At Least I'm Not Listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber...

I admit it. I’m a whore for pretentious and lofty reads. I want to work my way through the entire English canon; the French; the American; hell, the best works of Uzbekistan. I take Proust on holiday with me, or Salinger, or CAPS-eschewing e.e cummings. If I carry chicklit with me to some destination, it’s hidden away for a crafty read on some secluded beach.

The French, as they are wont to do, have a term for it where English doesn’t: livre de chevet. It means a book that says something—most often very flattering—about you. A new poll from The Guardian revealed that a huge portion of younger people who bought Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children did so because it Made Them Look Intelekshool on the plane. A much smaller portion professed to having finished said book, if they started it at all.

Sure, I suppose I’ve been guilty of it in the past. It’s why Don Quixote sits unfinished on my shelf, why though I can’t stand The Wind in the Willows, I won’t give the book away, either.

When it comes to Che Guevara, it’s like the complete antithesis of livre de chevet. I purposefully avoid anything to do with him, as much as I respect the man. It’s simply this: I saw his posters adorning the walls of my fellow students at university, to whom he meant little or nothing, but hey… the red and black looked cool in the dorms. His face adorns everything from cigarette lighters to British flags(!) in tourist shops to T-shirts emblazoned with the legend ‘Cli-che”

I don’t know quite why I picked up a copy of The Motorcycle Diaries in a shop on Sunday, though it may have been because it was all of £2.50. I determined to read it after the Diana Wynne Jones book wig_maker has lent me, but I cracked it open tonight for a gander and now I’m halfway through, loving the evocation of South America and the excitement of the road trip, and what these times travelling might have meant to Guevara and his perceptions of South America. I love the little musings:

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

And:

You will die with your fist clenched and your jaw tense, the perfect manifestation of hatred and struggle, because you aren’t a symbol (some inanimate example), you are an authentic member of the society to be destroyed […] you are as useful as I am, but you don’t realise how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.

Guevara hasn’t thus far said anything that surprises me in this book; often, the echoes of the thoughts of other writers and other people I have known are present in the ink splattered on the page, but he does that crystallising thing well, and the familiar red-and-black motif becomes less two-dimensional as I plough through the book.

Also, in a Babe-esque moment, mice sing. You couldn't make it up.