Colm O'Regan: Classic books and classic failures - my bookshelves tell a tale of naive ambition
Classic books on a shelf - where, much like in Colm O'Regan's house, they might stay in place
Even now they mock me. Sitting on the shelf. Pristine. Their spines are unbroken. The pages, apart from the first few in each, are unleafed. They will likely remain safe from the battering that hits the Inspector Rebus, Terry Pratchett and Ken Follett page-turners that surround them.
Books that have stains and grains of sand in them. Or wrinkled from the time they went into the bag with the swimming gear and had to be hung out.
The classics however are immaculate. Ulysses, Moby Dick, Finnegan’s Wake, Tristram Shandy and others with orange backs.
I tried. 10 pages of Ulysses per day and 1 page of Finnegan’s Wake was the quota. I was doing fine for a while. Stately Buck Mulligan and Stephen bantering in a tower, there’s a mention of a fried breakfast with thickly cut bread.
Soon it all started to unravel and as it got more difficult and when my phone tapped me on the shoulder and told me that someone on LinkedIn was excited about joining a new team, the spell was broken. (I recently came back to it, reading a bit for Bloomsday but crucially I started much nearer the end. That might be the secret for those who struggle.)
As for Finnegan’s Wake, with an introduction by an eminent scholar that admits the book is “unreadable”, I lasted precisely four pages. Once again I was fooling myself.
Classics books were brought in as part of a project called ‘Read The Classics’. The RTC project was a submodule of the overall Be Smarter (BS) Programme which was itself a key plank in the Horizon 2030: Towards Better Colm (TBC) campaign. TBC was unveiled amid much fanfare in a pub some night. At this stage however there is an Oireachtas Inquiry about how the money was spent.
It’s not the first enterprise to suffer this fate. There are a plethora of slow-moving, stationary and abandoned activities that litter my life like derelict houses in our city centres.
Also on the bookshelves are a few Learn A Foreign Language books. In my single days this was seen as ‘advantageous’ in the cut-throat world of talking any oul' shite to fordin' wimmin' in nightclubs.
I decided to take some classes. Eight classes. By the end of which I could have confidently told any woman straining to hear over the sound of “Murder on the Dancefloor” that my hobbies included among other things “skiing and talking with my friends” but little else.
The reminders of discontinued projects now – the eVoting Machines of my existence – are often electronic. My computer is an attic of discarded hobbies and promises. There are documents entitled “WriteAJokeADay” and “WhatIveLearnedFromWikipedia”.
There is the calendar reminder every month on Google to tell me to do my accounts. I have chosen to interpret this as “Find a bigger drawer to stuff all the receipts”. An alarm on my phone goes off with a message that says “Exercise”. I do exercise: my right to press the snooze button.
I’ve had to unsubscribe from a number of personal improvement newsletters including even financial ones which I thought would be key in helping turn myself into a high-flying day trader who lounged around all day moving millions while wearing expensive shoes and no socks.
Dusty emails from 10 years ago reveal LivingSocial coupon deals. After a year of offers, I realised I didn’t want to improve myself with 10 Gym Passes, 4 Yoga Classes, An Oven Deep Clean, A Photography Course, A Flying Lesson, A Yon-Ka Hydralessence Facial, or ChiBall Method session (whatever that was).
There are apparently many books about forming and keeping habits so there won’t be as much clutter and disappointment around the house. I know because I have some of those books.
And they are in great condition. Like new.
