I have read around 2600 books in my life. You’ve probably done the same, give or take a few hundred either way.
Years ago, I had a rule that if I started a book, I felt duty bound to finish it. This led to some stupifyingly tedious weeks, admittedly, and some strange additions to the things I accidentally knew about, about some of which the less said the better.
A few years ago I invented a ‘forty page’ rule by which an author had forty pages to make his or her pitch, after which all patience was off. Books that got discarded after forty pages either went swiftly to the charity shop or –if they were part of a collection, or if they made me look superficially more intelligent than I really was- back onto the shelf. Like so many rules, it’s not perfect but it still seems to work for me.
Which is why it’s come as something of a shock that I have been completely upended by Bill Bryson’s new work, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, and why I have abandoned it after only 39 of its 464 pages.
Now aspiring authors like me dream of writing like Bill Bryson. His seemingly effortless facility with the English language, and the manifest niceness that shines through from the page makes just about anything he writes a joy to read. And The Body is no exception: it is an extraordinarily well-researched trot around a subject that should rivet all of us, without exception- that of what is going on inside our own skin.
And that’s my essential problem. It turns out that I simply do not want to know what is going on inside my own skin. After all, I have spent 60 years trying not to find out what is going on inside my body, as it terrifies me. In biology lessons, I was the student who would always try to push the subject straight back on to locusts, or amoeba, after some colleague had cunningly persuaded Mr Fitzgerald to talk about penises for the amusement of all. Amoeba were safe; penises definitely weren’t.
So back to Bill Bryson. When, for example, he says that about 1000 cells within my body will turn cancerous each week, my brain simply cannot accept that it is anything but sheer luck that one of them doesn’t explode into vicious action against me. Indeed, I fancy I can feel a few of them planning on having a go even as I write. And when he explains that my kidney processes about 1500 litres of liquid a day, my only reaction is to wonder what would happen if it didn’t, and how quickly I would die. Ditto the brain. The liver. The eyes. The lungs. The heart. In the latter’s case, I was already feeling palpitations in my own when I was lying in the bath reading that section, and in particular the bit about all the things that went wrong with hearts, and how quickly we would die when they did.
And bacterias and viruses. Please don’t even get me started on bacterias and viruses. I see my own body not so much as a strong fortress against any potential invader, as a small and vulnerable third world island ripe for the picking by invading hordes, equipped with landing craft and the very latest modern weaponry.
I never even got to the bit about flatulence, which I had been told was quite funny, and which was why I was reading the book in the first place.
The Body remains on a bedside table in a friend’s house in West Cork, where it belongs. The whole scary experience has persuaded me that I am finally ready to dig into the 1,267,069 words of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Or Ulysses which, when I last tried, was the most unreadable and worst book on the planet. Far from forty pages, I didn’t even make ten.
But at least James Joyce didn’t tell me about all the things that were out there to get me.
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