Reading and travelling

I’m in Washington this week, for the IMF annual meetings. I took the train down here, and, as is often the way with trains, there were lots of cancellations and delays, and I had quite a bit of time on my hands.

Desperate to read something other than Credit Suisse First Boston’s 104-page Latin America Quarterly, it didn’t take me long to get engrossed in a back issue of the New York Review of Books which I’d never got around to finishing. (Where others keep reproachful piles of New Yorkers by their bedside, I generally manage to read most of what I’m interested in every week. My guilty consciences – the magazines I desperately want to read but never quite get around to doing any more than dipping into – are the New York Review and Foreign Affairs.)

As the train shuffled laboriously down to Union Station, I recalled an amazing issue of the magazine about a year ago, which I took on a trip with my girlfriend to California. It was full of fascinating and impeccably-written essays on all manner of topics, and I found myself sneaking off to my bedroom to read a couple of pages before dinner, rather than schmoozing in a friendly manner with Michelle’s family.

And then it occurred to me that a vastly disproportionate number of my great experiences as a reader have been while travelling. If I think of many of the books I enjoyed the most – The Comfort of Strangers, Requiem for a Dream, Foucault’s Pendlum, Infinite Jest – all were read on holiday. I would say of the last two that they have to be read on holiday – it’s only in such a situation that one ever gets the chance to read them in an amount of time short enough to be able to remember everything that went before. But the McEwan novel is compact enough to be read just about anywhere; capable of being fit into the busiest of schedules. It’s not the time-available thing, I think, it’s the guilt thing.

For the fact is that with the exception of an occasional half-hour between going to bed and going to sleep, it’s very rare that any of us have time over the course of the day to read a book or magazine without feeling a little guilty – without thinking that we ought to be doing something else.

When on holiday, however, or stuck in one of those gaps-between-meetings on business trips, we relax a little. Reading, then, stops being a guilty pleasure and starts being simply a pleasure.

So let me share with you now one of the best paragraphs I’ve come across in a very long time. You won’t have any difficulty identifying the author (Alan Bennett) – here his voice is so distinctive it verges on the self-parodic. But he has such a wonderful ear that he can get away with it. I don’t know if you’ll enjoy it as much as I did down here, but I’m sure you’ll love it all the same.

So, then, the opening paragraph of Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, from his latest collection of short stories, The Laying On of Hands:

Bit of a bomshell today. I’m pegging up my stocking when Mr Suddaby says, ‘I’m afraid, Miss Fozzard, this is going to have to be our last encounter.’ Apparently this latest burglary has put the tin hat on things and what with Mrs Suddaby’s mother finally going into a home and their TV reception always being so poor there’s not much to keep them in Leeds so they’re making a bolt for it and heading off to Scarborough. Added to which Tina, their chow, has a touch of arthritis so the sands may help and the upshot is they’ve gone in for a little semi near Peasholme Park.

Posted by Felix at 11:05 EST