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TOP 10 EASY-READING TO HELP YOU THROUGH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Covid-19 has been a grim daily grind through statistics and curves (flattened or not) and light relief has been scant. Even television seems grittier nowadays.

So, my reading list needs one or two little light aperitifs to lift the mood – books so slight and effervescent they linger only as long as their tipsy mood lightens your heart – a panacea for the dearth of mirth these days.  Here’s my Top 10:

1: THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950’s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink and vowed to go native in a way not even the natives can manage, she’s busy getting drunk, bedding men, losing jewellery and living life to the full.

‘Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.’

A wonderful cocktail of a book, as light and airy as a champagne bubble.

2: RIGHT HO, JEEVES by PG Wodehouse

If the world is not quite the shade of peachy keen you would like and you’re feeling a bit ooja-cum-spiff, manservant Jeeves has the perfect pick me up to restore your mettle. You could start with almost any Jeeves and Wooster novel, but this one contains some of the juiciest Woosterisms:

‘I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature to excite the liveliest of suspicions.’

3: LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL by Ronan Hession

Like a Buster Keaton version of Waiting for Godot, this wonderful novel in which practically nothing happens has been one of my favourite reads of 2020. Best friends Leonard and Hungry Paul are two zen-like 30-somethings swimming with the indifferent tides of their lives.

Gently humous and genuinely affecting, this book is perfect to help understand the importance of human moments amid the clamour of modernity.

4: COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons

Young, modern Flora Poste is sent to live with her remote country cousins, the Stakadders, in remote Sussex – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several cousins and the redoubtable Aunt Ada Doom.

Miss Poste imposes her life-affirming no-nonsense ‘higher common sense’ in an attempt to redeem the lives of her relatives to wonderfully humorous effect. Will Flora be able to over come Aunt Doom’s fear of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’?

5: ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY by David Sedaris

A collection of essays by the inimitable American humourist, David Sedaris, including the title story where he hilariously attempts to learn French.

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use.

From the dog owners I learned ‘lie down,’ ‘shut up,’ and ‘who shit on this carpet?’

The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count.

Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.

“Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the windows. “I want some lamb chops with handles on ‘em’.

6: GOOD OMENS by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

How we all miss Sir Terry and his askew view of the universe. Whilst I was never a huge fan of the Discworld novels, this novel is an artform in itself. As co-author Neil Gaiman states, Terry is an early riser, and Neil a night-owl, so this story was written in the few hours each day when they were both awake.

The ultimate nature-versus-nurture story in which the antichrist is born in a perfect English village and an angel and a demon, both of whom have grown very fond of humanity over the last 4,000 years, must team up to stop the apocalypse.

7: I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

Journalist, writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron had funny bones. Writer of Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, here she turns her gimlet eye on her own aging process with a wicked sense of fun.

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it too long?

Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where to carbohydrates fit into all this?

Are we really all going to spend out last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?

And what about chocolate?”

8: THE MEANING OF LIFF by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

“In Life,” wrote Douglas Adams, “there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare works which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes..”

Thusly:

Blithbury n.: A look someone gives you which indicates that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.

Ahenny adj.: The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.

Listowel n.: The small mat on the bar designed to be more absorbent than the bar, but not as absorbent as your elbows.

9: DEATH AND THE PENGUIN by Andrei Kurkov

Viktor Zolotaryov is a frustrated writer whose short stories are too short and dull. When a newspaper edito offers him a job as an obituarist, he agrees. His brief is to select high-profile Ukranian people and prepare obituaries in readiness for the possibility they might die. And then the do.

Viktor’s strange new career is watched with melancholic disapproval by his pet penguin, Misha, adopted a few month earlier form the impoverished city zoo.

A sourly absurdist fable, Andrei Kurkov has written a black comedy of post-Soviet chaos where ambulance drivers must be bribed to bring you to hospital (U.S dollars for preference) and everything is for sale – including a child’s heart for penguin heart surgery.

