Deconstructing my book shelves, one turgid structuralist manual at a time

Book Purge Thirteen — September 11th 2016

Can you read the signs? (See what I did there?)

A mere 36 books going this week. I’ve been resting on my laurels a bit, on the back of my daughter and I finally delivering five boxes of books to the local Oxfam book store yesterday.

This week’s purge might be called a deconstruction. A lot of structuralist and post-structuralist nonsense, whose sole purpose it now seems to me, was to remove the last vestiges of fun from reading any great book. Be gone. There is more to come in later purges, I’m sure of it. I just haven’t dragged the relevant boxes down from the attic yet.

The rest of the pile of discarded reading material is the usual eclectic mix. Eclectic in the sense of ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’

The one book of note that I would like to call your attention to this evening is The Last Voyage Of Donald Crowhurst. Crowhurst was a real British eccentric — a larger than life character who entered a round the world yacht race and faked his location while more or less stationary in the Atlantic. In the end, he couldn’t keep up the charade, realised that he had been found out, and that he would not be wining the prize money he needed to pay off his debts. He did a Maxwell before Maxwell and walked off his catamaran and into the sea.

My friend Jonathan wrote a play based on the story — called The Lonely Sea — and performed it himself at the Edinburgh Fringe back in the late 70s. Lots of memories, therefore, associated with the book.

But memories are no longer enough to justify shelf space, so it goes.

Likewise, the A. J. P. Taylor book, which was based on a TV series. Taylor came to give a guest lecture shortly after I started university and I remember being disappointed both by Taylor’s performance and the content of the lecture. It is too long ago for me to remember the topic, even, but I suspect he was dismissive of socialist movements or some such and that is what turned me against him. Why I even have this book I don’t know.

I have it no more.