Have I read enough novels?

[@tomdownlow]

I totally agree with you on this topic. "Reading novels for sheer pleasure" is what I was thinking before I even started to watch this, having only read the title of the video. I also find novels "intoxicating" and you are spot on when you say that "you have to start picking wisely" as one gets older. Thank you for this video.

[@johnmurphy5605]

I'm new to your channel but have watched a number of your videos (spanning long hair to short), and was wondering this morning what your reading mix might look like. Also, whether you read to assuage particular needs at particular times, and if you read less (or differently) while in the midst of writing. Thanks for the heads up re Rachel Cusk. Regarding your books, I shall read those in order of publication. Cheers.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

Good question. When I'm writing I tend to stay away from fiction, although not always. I never have 2 novels on the go, or seldom. There are novelists I go back to all the time to remind me why I do this. As for my own novels: my first 2 are VERY different from current on. I'd go with current one and leave it at that. But thank you anyway.

[@katejarmstrong]

I’m reading a wider range of novels at the moment - minor early 20th century novels as well as contemporary releases which are not really my sort of thing - and a lot from small presses. Currently on a combination of Muriel Spark and Alex Pheby, with a yearning for Middlemarch.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

Hello - I've never really got Muriel Spark. I suspect you're reading Pheby's Lucia? It's about 4 down my TBR list.

[@katejarmstrong]

Yes, I'm on Lucia, which is a very different novel from Playthings. Where P was all about being on inside someone's head, L so far is outside looking in. There were aspects of P I really admired, but L is, to my mind, a much better (and really excellent) novel. You have a treat to come.

[@rjd53]

"Why read more novels" is like asking Why still talk to anybody and have conversations, people won't tell me anything I haven't heard before after all, and if I cannot converse with interesting persons like Goethe and Hegel, why bother? For the longest time in my life I always read three books simultaniously of different genres, one fiction, one non-fiction, one poetry - the best strategy to produce sparks in your brain. The older I get the more fiction I read, lifetime is running out, non-fiction is becoming less and less important, what really matters now I find almost exclusively in fiction: I want to know, what other people experience, think, struggle with, are interested in, found out - and how they express themselves in bringing all that into style and form and transforming it to something new in the universe (biographies do not do that, they are mostly dull, facts alone are not enough). This is not escapism, it is being interested in human beings as spiritual beings. Poetry for me is just as important as novels, same with artists like Gerhard Richter or - the best - Anselm Kiefer. - I read Cusk's Outline and Transit about two months ago, I agree: a firework of intelligence, I marked almost each paragraph as worth rereading and am looking forward to the third volume of the trilogy, it will be published soon.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

I accept it was rather a ridiculous proposition, but I thought I'd think it through given it popped into my head. I'm interested that you say the older you get the more fiction you're reading when I find it's the other way around, although, it could change back of course.

[@curioushmm9027]

i wish you did more videos neil but i'll certainly settle for one of these every once in awhile..i love watching the thought process...and i'm delighted with the your conclusion...when you started i was thinking but why should we only ever need the absolute best of anything.. on another note i was listening to another booktuber go on about what a dreadfully back writer cusk is and that her books are full of grammatical and syntactical errors. quite wonderful to hear your response.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

I try once every 2 weeks but was a little down for a while so needed to take a break from pretty much everything. Cusk is a brilliant writer - there are no grammatical and syntactical errors: she's writing from a very unusual point of view, almost all reported speech, which makes her sentences very unusual.

[@Sinfulgaiden]

An insightful question I confront daily. Myself; I have spent the majority of my reading life on the novel. Yet I've always had trouble figuring out why (I tend to agree with D. H. Lawrence's dictum that the novel is a Holy construction). Unlike yourself Neil, I refuse to resort to the 'escapism' argument. If we spend most of our time on novels, certainly, it is for sheer pleasure. Otherwise, it is a learning process; a unique life experience. To cite it as an escapist activity lays bare a fact: that there is something lacking in our everyday lives. Maybe that applies to some of us; Philip Larkin, for instance. Nevertheless, as always, interesting video. Rachel Cusk now holds a place on my never-ending reading list.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

When I said 'escapism' I didn't necessarily mean to a nicer / safer place. And I have to say all art speaks to something lacking in us, and when it's great fills us up just a little. I've always said great art provides experience and its response to life we haven't lived yet

[@MarcNash]

Outside of genre work that spin a good yarn, I've never understood the association of novels to escapism. I find novels utterly ground me in the everyday world, trying to reveal fictions we both tell ourselves and the fictions that construct our collective 'shared' world of reality.

