RMSYL 27: Tender Is The Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald (read by Wayne Gooderham)

I’m always impressed by Big Readers. Not as in girth, though that’s impressive too. No, I’m talking about those people who devour books the ways you and I fritter away time on social media sites for example [insert semi-ironic winking smiley].

Wayne Gooderham is my current object of BR-envy.

Wayne has a website called Three Score & Ten in which for the last couple of years he has presented the whole time-honoured lifespan through extracts from published works of fiction. Starting from birth, ending in death, every year of our lives exemplified by a male and female literary character caught, if not forever encapsulated, in the pages of the books in which he finds them.

To complete this project Wayne read a lot of novels, a lot of novels. So when we were thinking of doing a RMSYL together and I suggested we go for a book and a character pegged to his current age, he immediately suggested Thomas Buddenbrook (38).

I said “Great!”, he said, “Just give me a couple of days to re-read it.”

A couple of days for a 732 page bildungsroman? It takes me longer just to get through the Sunday papers.

But true to his word, back came Gooderham a week later with the news that after finishing the much-anticipated, spanking new John E. Woods’ translation which he’d purchased specifically for our session, he had realised that TB isn’t 38 at all in the novel, that in fact it’s Dick Diver who’s his annuated counterpart.

So let me revise my initial claim. There’s one thing even better than a Big Reader, and that is a Reassuringly Scatty BR (RSBR).

Now scatty I can do.

[Intro tune: Latché Swing]

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