10: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by Andrew Kaufman

All of Tom’s friends are superheroes, and he’s about to be married to one: the Perfectionist. But on the day of their wedding, the Perfectionist’s ex-boyfriend, Hypno, hypnotises her by making her believe that Tom is invisible. Now the Perfectionist, boarding a flight to Vancouver and thining Tom left her, is moving away for good. And Tom has until the plane lands to make her see him again.

Told in flashback and ending Richard Curtis-style at the airport AMFAS is a beautifully quirky story of rediscovery.

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The land of Saints and Scholars.

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And good morning to you too, Mr Coffee.

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The scent of books

"I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We have a lot of fancy candles in our house. Mrs O is fond of surrounding herself with vetiver and bergamot and lavender and what-not. We should probably have taken out shares in Jo Malone. This means that my house smells nice, but it doesn’t necessarily smell like my house.

There are deep and complex interrelationships between scent, memory and emotion. For example, I cherish the memory of the smell of the satsumas my father stuffed into an old sock on Christmas Eve; an apple crumble resting in my granny’s scullery; the ozone and earthy scent of a Donegal peat bog after the rain.

The act of smelling something is like the act of remembering. Immediately on the first intake of air you can feel your mind going to work, sending the odour around from place to place, setting off complex signals throughout the brain, searching for signs of recognition, old memories, connections.

When I was ten years old, my great aunt Molly gave me a copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It is small, dark blue, bound in leather, and one of my most precious possessions. I tell people I’ve read it every December for 35 years, and that’s true; but I’m long past reading it for the story now. It has become a ritual tied to scent and memory and emotion. The weight and mutiness of the book in my hand instantly transports me to a place of comfort, love, peace.

A lot of readers will tell you there’s nothing like the smell of old books. That’s because old books are, quite literally, memory – and not only for the stories they contain.

Smell is the only fully developed sense a foetus has in the womb, and it’s the one that is the most developed in a child through to the age of about 10 when sight takes over. Smell and emotion are stored as one memory, so childhood becomes a time when you create the basis for smells you will like or hate for the rest of your life. Thinking back, many of your strongest memories will be tied to aromas.

Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, a structure at the front of the brain that sends information to the other areas of the body’s central command for further processing. Odours take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the seats of emotion and memory.

According to science historian Diane Ackerman not everything has a smell: only substances volatile enough to spray microscopic particles into the air. ‘Inert things we encounter every day – stone, glass, steel etc. – don’t evaporate at room temperature, so we don’t smell them. If you heat cabbage, it becomes more volatile and suddenly smells stronger. Weightlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell in space. In the absence of gravity, molecules are not volatile, so few of them get in the nose deeply enough to register as odours – a consistent problem for nutritionists trying to design space food.’

Old books contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which are given off as the organic matter decomposes – what we are smelling is the slow death of the paper, the binding, the glue. That combination of grassy mustiness and vanilla, according to the International League for Antiquarian Booksellers, comes from lignin, which is present in all wood-based paper. As it breaks down, the lignin gives off a faint vanilla smell.

Volunteers from University College London extracted the VOCs from a 1928 French novel they found at a used bookshop and asked volunteers to do a blind smell taste. More than a third said the old book extract reminded them of chocolate. A further third said it reminded them of coffee.

“You tend to use familiar associations to describe smells when they are unlabelled,” study author Cecilia Bembibre told Popular Science magazine. “And also, the VOC’s of chocolate and coffee seem to be very similar to that of books.”

Turns out, chocolate and coffee contain the fermented or roasted chemical compounds lignin and cellulose, which are also in decaying paper.

So, those people who love nothing more than curling up on a sofa with a good book, a cup of coffee and some chocolate are adrift in a sea of complementary aromas, memories and emotions, as well as reading a story.

‘Book smell’ is now a thing in the perfume world, like vanilla or sandalwood. In the last few years, dozens of products have appeared on the market to give your home the earthy scent of a rare book collection.

Not for me, though. Stuff your Chanel No. 5.

I’ll take Eau de Austin or Bronte cologne any day.