[@lilliannieswender266]

I don't believe that anyone can ever read enough novels, especially in the world we live in today. Like you, I have fewer books ahead of me than behind, and therefore I pick and choose with care, but novels will be a part of my life to my dying day. A system I use to keep my mind growing is to read a work of fiction and than one of non-fiction in areas of knowledge I am interested in learning about, this has worked for me for many years, and I find that one doesn't interfere with the other. Thank you for a interesting discussion.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

I certainly hope to be reading a novel on my death bed. Thanks, as always.

[@tinafromadelaide2073]

I've loved what I've read by Dostoevsky and Wharton so far, and Outline sounds intriguing, so I might have to get it. I'm yet to read any of the other authors you mentioned. Is there something in particular you would recommend out of those?

[@neilgriffiths5129]

For me, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is the most wonderful novel written in the last 20 years at least.

[@tinafromadelaide2073]

Neil Griffiths I bought it as a gift for my sister a while ago. I will have to read it myself some time. Thanks ☺

[@robbmnro5550]

When you upload something like this, you do tempt people (me) to do a list of books. Other than Colm Toibins new one, "House of names," i would suggest Angela Carter, but the novel on my radar right now is the wonderful, "Valley at the center of the world," By Malachy Tallack. As for non-fiction, i like them in audiobook mostly, its stops them being, for me, a dry read. Adam Tooze two books about the wars and how they were made possible financially, is a great insight. The history books of Lynne Olson are solid, but again its all war... One of the things i do to keep fresh is read/listen do stuff i wouldn't dream of, history books from after the wars... I've listened on Audiobooks to "Brothers" about JFK and RFK, wow, just wow they really paid with their lives to keep us safe. i'm tempted to go on, but that might prove annoying. I know how you feel about having less time to read than you once did, yeah chose wisely. rob

[@neilgriffiths5129]

Thanks for your 'list' - always appreciated.

[@mitchelaxler7656]

As usual, your reflections have struck a chord in me. I have asked your question several times in my life, particularly when I have read --or did not finish-- six or seven novels in a row that I found very unsatisfying (an Amis, a Roth, a late Bellow, a Banville, a Sebald, a David Foster Wallace, and a late Pynchon). Perhaps the question most acutely arose when I decided to fill in some obvious gaps in my reading (I have read about 2,000 novels in my lifetime) and turned to Anna Karenina, which, as you know, begins with this famous sentence: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This struck me as so obviously false to experience, so lacking in wisdom, being the equivalent of the rhetorical trick of erecting a straw man that you could defeat in argument, that I stopped reading then and there. But I have retained one interest in the novel, a purely aesthetic one: the quality of the prose, its rhythms, its style, the innovations yet to be rung from language. And I have greatly increased my reading and listening to poetry and to seventeenth century prose. There are few pleasures that exceed listening to a recital of Donne's prose and poetry or to hearing Wallace Steven's recordings of his poetry. It is remarkable how closely the pleasures you find in the novel--exalted pleasures almost visceral, intoxicating, enriching, elevated--track the pleasures of great music. This may be a reason to read more poetry and, of course, to continue seeing performances of Parsifal.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

I've never been convinced by that opening sentence. I think it's the wrong way around. Unhappy families might have different reasons for being unhappy - but they're all unhappy in the same way. I've also stopped listening to a lot of music. I'm just never relaxed enough, or I'm too tired and fall asleep.

[@unstartedartist]

Interesting stuff

[@inquisitivemind8672]

"Giving the novel a rest." My pulse stopped you know..... red icicles nearly formed within, until you unknowingly revived me with the mention of a book I haven't read. 😁 Great novels examine life in a way that most people fail to do, for whatever reason, in their own life, as they live it....I think some of the pleasure comes from knowing that a door has been unlocked and although we didnt make that door, we read the right book, we used the right key. (This week I read "A Month In The Country," it was perfect, thanks.)

[@neilgriffiths5129]

Glad you liked 'A Month in the Country'.

[@readingnomad7045]

Not to obligate you in any way, but I would love to hear why you think James Salter is such a brilliant prose stylist. Especially over such seminal figures as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, etc.

[@neilgriffiths5129]

Hello. I didn't actually say 'stylist' but sentence-making, which is slightly different. I have done a video on that. But am sure to do it again.