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The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life – review

Andy Miller was embarrassed about all the great books he hadn't read, so he set out to bring reading into his day-to-day life. Claire Harman on a heroic and amusing attempt to get back to the classics
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
'The toil of self-improvement' … Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Photograph: CBW/Alamy
'The toil of self-improvement' … Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Photograph: CBW/Alamy

The premise is contrived and frankly quite daft: Andy Miller, a writer, editor and former bookseller, decided that he hadn't read anywhere near the number of great books that he habitually claimed to have read and needed to redress the balance. A heroic stance was adopted: "to integrate books – to reintegrate them – into an ordinary day-to-day existence". A List of Betterment was drawn up, a dosage worked out (50 pages a day) and soon his long commute to work was spent wrestling not with sudoku but Bukowski, Tolstoy and Lampedusa.

Miller's list – which started with a dozen titles but swelled to 50 – included a number of great Unreads such as Don Quixote, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Communist Manifesto and Beowulf – all bursting with potential for Betterment – and a lot of what one might call unread Greats: Jane Eyre, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Frankenstein, books that fit Alan Bennett's definition of a classic, "a book that everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have". What was it like to force-read these cultural heavyweights? Miller kept a blog so that he might notice: "I persevered … I showered some books with superlatives and others with brickbats" and as the 6.44 shuttled back and forth from Whitstable to London he progressed down the list awarding ticks and crosses, delighted by how good Middlemarch was, surprised by how easy (and good) he found War and Peace, appalled by The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart.

The toil of self-improvement almost inevitably leads Miller to reflect on the many books not on his list, the ones that he genuinely loves, rather than those he hopes will be good for him, or which he feels guilty about. The complete works of Douglas Adams, Dickens, Larkin, Sterne, Philip K Dick, Matt Groening – none of them is in his scheme, which he gets increasingly desperate to bunk off. Possibly his most reflective and lyrical outpouring is on the tragic atmosphere of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and many of the chapters of memoir, which seep into and overset the reading-list plot, are vignettes of Miller's youth in Croydon, Hornby-esque musings on the part played in his development by the combined efforts of his parents, Croydon library, WH Smith and the Puffin Club.

Fandom and enthusiasm are Miller's forte, and flare up brilliantly around certain titles on his list (though conspicuously not many, and at least two of them he has read before): Colin McInnes's Absolute Beginners, Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, a Marvel comic anthology called The Essential Silver Surfer and something called Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmiche Musik – 1968 Onwards by Julian Cope. Miller goes into orbit so spectacularly about this piece of esoterica (which isn't even available to buy as a book, since the author suppressed it years ago), that it is impossible not to put down The Year of Reading Dangerously and go off to check it out online. It's sad to find Krautrocksampler impenetrable and weird, not "the unquestionably Great Book" Miller knows it to be. One would like to reward his missionary zeal, and the sheer exuberance that led him to write a 17-page fan letter to Houellebecq after reading Atomised, a document that is both worthy and cringeworthy, and which he reproduces in full, saying, "Were I the editor of this book, I would have omitted it entirely. But I am not the editor, I am the author."

The most pertinent experience of Miller's life were the years he spent not as a bookseller – his first job. His funny stories from behind the till include meetings with Dustin Hoffman (weirdly untalkative), Iris Murdoch (apparently in slippers), Princess Diana, whose choice of a free book was something about eating disorders, and Morrissey, who bought two copies of a book about the Jam, which Andy warned him was not very good. "'Mm', smiled Moz, 'but they're not for me'." Miller found that what is requisite from a bookseller is not a love of books but a love of selling them. If you prefer the novels of Tolstoy to those of Alan Titchmarsh (or vice versa, as Miller allows), you have to repress it in order to do your job: "and so, to protect your love of books, you start telling lies about them – inevitably".

"Have you read this?" was a question customers often asked, to which Miller tells us the best answer was a resounding yes: customers never really want the bookseller's opinion, but his approval, and their minds are already almost made up. Miller says he seemed to be selling the same half dozen or so novels over and over again (Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Secret History, Birdsong …) and personally recommended them hundreds of times "though I had read only one of them and not thought much of it. But these were the books that people wanted, even when they didn't know they wanted them."

When Miller was struggling with one of the biggies on his list, Pride and Prejudice, he was sorely tempted to give up: "why should I finish this one?", he wondered. "I knew what was going to happen in it; I knew what I thought about it; and what I said about it publicly would remain the same whether I plodded on to the bitter end or not. What, in other words would be the difference between saying I had read Pride and Prejudice and actually reading it? Perhaps it would be more honest not to finish it; perhaps there was something noble in running the race and, at the last minute, refusing to cross the line."

Miller comes to the rather unbelievable conclusion that it actually does one good to finish a book, like a course of antibiotics. Pride and Prejudice was fine after all, and this, he suggests, is how the life-saving/changing effect kicked in, halting "an erosion of integrity", no less.

But the truth that emerges more powerfully is that great books achieve and maintain their status from widespread neglect. If everyone was put through War and Peace or Paradise Lost – and I mean everyone – would those books gain or lose greatness?

Having finished The Year of Reading Dangerously, I find to my dismay that I am now no nearer, in fact considerably further from ever picking up Moby-Dick. But I do want to read Atomised, if only to marvel yet again at the uniqueness and individuality of literary taste.

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