More Books Than I'll Ever Read #2: Our Country's Good

I've suddenly realised now that I've decided to share with you, and upload a photo of, every book I own, along with an admission as to whether I've actually read it or not, I'm going to out myself as something of a fraud. Or, at the very least, an idiot. You see, I'm not sure that I've read enough 'important' books.

Whatever 'important' means. I'm not even sure I've read more than a couple of Dickens. Perhaps that's why I'm doing this; to embarrass myself into finally reading that copy of Wuthering Heights that's been sitting in my bathroom for the last few months. As opposed to the copy of Calvin And Hobbes that's on top of it.

Today's book, however, I have actually read. By coincidence, like the first book I uploaded, it's a play, but this time, it's a play I was in, as opposed to directing. This would be at least fifteen years ago now, and I was playing Wisehammer, a failed writer who was mournfully in love with a woman he had no chance of succeeding with. That's worth mentioning, since it's a role I seem to have found myself cast in with alarming regularity in recent years. It's probably best not to focus too much on the whys and wherefores.

This copy isn't the one I used in that original production, back with CYTO (that's the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation to its friends, and I won't go into too much detail about it right now, since I'm fairly confident we'll get the chance to do that before too long).

I picked up this copy of OCG in a charity shop in Hove a couple of years ago, because I genuinely liked the play, and it has a number of good scenes in it. At the time, I hadn't acted for a while; I had completed a BA in Theatre, and that had almost entirely extinguished any desire to perform, and any belief that I was in any way talented.

However, I had heard that the NVT (the New Venture Theatre, and, again, we'll get into the details at a later date) were producing Our Country's Good, and I felt that I might have something of a head start on finding a character, having played it (albeit possibly weakly) years before.

In the event, however, I didn't really have the courage to audition, and so delayed my joining of the NVT by a couple of years (that theatre degree had really damaged my acting mojo) but what I did notice is how many really great parts there are, even the walk on, growl, and leave ones. Each character is written with such wit and economy that you'd be happy to play a part of just five lines. Each character seems real, and breathing. As a (always delaying) writer, it's a master class in how to create rich characters in just a few short strokes.

It's a good lesson to learn, no matter what type of story teller you are: writer, director, deviser (and I've had varying degrees of success as all three). In short, as many How To Write books - and a character in 'Spaced' - will tell you: "Skip to the end."

So I will.

More Books Than I'll Ever Read #1: Medea

In the last month or so, I've had to buy about three more bookcases. Almost an entire wall of a not unsizeable room in my flat is now covered with heavily stacked book shelves.

I've lost count of exactly how many books I have, although I will concede that there might be a few doubles there. What is now very likely is that I own more books than I will ever have the chance to read before I die, even of one of those books has within its pages the secret of time travel and enables me to keep jumping back a few years to keep up to date. However, over the next number of .... days? Months? Years? .... I am going to attempt to upload a photo of each book I own, tell a story behind it, and, of course, an admission as to whether I've read it or not, and why. So, clearly, I'm not only a hoarder, but someone who feels the need to clutter up the Internet with my clutter.

This first book, Medea, I have actually read. Not only that, I've read it several times, and made loads of notes over it. This is because I'm directing it for the NVT Brighton in June.

It's a good translaton, by Tom Paulin (of Late Review), and the cast seem to be having fun with it. The inside pages are all scrawled over with lots of notes and ideas that presumably made some sense to me at some point. What's particularly fun is how often I've scrawled a question mark at random moments in the text.

However, as this is my first entry on the subject of books (and those ones I'll never read) I feel I should point out that I don't normally write in my books. For play scripts, it's fairly expected (you can now guess the date of a script mainly due to the absence of a highlighter marker), but with most other books, with the exception of text books, I suppose, it's considered something of a no-no. Presumably it's looked upon as some kind of graffiti. However, there have been times when I've picked up a second hand copy of something or other, only to discover that someone before me has doodled notes in the margins.

It's almost always pleasantly conversational, and has led me to muse that had I ever met the person who had made the notes, we would have probably gotten on quite well (it's clear that we have at least had similar taste in books).

If books are a form of telepathy, with the writer speaking across time and space to the reader, then the notes in the margin are the chatty friend who always has something to say.