5 Things I learned from 5 amazing books
I’ve always been a lover of books. I can trace my relationship with reading from Mr Men and the Meg & Mog books through The Giant Jam Sandwich, Milly Molly Mandy, onwards to the The Famous Five, Secret Seven and Mallory Towers. When I was nine my mum took me and my sister for a day trip to London, as a treat she bought me a new book — Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls, I clutched that book in my hot little hand all around London and eagerly devoured it on the train home.
I wasn’t particularly discerning, I just wanted more — more stories, more words, more books. Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Margaret Mitchell, on and on I ploughed.
I can mark significant periods in my life by the books I was reading at the time. And honestly I can’t help but be slightly bewildered by people who don’t share my love of reading. That’s to say, I understand that people don’t get it, like I don’t get other passions: football, knitting, caving, but it confuses me on a visceral level.
If this was a list of my favourite books, it would be firstly, a list I would never finish due to endless revision and secondly, be a too-long list. But thankfully it’s a list of 5 things I’ve learned from 5 books, so here we are.
- Imagination is not limited by environment or experience
I studied Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë as part of English Literature GCSE (and of course I am of the Kate Bush era...). I instantly fell for it, that strange Yorkshire dialect, those unforgiving moors. I was less interested in sulky Heathcliff than I was enthralled by Catherine Earnshaw. She was strong and true and rather wonderful. And I became fascinated by Emily Brontë. A largely reclusive woman who somehow, despite her lack of social interaction (or perhaps because of it) summoned up this tough novel centred on a famously raw and brutal relationship. The novel remains a strong testament to the power of the imagination to transcend personal circumstance and experience.
2. Parenting is as much about letting go as it is about holding on
I have tried to pass on my love of books to my children. Who knows if it will stick but in the meantime I have read them some wonderful children’s books (and some god awful ones). Owl Babies by Martin Waddell is a particular favourite. It includes the stuff of nightmares — three small, cute owls awake one night to find their mother GONE. Together they try to figure it out. Where is she? What should they do? Will she come back? The tiny owls wait on a branch in the dark night worrying about her return until, suddenly, “Soft and silent she swooped through the trees to Sarah and Percy and Bill”. She chides them gently, “What’s all the fuss? You knew I’d come back”.
As parents our primary instinct is to reassure our children that we will always be there for them, that we will always come back. But of course being a parent is about giving our children both roots and wings and so Owl Babies helps us to understand that little by little, we have to learn to let them go.
3. The future is shaped, not predestined
Humans like to try and predict the future. When it comes to fiction some writers, perhaps surprisingly, fare pretty well — Orwell, HG Wells and Arthur C Clarke all made some startlingly accurate predictions. What I enjoy about these kinds of books is that if they’re well written they should seamlessly transport us to a world that is at once both unknowable and yet familiar.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is a touching, funny book that paints a dystopian future in which we are all live-streaming everything all the time. Wearing ‘äppäräts’ around their necks — tiny devices that livestream data about them wherever the wearer is — the characters understand that their worth is measured by their virtual popularity. Shteyngart is a wonderful writer, he invites you into his world with a confident, uncompromising style. The genius of this book, set in the near-future, is it feels simultaneously farcical and perfectly likely to become true. But running through the book is a thread that reminds us that even if a certain kind of behaviour appears inevitable, as human beings we can always decide. We can always choose a different path from the herd.
4. We must remember to care for our internal selves
Of course all this is transitory. We busy ourselves with work, deadlines and to-do lists but in a moment, with one diagnosis, everything can be taken from us.
Books about how individuals deal with a terminal diagnosis and the aftermath are like all books in that, to be starkly honest, they vary in terms of the quality of the writing. It is clear though, from the first page of Kate Gross’ book Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life) that she is an excellent writer. (Don’t let the awful book cover put you off by the way, it makes it look like something it really isn’t). At the age of 34 and with two young children, Goss was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Her book is a call to arms in which she lays out her ‘rules’ for living a fulfilling and happy life. There is much that rings true in this wonderful little book not least her entreaty to look after our intellectual selves, our ‘hinterland’,
“To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, the rest of you, your body, is really just an appendix to it. It is the bit of you that is, that makes you who you are. You need to tend it, nurture it with questions and answers, clear away the weeds once in a while…And it is yours, only yours. It is portable, light as a feature, and you can carry it even when everything else is too heavy.”
Goss was a perpetual high-achiever, she read English at Oxford University, worked for Tony Blair and went on to found a charity that works to rebuild institutional structure in post conflict Africa. As happens to us all, work and family pressures meant she had periods in her life where there was no time to pause, to feed her mind and soul.
“But I think I must end this chapter with a warning. It is too easy, as an adult, to let life rush past with its business of succeeding, working, consuming, rearing. All of that can be joyful and fulfilling. I grant you. But it is so, so easy in the rush of life to neglect your inner world. I know mine was dead for many years, squeezed between work and achieving stuff…it’s a choice I made, and gladly. But one unexpected blessing of illness is that it has given me time to tend my mind again…Even as one little room becomes my everywhere, I roam the wide plains of my mind.”
5. Whatever happens stories will never stop astounding us
It is a truly marvellous thing to think that we will always have more stories, both fiction and non-fiction. That we will never reach a point at which there’s nothing more to say, no more words to write.
My book of the year last year was definitely H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. I came to it before it won its well deserved awards (with books — like films — it’s often better to experience them without preconception) and it blew me away, both because it’s a wonderful read but also at how it defies any clear labels. Part memoir, part academic history and part falconry training manual, it is a masterclass in the notion that if something is good, it doesn’t have to fit in a ready made box, it can create a whole new genre of its own. Of course this applies as much to anything as it does to books and we do well to remember it.
“She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.”
