How do you decide a book is worth reading? When do we allow ourselves to abandon a book halfway through?

The questions are an outgrowth of a very late night conversation last Saturday in the ‘Blue Lady’ a bar frequented by yachties swabs and all, near the port of Antibes. We’d just been to a one-man show at a café-theatre in the old town. The discussion over a bottle of rosé, veered from why the stand-up comic had made us laugh – or not, to taste in humour -the best funny films- to Woody Allen and why we should like him or not – to the difference generally speaking - between ‘the film and the book’ to what is it that makes you choose a good book? Our choice is reglemented by media-hype, affirmed an unconditional Woody Allen fan. Marguerite Duras for instance, he went on (Duras keeps popping up in this blog – is she a sort of Gallic couterweight to V Woolf?) who would ever read the minor, more inaccessible novels like ‘Lol V Stein’ if the critics and sale records hadn’t canonised her for landmarks like ‘Le Barrage contre le Pacifique’ and ‘Le Marin de Gibraltar?’

My own answer is reading for me is quintessentially social. It’s like moving in a circle of acquaintances. I turn from one book to another the way I talk to one and then another person in a room. The approach to the ‘conversation’ is based - very egocentrically and banally - on what we have in common. The ‘other’ –the writing - subject matter or author, resembles me in some way. Or has some relation with someone else we both know. Maybe another writer with a similar or totally opposed outlook. Or from the same time period. Or country. When I was living in Paris and read about events there during Algerian war of independence I went looking for Algerian writers. I was half-looking for ideas to flesh out my own experience in France and from growing up on the edge of a sectarian community in northern Ireland. I found Assia Djebar and Yasmina Khadra. Also Rachid or Rahim Memmouni?? Is that the right spelling? Some faces stay in your mind longer than others. All the above writers exposed me to depths and aspects of writing and experience totally outside my personal sphere. In some cases getting to know them was a memorable encounter which I took into myself. (And maybe my personality too - in the way Freud says we are all of us but “precipitates” of what other people leave in us.) However in other cases, I read pages of prose the way you walk past strangers in the street, noting a detail here and there but also uncaring, unnable to relate.

And why should this ambivalence be otherwise? Why are we so mesmerised by the aura of a ‘good book’ – a question which our fellow rosé drinker at the ‘Blue Lady’ was getting at when he spoke of the difficulty of making a personal choice. I don’t allow myself to give up on a book, he said too, with a groan. Is this guilt some sort of genetic memory leftover from the reverence of monotheistic religions for ‘the holy book? As if starting to read is a moral commitment to some sort of integrity. Why the bafflement and dullish self-doubt when we can’t get reaction out of ourselves? Or when an ‘official’ great like Thomas Mann (whose ‘Dr Faustus’ I’ve never been able to read), or a fashionable name like Murakami leaves us cold – I loved ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ but couldn’t get past the first chapter of ‘Kafka sur le Rivage. ’ Following a holiday in Croatia, I read a collection of testimonies from the war in Bosnia which until today has left me unable to read the pre-war classic ‘The Bridge over the Drina’ lent me by a friend from the same part of the world. We don’t want to accept that even the god and goddess writers have their duds. Did anyone out there read Doris Lessing’s ‘Love, again?’ - without cringing? Books that live beyond a feat of wordy distraction have their own time and place. Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ for instance, taken in non-stop stretched out on a sunbed the summer I was fourteen was just right for the sort of adolescent I was in 1978 and certainly marked me for life. Whereas trying to get through Henry James’ ‘Portrait of a Lady’ two summers later was a waste of time. Many more years of the heart were necessary for me to admire the finesse and understanding of those paragraph wending, winding sentences.

Of course, as a sometime fiction writer and lifelong ponderer on how to write a good one, all books are relevant to me. What have they got that I haven’t is what I want to know! Are all readers writers? There’s definitely that spice of jealousy in the company I keep with books. And a real tang of nostalgia too when I step into a bookshop, as if for a place where I used to be happy as I will never be again, in childhood maybe, the new paper smell as strong as the whiff of Proust’s madeleine.

If I may be allowed to digress from the written word – concerning Woody A. I have to say I love the earlier work, where Diane Keaton is young, but then I went off him around the scandal surrounding his affair with his adoptive daughter. All those lovably muttering, humbled self-portrayals of the later films like ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’ feel like so many pleas for titillating sympathy. (In parenthesis the scenarios set in London ring false. Brits don’t sound like the characters in ‘Matchpoint’ – film which the French adore. And they are definitely embarrassingly NOT like the brothers in ‘Cassandra’s Dream’). Of course not liking the films because of the gossip rags drooling over his personal life goes to prove the point above on our ‘manufactured’ choices, mere reflexes of mediatised hype. So how should we allow ourselves to personally censor our reading and other choices? What I mean is how moral should we be in separating a good book from the opinions or lifestyle of the author? Personally I have never been able to get through Céline, to return to the TS Eliot I used to love, or to touch much of Pound because of all of these writers’ anti-semitism. On the other hand I would never vote for these books to be burnt in a public place. How do we estimate the human price of a work of art? I was very impressed in my early twenties and in the depths of a literature degree by Bruno Bettelheim's 'The Informed Heart' where he cites the ravages wrought on the children/family of geniuses. Einstein's unvisited daughter wasting away in her mental home, Joyce's daughter, Beethoven's nephew? Was it worth it? wondered Bettleheim. Couldn't we have swopped the ninth symphony for one person's release from suffering? He was writing in the post-second world war period when thinkers wondered over photos of piled corpses about the connection between art and human rights. Today I like Bettelheim's question but think it has to be left at just that - a question which should never be put aside - and for which the answer is a mystery.

Nevertheless our personal taste is inescapably moral too. Everyone has his or her limits. There are people in the world (my partner included) who were once so steeped in a propaganda system that they read every single line of print as a kind of trick working out its hidden ideology on the reader. Even your enemies influence you, goes a Persian proverb. That’s one extreme. The opposite is that we forget how good writing seduces us into an illusion of universal truth. Soaks the reader in one single human being’s feel of the world and makes us feel this is the whole, the sum total. The despair of Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure,’ or the brilliant jagged anger of Plath’s Esther Greenwood in the ‘Bell Jar’ for instance, the violent erotic pessimism of D.M Thomas in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ or Michel Houllebecq’s ‘Atomised’

Books don't 'hold a mirror up to nature’, as we learned in our annotated school Shakespeare. The bard was just a bit true. The inner ‘world’ of books no matter – and especially - how brilliant it may be – is but a tiny part of the whole. Not a vision just the dazzle in a shard of broken mirror flashing off the sun.

So I nolonger stay to the end with the books I don’t like. I give myself permission to devour, to love a book, to go off it. Hey, whose feelings am I hurting here? To go back to my earlier analogy, if the choice of a book can be compared to how we approach another person, our only ‘moral’ obligation is not to lie to ourselves - at the very least in our heart of hearts – about what we are really feeling as we read.