Summer holidays allow many of us to vary our reading habits, to read more deeply, broadly, lightly or speculatively than the rest of the year. I confess to sometimes feeling a sense of guilt if I read anything pulpy or trashy at any other time of year, mainly because there is such of long list of excellent non-fiction and fiction that I’m keen to read at some point.
I warn you now that this blog is about to take a turn for the non-cheery…
Somebody once introduced me to an alarming way of viewing book choice. It runs like this:
1. Guess roughly how long you will live.
2. Subtract your current age from this figure to give you a new figure: X years to live.
3. Estimate how books you read in the average month, Y.
4. Multiply your above answer, X by 12 and then again by Y and that is how many books you can hope to read before you… die.
This is not complex maths, but many do find it strangely revealing and then scary. The figures that this simple bit of arithmetic reveal are rarely as big a number as we might have guessed or hoped. Even a 20 year old who hopes to live to a hundred and reads two books a month will only get through 1920 books during the rest of their life. A 50 year old banking on making it to 80 and reading one book a month can look forward to 360 more books.
When we compare these figures with the number of books published each year – 184,000 in the UK in 2013 – it’s easy to see that we should choose wisely, whatever our age and speed of reading.
Stepping away from the Grim Reaper’s habit of slowing our reading and looking at things more positively, one of the ways that I enjoy summer holiday reads more is by noticing those times when the author subtly reveals that they really know the world they claim to.
In The Natural Navigator, I touched on the idea that however fantastical a story, there is still a need for the reader to be able to relate to some aspects of it. A reader cannot find all elements of a story to be alien, even if the story is about aliens, as then we do not feel transported into that world. So, the crazier the story, the more important it is that we can relate to some parts of it.
The Greek myths, like the Odyssey, are great examples of this principle in storytelling. The reader (or listener) is not expected to believe that the Sirens or Cyclops or any of the other outlandish characters will be found in the Mediterranean. But the suspension of disbelief is maintained by describing a physical world that makes sense around these extraordinary creatures.The stars Odysseus uses are true to life and the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, to give a couple of very basic examples.
The same logic applies in contemporary fiction. I have found it to be universally true that stories that earn the label, ‘modern classic’, have a rare insight into not just the characters they portray, which most people would expect, but also the almost-hidden aspects of the physical world around them too.
I read ‘Gorky Park’ by the award-winning thriller writer, Martin Cruz Smith, during a recent family holiday to Greece. We were sailing and skippering a small boat with young children on board did not seem to be the perfect moment to re-attempt Ulysses by Joyce. I wanted something that would be both a page-turner and, for the reasons above, some claim to higher than average quality for its genre.
I was impressed not just by the story of Gorky Park, but by the physical setting. The author has gone well beyond average thriller efforts in setting the scenes. Here are just a few examples of the sort of thing I mean, selected only for having some passing relevance to natural navigators:
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‘The Earth. The ground is like a drum. It’s true – you can hear it. As a drumhead gets hotter and drier, what happens? It get louder. The same with the ground. Listen,’ Pribluda slapped his foot down. ‘Sort of hollow. The water table is falling.’
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“There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.’ He laughed. ‘If you don’t know where a road goes, you shouldn’t be on it.’
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‘Arkady had lost his sense of direction, but as the moon was to his left he guessed they were headed south.’
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If you have come across any other examples of fiction authors doing an unusually good job of observing and writing about the outdoors, nature or navigation then please do send them my way, I find it a fascinating area.
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