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Tru dat

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Top 10: Literary Pandemic Vaccines

The pandemic has been a grim daily grind through statistics and curves (flattened or not) and light relief has been scant. Even television seems grittier nowadays.

So, my reading list needs one or two little light aperitifs to lift the mood – books so slight and effervescent linger as long as their tipsy mood lightens your heart – a panacea for the dearth of mirth these days.  Here’s my Top 10:

1: THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950’s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink and vowed to go native in a way not even the natives can manage, she’s busy getting drunk, bedding men, losing jewellery and living life to the full.

‘Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.’

A wonderful cocktail of a book, as light and airy as a champagne bubble.

2: RIGHT HO, JEEVES by PG Wodehouse

If the world is not quite the shade of peachy keen you would like and you’re feeling a bit ooja-cum-spiff, manservant Jeeves has the perfect pick me up to restore your mettle. You could start with almost any Jeeves and Wooster novel, but this one contains some of the juiciest Woosterisms:

‘I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature to excite the liveliest of suspicions.’

3: LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL by Ronan Hession

Like a Buster Keaton version of Waiting for Godot, this wonderful novel in which practically nothing happens has been one of my favourite reads of 2020. Best friends Leonard and Hungry Paul are two zen-like 30-somethings swimming with the indifferent tides of their lives.

Gently humous and genuinely affecting, this book is perfect to help understand the importance of human moments amid the clamour of modernity.

4: COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons

Young, modern Flora Poste is sent to live with her remote country cousins, the Stakadders, in remote Sussex – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several cousins and the redoubtable Aunt Ada Doom.

Miss Poste imposes her life-affirming no-nonsense ‘higher common sense’ in an attempt to redeem the lives of her relatives to wonderfully humorous effect. Will Flora be able to over come Aunt Doom’s fear of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’?

5: ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY by David Sedaris

A collection of essays by the inimitable American humourist, David Sedaris, including the title story where he hilariously attempts to learn French.

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use.

From the dog owners I learned ‘lie down,’ ‘shut up,’ and ‘who shit on this carpet?’

The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count.

Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.

“Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the windows. “I want some lamb chops with handles on ‘em’.

6: GOOD OMENS by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

How we all miss Sir Terry and his askew view of the universe. Whilst I was never a huge fan of the Discworld novels, this novel is an artform in itself. As co-author Neil Gaiman states, Terry is an early riser, and Neil a night-owl, so this story was written in the few hours each day when they were both awake.

The ultimate nature-versus-nurture story in which the antichrist is born in a perfect English village and an angel and a demon, both of whom have grown very fond of humanity over the last 4,000 years, must team up to stop the apocalypse.

7: I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

Journalist, writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron had funny bones. Writer of Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, here she turns her gimlet eye on her own aging process with a wicked sense of fun.

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it too long?

Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where to carbohydrates fit into all this?

Are we really all going to spend out last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?

And what about chocolate?”

8: THE MEANING OF LIFF by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

“In Life,” wrote Douglas Adams, “there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare works which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes..”

Thusly:

Blithbury n.: A look someone gives you which indicates that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.

Ahenny adj.: The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.

Listowel n.: The small mat on the bar designed to be more absorbent than the bar, but not as absorbent as your elbows.

9: DEATH AND THE PENGUIN by Andrei Kurkov

Viktor Zolotaryov is a frustrated writer whose short stories are too short and dull. When a newspaper edito offers him a job as an obituarist, he agrees. His brief is to select high-profile Ukranian people and prepare obituaries in readiness for the possibility they might die. And then the do.

Viktor’s strange new career is watched with melancholic disapproval by his pet penguin, Misha, adopted a few month earlier form the impoverished city zoo.

A sourly absurdist fable, Andrei Kurkov has written a black comedy of post-Soviet chaos where ambulance drivers must be bribed to bring you to hospital (U.S dollars for preference) and everything is for sale – including a child’s heart for penguin heart surgery.

10: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by Andrew Kaufman

All of Tom’s friends are superheroes, and he’s about to be married to one: the Perfectionist. But on the day of their wedding, the Perfectionist’s ex-boyfriend, Hypno, hypnotises her by making her believe that Tom is invisible. Now the Perfectionist, boarding a flight to Vancouver and thining Tom left her, is moving away for good. And Tom has until the plane lands to make her see him again.

