Essential reading
The other day, I found myself, by chance, on a blog whose writer* was involved in so many reading 'challenges' that I felt quite giddy by the time I reached the end of the post. Ten books on this challenge. Tick. Fifty books on that. Tick. Twenty on another. Tick. And more challenges on the horizon. She was hurtling through the literary world faster than the speed of sound. I can see the attraction of the odd challenge here and there - for example, to stretch one's reading horizons but working my way through lists reminds me too much of school. And, to be honest, I'd be useless because, on the whole, I like an element of chance (see, we're back to Hardy's influence again), and move, in no particular order, from novels to biographies to poetry, from history to art, and so on.
Apart from that, I've spent most of my professional life writing to other people's deadlines, so I'm rather enjoying having fewer to deal with these days.
All of which leads me to . . . Biff (bear with me, all will become clear) and I was reminded of Biff when someone landed on 60GoingOn16 having done a search for 'biff courtesy chris garratt'. For those who are not familiar with the works of the mighty Biff (the combined talents of Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd), their brilliant cartoons ran for years in the Guardian, although, sadly, no longer. But my daughter and I came across their work almost 30 years ago at Camden Market and, for ages, friends and family members would receive nothing but Biff cards on birthdays and special occasions. For Mother's Day, 1983, she bought me The Essential Biff (see above), and wrote inside the front cover that she hoped I'd have "hours of fun in the phone booth of memory". (Very Biff, that.)
I missed the Biff retrospective at the Guardian two years ago (kicks self hard) but the web page led me to - oh joy, oh rapture - Biff Online. Last night, I whiled away far too much time revisiting old cartoon friends and discovering others I'd missed the first time round.
And it's where, by chance of course, I found this, Biff's inimitable take on speedreading, and suddenly felt very comforted about meandering rather than racing through the wonderful world of books. As my mother used to say about all sorts of things in life, "It's not a race and it's not a competition."
*The reader/writer in question is American and it did make me wonder if our transatlantic cousins, given their pioneering history, are inherently and instinctively more competitive than us. (The American wing of my family is fiercely competitive; we British cousins look on in amazement.) For example, while many, but by no means all, Brits love sport - watching sport, that is, rather than taking part - I'm not sure that we are, by nature, a particularly competitive lot. This may be attributable to that time-honoured Anglo-Saxon viewpoint that it's not winning or losing that matters but how you played the game. Or, in this case, not how many books you read but how you read them. I expect I'll get shot down in flames for this and British readers by the dozen will tell me that they love book challenges and regularly play at least six different types of competitive sport. Meanwhile, plenty of American readers will say they like the individual, unhurried approach to reading and have zero interest in sport. But, hey, it's Friday, and I thought I'd liven things up a little.














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