Books I Revisit

 

Some books stay with me because I enjoyed them. Others stay because they continue to make me think. There is a difference.

A good book does not always need to be read twice. It may do exactly what it set out to do, leave something behind and then remain part of a particular time in life. Other books behave differently. They seem to wait. Years later, I can return to them and find something I had either missed or was not yet ready to understand.

Those are the books I value most.

I often return to George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and essays such as Shooting an Elephant still interest me because Orwell was prepared to look directly at things that were uncomfortable. He was suspicious of slogans and easy explanations, and he understood how language can reveal something while also being used to hide it.

That has always mattered to me.

Success does not automatically prove wisdom, just as failure does not always prove foolishness. What looks obvious afterwards may not have been obvious at the time. A person who appears fortunate may have benefited from advantages that were never noticed, while someone judged unlucky may have been dealing with causes that remained hidden from view.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is another book I return to. It examines the mistakes people make in judgement, particularly when they are convinced they are being rational. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness raises a related question that I find equally interesting: how often do people mistake randomness, timing, risk or advantage for their own judgement or ability?

That question sits close to the thinking behind The Luck Illusion.

I am also drawn to writers who notice ordinary life. Important things do not always happen in dramatic places. They can be found in a kitchen, a street, a café, a shop or in a small exchange between two people. A writer who notices these things can often say more about human behaviour than one who depends upon spectacle.

Laurie Lee does this beautifully. Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning remain books I can return to because of the way he writes about people, weather, hunger, music, memory and place. He reminds me that observation is not passive. To notice something properly is already to begin thinking about it.

I probably learned more from that than I realised at the time.

Living in Bulgaria has also changed the way I read travel writing. I am less interested in descriptions of scenery than I once was. What interests me more is what happens when people encounter a place that does not behave as they expected it to.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water have that quality. He travelled with curiosity and was willing to be surprised. That matters. A foreign country does not exist to confirm the visitor’s assumptions. It has its own habits, humour, history and way of doing things. An outsider may understand some of it, misunderstand some of it and occasionally look rather foolish in the process.

Anyone who has lived for a long time in another country will recognise that.

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is another book I associate with this part of Europe. It is enormous, opinionated and not something I would treat as a final authority on the Balkans. But that is partly why it remains interesting. It gives the reader plenty to question as well as plenty to consider.

I have always been interested in books that show what happens to people under pressure. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath does this in a way that has stayed with me for years. Poverty, work, weather, migration, hunger, banks and pride all act upon individual lives. The people in the novel make choices, but those choices cannot be understood properly without understanding the conditions around them.

That idea has never really left me.

Albert Camus is different again. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider remove many of the comforts that people usually rely upon. Camus asks what is left when familiar explanations no longer provide much comfort. I do not find that bleak for its own sake. I find it useful because some questions should not be answered too quickly.

Graham Greene also returns to my shelves. The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory are full of people whose explanations of themselves do not always match what they actually do. Greene understood weakness, compromise and the difficulty of maintaining moral certainty when real life becomes involved.

That gap between what people believe about themselves and how they behave has always fascinated me.

I have never had much patience for language that exists mainly to display the writer. Style matters, of course, but for me it works best when it carries the thought rather than standing in front of it. Clear writing does not have to be plain or colourless. It can still contain humour, anger, sadness and beauty. It simply does not need to keep reminding the reader that the writer is there.

Orwell understood that. Steinbeck achieved it in another way. Greene did too.

The books I value most are not necessarily the ones I agree with. Sometimes disagreement is part of their value. A book can irritate me, make me stop, force me to reconsider something or leave me arguing with it long after I have put it down. That can be far more useful than reading something that confirms what I already thought.

This is also why rereading clearly matters.

A book read at seventeen is not the same book when read at thirty, fifty or later. The words have not changed, but the reader has. Something that once seemed important may become less convincing, while a sentence that passed unnoticed years earlier can suddenly carry much more weight.

Some books become smaller with age, some grow, and those are the ones worth keeping.

Reading and writing have always been closely connected for me. Reading shows me what works, but just as importantly, it shows me what does not. It reminds me when a straightforward sentence is enough, when an argument has been pushed too far and when something is better left for the reader to consider.

The books I return to have probably shaped my thinking more than I consciously realised. They have made me suspicious of simple conclusions and more interested in what lies behind them.

That influence can be seen in The Luck Illusion. The book grew from the same habit of looking again at explanations that seem obvious and asking whether they really tell us enough.

Luck was one of those explanations.

I wanted to know what might be hidden behind the word.