Surprising Things I Learned From Books

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently.

Anyone who knows me in actual, real life will be rolling their eyes at this point because I am always doing a lot of reading. This time though, it has been extreme reading (very like extreme ironing but without the creasing), as I have been devouring an exceptionally long, long list for a fiction prize. Imagine a cross between speed reading and Whack-A-Mole and you will have it exactly.

I have read some brilliant things and some terrible things and a lot of things that hovered in between. I have read one book that gave me that fizzing rush of adrenaline that tells me I’m reading a truly great book. I have read one book that I wanted to hurl through the window every two minutes.

It’s good to read things you don’t love, despite the window rage episodes. It tells you a lot about yourself. Critical reading is as much about you, the reader as it is the writer. Asking yourself why you don’t like something is often extremely illuminating.

I hate long-winded writers, which is ironic because it is very much my style. I hate books where all the characters are awful, even when they are meant to be awful. I don’t want to know how awful the world is. I live in it and I’m not blind. I can deal with sadness but cruelty isn’t my jam. I hate thrillers that set up a great plot and then realise that what they need their main character to do is impossible, so they break their own rules. That gives me the window rage for sure. I also don’t have much time for that: ‘It’s like Harry Potter, but with voles, or unicycles,’ style. To be fair though, that’s more publishing’s fault than the author, but it’s still annoying to me. There are so many great voices out there, why keep giving laurels to all the cover bands?

Sometimes though, I find something very specific that drives me mental, which is surely a sign of my own insanity, because it bothers nobody else but me. The problem with this sort of thing though is that once I have seen what it is and decided I hate it, I am super, super attuned to it and then I start worrying it will crop up again, and then it does and it is all VB (very bad) sometimes it is VVB.

And I have nobody else to blame but myself.

I recently read a book from the long, long list which was like this. I won’t name it, because it is superbly written and deserves to do very well and I ruined it for myself so it would be unfair to spoil it for you.

I discovered that although I am no prude and am happy to read sex scenes which involve any gender you care to mention, I cannot deal with graphic descriptions of scrotums (scrotii?).

Which was hugely unfortunate as this writer was very, very keen on describing them in every kind of situation where you’re likely to come across one. Near and far away.

They dangled and wobbled. They bounced and folded gently (with a small sigh). They squashed like a stress ball. They swung, pendulously too and fro (with their ears hanging low). They were lit up by the morning sun and cast interesting, crepuscular shadows at dusk.

If I’m honest, I thought about scrotums more during the reading of this book than I ever have in the past fifty years off my life and I came to the conclusion that this many scrotums were too many scrotums for me.

As I said, the things that you find you don’t like, often tell you more about yourself than anything else. So what have I learned during this deep dive into the world of scrotal activity?

I have learned that I am very, very glad to be a one man woman and that when it comes to me and scrotums, it’s very much about the personality of the scrotum wearer. I shall never leave him for another scrotum I have seen in passing, that’s for sure.