Mark Mason

On Desert Island Discs the other day, Peter Ackroyd chose a pen and some paper as his luxury. ‘Do you write longhand?’ asked Kirsty Young. Ackroyd’s reply was really intriguing: yes, he does write longhand – but only his fiction. To write one genre by hand but another on computer might seem bizarre, including to Ackroyd himself, who responds to my enquiry about why he works this way with an admission that he doesn’t know. He is, though, far from unique in having a strange approach to his craft. Many writers have been very … how can we put this … ‘particular’ in the way they turn words in their head into words on the page.

I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding off being his mellifluous Yorkshire tones relating a Peter Cook one-liner from 1963. I’m talking audiobooks, of course. There’s a nebulous point somewhere sleeping and wakefulness, a state where insomnia still reigns but you’re too tired actually to turn the light on and read. The solution? An audiobook. You get the hypnotic effect of a book without the hassle of reading it yourself.

I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect non-fiction book has already been written. In 1955. And once a year ever since then, for that matter. And yes, every year it does hit the top of the bestseller lists. It’s the Guinness Book of Records. When I wrote novels, publishers used to assuage my worries about a lack of reviews by pointing out that it was always harder to get fiction reviewed than non-fiction.

It’s every writer’s nightmare – losing the only existing copy of your current book. Doesn’t happen that often these days, what with the mantra of the modern world being ‘Thou Shalst Back Up’. What’s particularly galling for Francis Wheen is that he had backed up, in the surest way possible, namely printing out a copy of the his latest novel. But even that isn’t enough when you suffer the fate that befell Wheen last Friday: his garden shed, which acted as his office, burned to the ground.

Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together. I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through I was still undecided; novels from over a century ago can be hard work, largely because of the wordiness. (Many of Dickens’s champions admitted that in the recent Charles-fest.) You know there must be something there — books don’t become classics for nothing — but it can take a bit, often a big bit, of finding. Fiction led by its characters rather than its plot often has this problem.

Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward march of e-books. For it’s in this business centre that the Society of Indexers is to be found. (I know — you think they’d have a dusty garret somewhere in St James’s.) With Kindles and iPads able to instantly locate every occurrence in a book of whichever word or phrase you’re looking for, surely the days of the index are (please forgive this, it really isn’t deliberate) numbered?

Which books (if any) have you got in the loo at the moment? The term ‘loo book’ has come to mean ‘lightweight/undemanding humour book’ – but does it have to mean that? The three titles currently gracing my own cistern have made me consider the question. They’re Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and Londoners by Craig Taylor. None of them, you’d have to say, particularly lightweight. It’s not that there isn’t a place in the nation’s smallest rooms for conventional toilet tomes. The best of these can be great books, from theDaily Telegraph’s unpublished letters through Schott’s Original Miscellany to Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?

Are you awed by an autograph? Swayed by a signature? As you peruse the shelves and tables of a bookshop, is your eye drawn more readily to a cover if it bears one of those little stickers announcing that the copy in question has been signed by the author? Plenty of people’s eyes are, apparently. Publishers always encourage their authors to get out there in the shops, pen in hand, offering to sign whichever copies of their latest work happen to be in stock. I did this with my first book, and felt a little silly walking up to the counter in Waterstones, carrying half a dozen copies of the novel lifted from a nearby table. But the assistant didn’t bat an eyelid. In fact she was very pleasant, asking me about the book and how it was going.

I've spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don't actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you've finished it' problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can't accidentally leave things between the pages for subsequent owners to find. Because, of course, there won't be any subsequent owners. One of the joys of a secondhand book is unexpectedly chancing upon someone's makeshift bookmark trapped between pages 118 and 119. A friend recently gave me, as a present, a copy of More Manners for Men, one of those bum-clenchingly snobbish etiquette guides from yesteryear. The specific ‘yester' in this case was 1908.

Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it. A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four years. The spur is the fast-approaching 100th anniversary of Oates’s death — the least I can do is pay him the courtesy of getting it read by then. Inevitably called I Am Just Going Outside, Michael Smith’s book has proved to be a corker. One of the many things I never knew about Oates was that he was from Gestingthorpe, an Essex village just over the border from my home in Suffolk.

‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ So said Ford Madox Ford. Whether that applies to any of his own books I don’t know (my shelves seem to be a Ford-free zone — anyone?). But at least one blog applies the test to various tomes, so I thought I’d scan some of my past reading and see whether the rule holds true. Page 99 of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy is a conversation between the two main characters (adult Will and schoolboy Marcus), which features a brilliant example of Hornby getting you straight inside Marcus’s head:  ‘Do people give you a hard time?’  Marcus looked at him. How did he know that?

Quiz question: which famous 12-word quotation is followed by the phrase ‘for there is in London all that life can afford?’ Clue: two of the words are ‘tired’. If you need any more clues ... well, I might as well warn you now that this probably isn’t the blog post for you. Because it’s about London books. It’s struck me that our capital city is the perfect example of a gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to writers and their inspiration. It seems Dr Johnson was correct: 350 years on and there’s still all that life can afford in London. It’s fascinating the different ways authors find of slicing up that life and putting it between the covers of a book.

Hate to get all Peter Mandelson on you, but I’ve decided I’m a fighter not a quitter. When it comes to books, that is. I hate giving up on them. No matter how dense the prose, how teakish the characters, how convoluted the structure, I have to plough on to the bitter endpage. And sometime it is bitter; you finish the book as unimpressed as you were at page 20, thinking ‘there go a few hours of my life I’ll never get back’. But often you warm to the book, feeling glad you persisted. Those are the experiences that inspire, that make you a plougher. Is it the right way to be, though? A friend of mine has a ‘page 80’ rule. If the book hasn’t gripped him by then, off to Oxfam it goes.