Which book have you read more than any other?
At first, I thought this would be easy. Then I realised that, outside school and university, I rarely read a book twice. There are simply too many books waiting to be read and too little time left to read them all.
I also have to disqualify dictionaries and reference books. Otherwise, my battered old Chambers English Dictionary would win outright, closely followed by Roget’s Thesaurus. There was a period when I seemed unable to write a sentence without consulting one or the other.
As for fiction, no novel has ever become my personal Bible. I have loved plenty of books, but never enough to read them over and over again. Once I know who did it, who married whom, or who gets eaten by the shark, the mystery has largely gone. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love I read then dipped into as a teen – I reread it recently fifty years on to amuse myself. The teen pleasure had muted.
So what book have I actually read more than any other?
To my eternal embarrassment, the answer is probably Shere Hite’s The Hite Report.
In my defence, I was a teenager.
For those too young to remember, this was not a book so much as a cultural earthquake. Here, at last, was a detailed account of what women thought, felt, wanted, disliked, enjoyed, and wished men knew about sex and the female body. To a generation of boys who had received their sex education from playground rumours, awkward biology lessons, and the scrutiny of adult mags it was treated with religious reverence. I bought and gave away more than one copy to fellow enthusiasts.
My friends (female) and I pored over it like medieval monks studying sacred texts. We discussed passages. We debated findings. We cross-referenced evidence. We probably devoted more intellectual energy to analysing The Hite Report than we did to our A-levels.
I suspect I read parts of it dozens of times. It certainly received far more attention than any Shakespeare play I was supposed to be studying.
Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Emmanuel have received similar scrutiny. You can see the pattern.
What Colors My Parachute? The careers support book was read and re-read multiple times as an aid. More will come to me as I dwell on it and scan my shelves.
Timing is everything.
Nowadays, the books showing the most wear are very different. A guide to trees and fungi gets frequent use. My swimming coaching manuals are dog-eared and covered in notes. The thing is, I know how to devour a book when I want to. A got through Ken Follett’s latest ik just two days!
So the trajectory of my reading life seems clear enough.
At sixteen, I was desperately trying to understand girls.
At sixty-four, I am trying to identify bracket fungi, improve a twelve-year-old’s tumble turn and save the world from climate change.
Whether this represents progress remains open to debate. Fifteen years I was reading most books on a Kindle; five years ago I came back to print in a big way. It’s a different read, and you can pass on a book.
Perhaps the real lesson is that we never stop looking for answers; only the questions change. And having spent a decade using Google I am now glued to ChatGPT for answers to everything.
Of course, the book I will have read the most, should it get published, is the one I’ve been writing for the last 18 months.
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