My Reading Life: Bob Carr
Penguin $35
******
A haughty intellectual could prematurely dismiss this 400-page one-man book club, especially by beginning with the back cover, which promotes My Reading Life as "a personal investigation into the nature of democracy, dictatorship, decency, and the hardwired human condition." Mercifully, it isn't. A more accurate title might be Uncle Bob's Best Bits for Boys and Girls of All Ages, or Carr's Bumper Book of Blurbs. His favourite novels, histories and plays are given around half a page each, with a summary, a quotation, and occasionally the number of times he has read it (mostly between zero and two). He sometimes even recommends a frequency of rereading: every 15 to 20 years for Tomasi's The Leopard, for example. Better put that in your calendar so you don't forget.
With excerpts exceeding in total the length of many of the novels it recommends, this superbly indexed book is vulnerable to the criticism famously attributed to Dr Johnson: parts are good and original, but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good. But Carr doesn't pretend to original scholarship or hope to be consulted by anyone who has just reread Proust: his target is someone pondering the leap from the newsstand to the bookshop, wondering which of the Penguin classics stands the best chance of completion. He aims to place a "comforting arm" on the novice's shoulder: "Now Tolstoy isn't that hard. Persist with the Russian names in the first 50 pages. Remember that there are two key characters, Andrey and Pierre." Easily ridiculed, yes, but if it gets a few extra teenagers to page 51, it earns its royalties.
Even the well-read, who may find Carr's highlighter-happy arm more condescending than comforting (and the rampant italics indicating his "loving emphases" more irritating than enlightening), will still discover many magnificent quotations and a few titles to add to their list. Some parts are both original and good, such as the chapter on "Labor in the Modern World".
He's a shameless fan of brand names like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Harold Bloom - as his outgoing mail shows. NSW voters may wonder whether their state could have been better run in the decade 1995-2005 if the premier wasn't indulging in correspondence and conversations with so many great names. But they shouldn't begrudge a former Minister for the Arts his day in print: My Reading Life is the kind of personal literary survey that every book lover should write.