As a reader I know what I like
and make no pretentions to liking a certain book just because it is a book that
I ‘should’ read. My bookshelves are lined with autobiography, biography, and
reference books relating to my three big loves of music, comedy, and radio.
Fiction doesn’t really play a part in my reading habits apart from a few exceptions.
As a writer I have never written fiction, not properly anyway. At the moment I
am almost finished writing the book inspired by David Bowie that I mentioned
before Christmas, and in storage there sleeps an unfinished book that I started
about the fictional life of The Muppets and where it all went wrong for them.
Maybe one day I’ll dig it out and release it on Kindle for a few quid, although
I’d have to check if it’s good enough first. There’s only one work of fiction
that I have made a point of reading from the first book to the last, and that
is the Adrian Mole diaries.
When I first read The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 133/4 I
was a bit too young to fully understand a lot of it, but going back to it a few
years later I found the humour in references that had gone over my head on
first read. Although parts of it have dated it still holds up as a document of
recent history; Royal weddings, governments, new laws, although due to Mole’s
affected intellectualism there are very few pop culture references besides his
love of Abba, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ being one of his favourite songs (played on
the day Freddie Mercury died), and in later years his children and family drew
him into trash television with passing mentions to Big Brother,
Jeremy Clarkson, and other such things that he professed to despise.
Although Adrian Mole was a few
years older than I was, I found in him a fictional character that I could
relate to; misunderstood, unappreciated, and with a frustrated career as a
writer bursting to get out. Up until recently my failures outweighed my
successes, and with three books and three different radio shows on my CV I can
finally say that I have overtaken Adrian Mole on the career ladder.
The last book, The Prostrate Years, covered Adrian’s discovery that he has
prostate cancer and his subsequent treatment. As always the book ends on an optimistic
note, but the sad thing is that now we will never know how the story ends. I
always imagined that the chronicle of this man’s life would always be there,
but I was wrong. Unless we discover that Sue Townsend had unpublished work
ready to go, Adrian Mole is now frozen in time.
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