I have enjoyed reading ever since I learned the skill, and in addition to the magazines to which I subscribe I always have a book on the go. My favourite time for reading is in the evening, just before bed-time. I am in the habit of varying my “diet” fairly systematically, mixing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. A particularly weighty piece might well be given a rest part way through, allowing myself an interlude of something lighter. This is the current plan.
For some time now I have been working my way steadily through David Jones’ rather weighty History of Wales. It is very interesting, but it does require refreshment breaks every now and then. Not long ago I enjoyed Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I had seen the film when that came out, and decided it would be good to read the original. If you are not familiar with it, the book revolves around the experience of a butler serving in a wealthy household. As I reached another “breathing space” a couple of nights ago it struck me that it might be interesting to compare Ishiguro’s novel with one of the classic p. G. Wodehouse “Jeeves” stories. I have very pleasant memories of these, which I read with great enthusiasm when I was at school. How did Jeeves measure up to a more serious version of the “gentleman’s gentleman”?
To my immense surprise the Wodehouse has turned out to be a real disappointment. I simply cannot believe in the world he depicts for us. The characters are all heavily over-drawn and the story-line terribly predictable. I’m not sure that I will bother to finish it. (My wife tells me that she had the same experience of the book.) Clearly the world Wodehouse describes no longer exists, even assuming that it ever did, but this is true of Ishiguro’s narrative also. Perhaps the most important factor here is that I have changed. Curiously, I cannot think of an analogous shift in my tastes in the visual arts, between my youth and now. Certainly I have discovered new artists, but for the moment I can’t think of a painter whose work enchanted me in my teens, but who bores me now.
I wonder what it is that makes for our response to something we find funny …. or to pictures we admire, for that matter.