What I’m reading Matthew Crawley
Let me be completely honest, I’m someone who buys approximately 50 times more books than I actually read.
I also have a tendency to start about 10 books at once, pitting them against each other for my attention, ultimately finishing around one a year.
Despite my ‘‘prodigal son’’ relationship with books, I still cling to a deluded vision of myself as an avid reader, having once-upon-a-time found my happy place in the essays of Joan Didion (RIP), and loved getting lost in the Southern gothic gloom of Cormac McCarthy.
Lionel Shriver’s eerily prophetic The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 helped prepare me for the apocalypse, while the poetry and lyrics of Leonard Cohen help me avoid the apocalypse altogether.
Of course, I’m a sucker for a musician’s autobiography, with Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run both unexpectedly wonderful reads.
It’s something of a tradition in our relationship for my partner and I to gift each other books as part of our birthday and Christmas love bombs.
Given, of course, with the mutual understanding of the modern malaise, and that they may never actually be read. This year’s Christmas book was easily the best yet; a fascinating account of… a piece of chewing gum (Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis, to be exact).
I make no secret that I’m a huge Nick Cave fan, not only of his musical output, but also his novels, screenplays, and surprisingly personal weekly letters to his fan base.
These days, Cave rarely moves a musical muscle without including his best buddy and creative companion Ellis. Typically, Ellis (not the problematic comic book author with the same name) has stuck to his knitting, leaving Nick to the wordy stuff. With Nina Simone’s Gum, however, it’s clear that Ellis has more strings to his bow than he’s been letting on.
This is, on its surface, the story of one man’s real-life obsession with a piece of his musical idol’s discarded chewing gum.
As the story unfolds, however, we are reminded of the ways in which seemingly humble objects can develop sacred meaning, with this masticated artefact taking the author around the world in unexpected ways.
The good news is I just finished reading my Christmas present, and it’s only February! It’s a book for anyone who carries a secret thimble or a single knucklebone for luck, and I loved it.
Perhaps there is hope for the little lost reader in me yet…