The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street,

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      This Fourth Estate paperback edition published in 2015

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

      Copyright © Andy Miller 2014

      Cover design © Leo Nickolls

      The Andy Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      No surrender to the LRB.

      Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at

       www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

      Source ISBN: 9780007255764

      Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007375257

      Version: 2015-02-10

       Dedication

      For Alex, love Dad

WARNING!

      ‘I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.’

      Homer, The Odyssey

      ‘What’s the point of going out? We’re just going to wind up back here anyway.’

      Homer Simpson

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

       Epigraph

A Word of Explanation

I

Book One

Book Two

Books Three to Five

Book Six

       Books Seven to Nine

       Book Ten

       Book Eleven

       Books Twelve and Thirteen

       II

       III

       Books 28, 29 and 31

       Books 41 and 42

       Book 45

       Books 49 and 50

       Epilogue

       Notes for Reading Groups

       Exclusive Excerpts from the Blog of ‘Leonard Bast’

       Appendix One: The List of Betterment

       Appendix Two: The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most

       Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read

       Bibliography

       List of Illustrations

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       A Word of Explanation

      Let me begin on the back foot and linger there awhile.

      This book is entitled The Year of Reading Dangerously. It is the true story of the year I spent reading some of the greatest and most famous books in the world, and two by Dan Brown. I am proud of what I achieved in that year and how the experience changed my life – really altered its course – which is why I am about to spend several hundred pages telling you about it. However, the book you are holding has not always been called The Year of Reading Dangerously. I started out with that title but then had second thoughts. For a while The Miller’s Tales seemed like it might work. After that, I briefly considered Up! From Sloth, then The Body in the Library. Other possibilities included Hunting Paper Tigers, Real Men Don’t Read Books, Memoirs of a Born-again