet-job she did on him. He was joking, Polly ... !
Female: Patricia Highsmith. Leave aside Ripley for a moment. If you're new to her, start with This Sweet Sickness, or Edith's Diary, or The Blunderer, or The Glass Cell, or A Dog's Ransom, or Deep Water, or A Suspension Of Mercy ...
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A Berlin Book Tower in memory of the Nazi book burning.
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MP: Moderation in all things.
TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?
MP: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman. Marvellous. Big, complex man deserves this big, accessible treatment.
TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?
MP: Charles Bukowski. All the men were drunk and all the women were steaming.
TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?
MP: Another tie: Animal Farm by George Orwell / Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?
MP: The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. Crazy name, crazy guy. But where would the early John Banville have been without this rattling good yarn about the vagaries, happenstance and randomness of scientific discovery?
TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?
MP: Tarantula by Bob Dylan.
TPQ: A must read you intend getting to before you die?
MP: Gibbon, I suppose. But, at my time of life, it'll have to be an abridgement of an abridgement ...
➽Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast ... when he can get a pitch.
Michael - thanks for this. I derived immense enjoyment from your take. The Third Policeman is one of the worst books I ever read so was pleased you mentioned it. It has to rank with The Heart of A God and Chrome Yellow. Von Daniken was pretty popular at the end of the blanket protest but then anything was to people who hadn't get a chance to read anything in years. Gunk!
ReplyDeleteModeration in all things - what a lovely answer!
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I would love to see you reviewing books because your manner of expressing yourself in relation to them was the bait and I anticipate being hooked!
I disliked At Swim Two Birds so much I swore I'd never read another of Flann O'Brien's. However, I was persuaded by the passion my uncle had for The Third Policeman and gave it a try and loved it. The conundrums especially. I found At Swim Two Birds a chore but I am reasonable enough to put this down to me rather than the writer.
ReplyDeleteBorstal Boy is a cracker too. We have some similar and some not so similar tastes.
We read Animal Farm at school and I have to say most were impressed by it.
I quite like Bukowski. Either I find your choices really match mine or really go against them so its 50/50 whether I will love Dracula or not. I like those odds so plan to read it someday.
Simon - I loved The Poor Mouth and for that reason picked up the Third Policeman. Never again!!
DeleteI have never read Bukowski but my wife loves his stuff.
Dracula, I loved when a child. I forgot all about reading it until this session. I loved that type of book but it was hard to beat the original.
AM,
ReplyDeleteI like the beat poet era in American history. Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road was based on Neal Cassidy, one of The Merry Pranksters. Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was also one of The Merry Pranksters. They used to drive around America in a day-glo school bus giving out LSD. Kesey wrote the book mostly under the drug's influence. He knew a guy who worked in a mental hospital who he bribed to give him ECT, famously mirrored in the film of the same name.
Hunter S Thompson spent a year with the Hell's Angels and Tom Wolfe spent some time with The Merry Pranksters. Hunter's compound Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado set the scene for a meeting between The Hells Angels and The Merry Pranksters. A banner at the compound read The Merry Pranksters Welcomes The Hells Angels.
Hunter S Thompson wrote Hells Angels based on that time and Tom Wolfe similarly wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test mostly around the Pranksters. The narration of the Owl Farm party in both books, taken together, with both writers' opposing perspectives is fascinating, even though it's only a chapter in both.
I would recommend reading On The Road, Hells Angels (any gonzo journalism by Hunter is spectacular but the events above are particularly surreal), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and maybe Ham on Rye by Bukowski to get a flavour of the time.