The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (And Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

I so wanted to love Andy Miller's The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (And Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (#438), and I did, as I read his opening Word of Explanation.  From there on in, it was a steep and wretched decline into tedious political blather and twaddle with gratuitous detours into rock and roll, all told in such a peculiarly insular British fashion to be almost utterly incomprehensible to an American reader.  I asked one of the most erudite and well-read academics I know at dinner last night if he had ever even heard of the book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.  He hadn't, which made me feel marginally better, but according to Andy Miller's book-reading memoir, it's on the "Classics" list of every Briton as a book one must have read, or at least claimed to have read.  For thinking Americans, that's just Dude, the Obscure, as you would probably term it, Mr. Miller.

Nor does he bother to give you his opinion on all fifty one of the books he actually did read in a year (SPOILER ALERT!!!) He does not actually read two bad books; only Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, which he gobbled down along with the rest of us lowbrow folks while pointing out its myriad deficiencies.  I personally think it's just jealousy on his part, because he can't successfully write about every book he reads (His book blog failed because he got bored with it - too, too tedious for words!  Literally!), he can't sustain a membership in a book club discussion group (they hate his picks to read {Frankly, I would have, too!} plus the discussions make him dislike the others' choices, so he'll never read one of their recommendations again, so there!) and he's not tripping over piles of money on the way to the bank to deposit the profits from his own books!  The books I was most interested in finding out what Mr. Miller thought of them were not included anywhere in his oeuvre, with the exception of Pride and Prejudice, which predictably enough, he hated, along with anything else by Jane Austen, (not that he would ever bother trying to crack any of her other books).  But Vanity Fair? Jane Eyre?  Crime and Punishment?  The Odyssey?  None of those made it into his book as worthy of discussion.  From the books he did include, I can only paraphrase that famous saying about the Americans and the British being two cultures divided by a common language, as I certainly didn't recognize many of the books included in his canon.  I did find his juxtaposition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick and The DaVinci Code amusing, though.

There are a lot of great quotes about the love of books and the love of reading scattered throughout The Year of Reading Dangerously if you have the patience to winnow them out.  As for me, though, I won't be passing on a recommendation to read this to any of my book-loving friends; in fact, it could be quite enough to push them in the opposite direction!  My advice?  Look at Appendix I - The List of Betterment, see what Andy Miller read, and make your own decisions about whether or not any of them are of sufficient interest to you to pursue on your own.  As for his publishers - poor choice for the American market - it doesn't translate well.