Told in flashback and ending Richard Curtis-style at the airport AMFAS is a beautifully quirky story of rediscovery.

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Little Objects of Desire

Fundamentally, books have remained the same since Guttenberg decided he couldn’t be arsed transcribing things by hand anymore.

It would be hard to think of another familiar, man-made object which has remained so markedly unchanged since 1455. White privilege, maybe. Also, tennis.

Ever since the birth of the Kindle, Nook (remember them?), Kobo (what?) and a plethora of other e-reading apps, people have been predicting the death of printed books, but it hasn’t happened.

After reaching a peak in 2014, sales of e-readers and e-books have slowed, and hardback sales have surged. More encouragingly, independent bookshops (bookstores for my American readers. I’ve never understood that – a shop sells things; a store just stores them) have bucked the recent high-street trends and are experiencing a resurgence in the face of ‘that south American river that shall not be named’. So much so that the ‘south American river that shall not be named’ is now considering opening physical bookshops.

It appears they are now learning the lesson that book readers and indie booksellers knew all along. Books are not just commodities or things to own. If that were true, then a bookshop would hold no more emotional resonance than a branch of Ikea.

There are few things more soulless than mega-corporations (naming no names) stacking high the three-for-two and buy-one-get-one-free offers, as if books were no more than store-cupboard staples. It’s not like readers would think, ‘I want the new Ali Smith, and I don’t really need the Jodi Picoult, but I may as well take it and shove it in the cupboard next to the chickpeas and kidney beans – you never know’.

Indeed, it’s very telling that Waterstones stopped their bogof offers a couple of years ago under the tutelage of James Daunt.

Proper bookshops know their customers come as much for the experience as for the books. A carefully curated, atmospheric bookshop is as cosy as a Hobbit hole in springtime, because indie bookshops know that books aren’t just books. They are little objects of desire.

I read a lot, but I will always have more books in my house than I will ever read. This is the happy absurdity of being a book lover. Unread books are not a waste. They contain the promise of pleasure yet to come, paths yet to roam, and lives yet to be lived.

To be fair, there is probably a fine line between a book lover and an ordinary hoarder, but in that thin gap is everything which makes the difference between a paper book and a notional ebook – the very physicality of paper, pages, binding, spines and beautiful, colourful covers. It’s interesting that the dictionary definition of a bibliophile is ‘a person who loves or collects books’. It does not define a bibliophile as a person who loves and collects and reads books. I mean, we will; but it’ll take a while.

You can’t collect e-books, unless you take pride in a virtual library – on Goodreads, say. Which is fine, but then it’s broken down into mere statistics. This is how many books I have read so far. These are the books I’m going to read. There is no theatricality, no colour, no physicality, and worse, no book smell.

And that book smell is like crack cocaine to book lovers – the old, slightly vanilla smell of paper and binding glue and musty, dusty shelves. If you could bottle it as a pheromone spray I bet you’d end up with a lot of weird dates in libraries.

There is also a difference between collecting books and collecting other things – shoes, for example. Show me a person with a thousand books and I will be green with envy. Show me a person with a thousand shoes and I will ask which southeast Asian country you have been exiled from.

Books are the ultimate badge of personality. The first thing I do in a stranger’s house is tilt my head to examine the spines on their bookshelves. You can tell a lot about a person from their bookshelves. There are green flags and red flags. Classics are a green flag. Also a few cookbooks, a volume or two of history, some contemporary fiction.

Jeremy Clarkson books are a red flag. Probably even for Jeremy Clarkson.

My books are me, externalised – my worldview in object form. A chaptered hall of mirrors casting reflected aspects of me. They are where I have been, where I hope to go, and the map.

Like the bicycle, the book is a perfect invention, and perfection dies very, very hard. The car hasn’t murdered the bike, and e-book corporations won’t murder the book. Even if Jeremy Clarkson comes installed free.