Falling in love with the deplorable Jackson Lamb

I don’t go in for bingeing on box sets. I am happily working my way through the 33 episodes of Inspector Morse, but I am strict about watching only one an evening. They last around an hour and forty minutes, so though I am sometimes tempted to go on to the next episode, it’s not so hard to resist. However binge-reading is another matter.

The hot weather made me think of those summer days long gone when I would go into a kind of trance and read for hours at a time. The years between sixteen and my mid twenties were my great reading years. I was doing an English A Level and then an English degree, followed by an M.A. and then a Ph.D. I was supposed to be reading, but even given that, I did read an awful lot. One summer I read all the Shakespeare plays that I hadn’t already studied and I mean ALL of them.

I can’t read like that these days – just as I can’t sleep until noon. Rarely do I succumb to the charm of a book and neglect everything in order to finish it. The last time I surrendered to a novel and spent the week-end reading it was when we picked A Gentleman in Moscowby Amor Towles for our book-group. All those years of work and child-rearing have got me out of the habit of long sessions with a book. Though I do still read a lot, it tends to be only on holiday that I can spend a whole afternoon with a novel.

But having said, there is a kind of binge-reading to which I do succumb. A couple of years ago, I discovered Mick Herron’s Slow Horseson my Kindle. I had bought it –  perhaps because I met him at Crimefest – and then forgotten about it, as tends to happen with e-books. It was both gripping and darkly funny. By time I had got round to reading it, the deplorable Jackson Lamb and the sorry crew at Slough House were several adventures further on. In the long ago pre-internet past I would have to go to a book shop (remember those?) to look for the next instalment, and I might have had to order it. Or, if I was in low water financially, all too likely in those days, I might instead have gone to the library (an endangered species now). But now it is the work of seconds to buy someone’s whole back catalogue in order to devour them one after another. So in that sense I am a binge-reader, and though it is great to be able to finish one novel and go straight on to find out what happened to the characters next, perhaps something is lost too. There is a pleasure to be had in anticipation and delayed gratification (not to mention the importance of supporting book shops and libraries).

Having said that, if anyone should be tempted to download all Mick Herron’s books – or mine for that matter – please don’t feel you must hold back.

This is a second posting – I don’t know what happened to the first one. It mysteriously disappeared shortly after it appeared on my blog.