John Crace: I was an innocent
Nobody could ever have claimed the mobile library that parked up for an hour or so each week in our Wiltshire village was well stocked. But then it didn’t need to be. The librarian knew her clientele. If I had been an intellectually precocious teenager, I dare say she would have filled the shelves with the great works of Dickens and Orwell. If I had been as sexually precocious as Haruki Murakami, she’d have probably laid on a copy of Belle de Jour.
But I was neither. I was an intellectual and sexual innocent, so she filled the shelves with the works of Captain WE Johns. I couldn’t have been happier. Week in, week out, I went through two or three Biggles books. I followed Captain James Bigglesworth through the first world war, through the interwar years, during which he established himself as a pilot for hire, through the second war in which he took on the Nazis, and on to a long and fulfilling postwar career as a professional adventurer.
Never once did I stop to wonder how Biggles could carry on behaving as if he was in his 20s when he must have been in his late 50s or early 60s. Never once did I suspect there might be a homoerotic undertone to the relationships between Biggles, Ginger, Bertie and Algy. And I certainly never stopped to wonder if I was too old to be reading this stuff. From time to time, though – particularly when reading Biggles in the Baltic, in which the heroic quartet had taken out most of the German navy, half the Luftwaffe and several troop trains inside a week – I did find it a little odd that it had taken Britain so long to win the war. So I can’t have been that stupid.
Lola Okolosie: my embarrassed furtiveness was pointless
Before Fifty Shades of Grey (which I haven’t felt the need to read) all a horny adolescent girl had for titillation was Mills and Boon – God love them. When it comes to erotica, some friends swear that Jilly Cooper was what got them through a burgeoning sexuality, but the weight of those tomes put me right off. Mills and Boon were fairly quick reads, which made them, in my teenage reasoning, by far the most inconspicuous choice. Now, though, it’s probably fair to say the good librarians at Bradford central library had some idea as to why my Rosa Guy novels were sometimes accompanied with titles like Dark Obsession.
Where these novels were concerned, I purposely chose a book by its cover. Some were far too suggestive of sex to leave lying around the home. That was too risky. I’d go for innocuous Technicolor scenes with the hero and heroine on the cusp of a kiss à la Bollywood love scenes. Sure, anyone looking could tell it was a romance but, my thinking went, they’d probably never guess at exchanges about cunnilingus in which the hero “darkly” tells our heroine, “There are other places to kiss” and she begins to feel “waves of ecstasy”.
In the end, my embarrassed furtiveness was pretty pointless: every two seconds someone on this planet is buying a Mills and Boon. The stealthy subterfuge was a complete delusion. Similarly, what’s the point in splitting what you read into books that make you look good and lowly works that you think are made for dunces? Literature is still literature. If nothing else, a truly awful novel helps you form a critical judgment, when it’s not making you howl with laughter that is.
Fay Schopen: I borrowed Hotel du Lac to show off
The leaked reading habits of the teenage Haruki Murakami may have Japanese librarians in a tizzy about privacy, but I’m not convinced the author has much to be embarrassed about. Borrowing a three-volume work by Joseph Kessel from his high school library sounds pretty classy, even if Kessel’s Belle de Jour is a novel about a young housewife who finds sexual satisfaction by becoming a prostitute. It’s sexy, sure, but French, so intellectual too.
I don’t think there was a copy of Belle de Jour in my school library. It was a convent school and sexy books, French or otherwise, were thin on the ground. I clearly remember borrowing Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, however. I can vividly recall the blue cover, showing an empty, windswept balcony, and the exact position of the book on the shelf. I have no recollection of ever reading it, though, as I was simply borrowing it to show off. The New Statesman called it “pretentious”. Perfect! Maybe Murakami was showing off too? Although given that he is a fantastically successful and talented author and I am eating cold pizza in my pyjamas, he probably wasn’t. I checked out reams of pretentious books from my school library (some of which I still have in my possession. Er, sorry, Sister Monica) before going home and thumbing through my copy of Forever or The Thornbirds for the 97th time.
Now that I am fully comfortable in the embrace of my own lowbrow tastes, the library is no longer a place to show off. Last week I bought a book from a pile they were selling off called Best Lesbian Romance 2013 (20p). As I paid, I became worried that the librarian might think I was trying to hide it and think that I was ashamed, or a homophobe, so I waved it manically around while saying loudly, “This one, I’ll take this one!” Now that’s embarrassing library behaviour for you. I also feel a bit bad about not having read the Booker-winning Hotel du Lac. I looked up the plot online and it sounds pretty great. I might have to pop down to the library and borrow it.
