The project

I have always thought of myself as a book person. Not exactly a bookworm, but certainly an enthusiastic reader. I hang out in second-hand book stores, bring home an armload of books from my weekly visit to the library and always have a little stack by my bed. I love to talk books with my friends and am always on the look out for recommendations and leads to the next must-read.

It has slowly dawned on me, however, that I really don't read a lot of books. The stack by my bed hasn't changed in months and almost all the stuff I get from the library goes back unread, unopened even. The pact with my wife to not buy a new book until I have read the last purchase is spectacularly violated.

How can this be? I know so much about books and authors, I must have read a load of books.

A check of my bookcase reveals the answer. There, amongst the unread novels, is a whole row devoted to books about books. The Modern Library, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (highlighted with all the books my wife has read), The Polysyllabic Spree, Cult Fiction. It is by reading and re-reading these books that I have become an expert far beyond my experience.

The last of these, Cult Fiction by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard, is a particular favourite. The authors written up in Cult Fiction write the kind of fringe, outré stuff I should be reading: Angela Carter, Charles Bukowski, Michael Moorcock, Nathanael West. It is also the sort of book I would like to be written up in if I was an author – though I would have to be a drunkard, pimp or deviant to get in. I dip into this book constantly. I love it. I love seeing how an author's experiences and eccentricities are mirrored in their fiction (as much as I can imagine what their fiction is like). I also love the little tag line each author gets. ("Joris Karl Huysmans: Decadent and unnatural acts" – I'd know what that meant if I had read any Huysmans.)

Flicking through one day I noticed that many of the authors are linked in the "Read On" lists at the end of each entry. It might even be the case that all the authors in the book are linked in a huge web. And that's when the notion of the project struck me.

In order to read more books that I think I will like, I endeavoured to read through Cult Fiction, one book per author, following a trail through the authors by the Read On links wherever that takes me.