Andy Miller's 12-month-long immersion in the classics renewed his zest for life – and produced an inimitable memoir
Andy Miller's devotion to the classics 'turns out to be triumphantly justified'. Photograph: Keith Morris/Alamy
Believers used to put their trust in a single, sacred Good Book, some of it thought to have been personally dictated by God. More recently, American universities based their curriculum on a set of so-called great books that were calculated to transmit all the life lessons needed by graduates who were predestined to run the country and the world.
This written store of knowledge is now under threat from an audio-visual mayhem, a blitz of images combined with a sonic din, all electronically transmitted. Books, clumsy bundles of paper and glue, are said to be a doomed technology. So when Andy Miller decided to spend a year catching up with some literary classics he felt he ought to have read, he undertook a quaintly retrograde mission. He was retrieving a personal past, a time when, with no job or family to distract him, he could lose himself in the imaginary worlds conjured up by words; he was also reverting to a remoter cultural past, an era when books were honoured as coffers that contained, as Milton said, the precious lifeblood of the master spirits who wrote them.
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