Stuff I’ve Been Reading: February 2005

BOOKS READ:

• The Plot Against America—Philip Roth
• Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul—Tony Hendra
• Chronicles: Volume One—Bob Dylan
• Little Children—Tom Perrotta
• Soldiers of Salamis—Javier Cercas
• The Book of Shadows—Don Paterson

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The Men Who Stare At Goats—Jon Ronson
• I Am Charlotte Simmons—Tom Wolfe
• Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood—Jennifer Traig
• Palace Walk—Naguib Mahfouz
• Just Enough Liebling—edited by David Remnick

The story so far: I have been writing a column in this magazine for the last fifteen months. And though I have had frequent battles with the Polysyllabic Spree—the fifty-five disturbingly rapturous and rapturously disturbing young men and women who edit the Believer—I honestly thought that things had got better recently. We seemed to have come to some kind of understanding, a truce. True, we still have our differences of opinion: they have never really approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish. (There are a whole host of other rules too ridiculous to mention—for example, you try finding “novels which express no negative and/or strong emotion, either directly or indirectly”—but I won’t go into them here.) Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims, and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column, I wrote a little about ­cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.

I have no idea whether you’ll ever get to read these words, but my plan is this: not all the fifty-five members of the Spree are equally sharp, frankly speaking, and they’ve got this pretty dozy woman on sentry duty down at the Believer presses. (Sweet girl, loves her books, but you wouldn’t want her doing the Harold Bloom interview, if you know what I mean.) Anyway, we went out a couple of times, and I’ve told her that I’ve got the original, unedited, 600-page manuscript of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, her favorite novel. I’ve also told her she can have it if she leaves me unsupervised for thirty minutes while I work out a way of getting “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” into the magazine. If you’re reading these words, you’ll know it all came off. This...