The Ghost of Thomas Kempe: can you top it?
According to a story in G2 yesterday, Andrew Marr claims to have read War and Peace "at least" 15 - yes, 15 - times. One wonders how he managed to hold down what must have been a fairly demanding job as the Beeb's political editor, but that is really between him and the director general.
In the spirit of investigation, Tanya Gold rang around the literary great and good to find out whether Marr was alone in his smugness, and discovered that his closest challengers were AS Byatt (five times) and Orlando Figes (four), with a clutch of twos and ones trailing along behind.
The issues of trust and believability which the survey naturally threw up led us up here in GU Towers to invent on the spot a new version of Humiliation, David Lodge's game from Changing Places, in which players name classics that they haven't read (Lodge himself, funnily enough, owns up to War and Peace).
So our game is as follows: never mind War and Peace, which is the most embarrassing book you'll own up to having read time and again? I'll kick off with two: The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (first read to me by my father when I was eight or so, now my official comfort book) and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively (latest rereading took place last Sunday in the teeth of a vicious, birthday-induced hangover. I should point out that I am in no way denigrating this book, which I firmly believe to be one of the best ever written. Strictly speaking, however, it was written for children).
What about you?
