I fear I’ve missed out after years of speed reading - Ian McMillan

At the top of the page was a thrilling (to me then, and still to me now) title that said, in bold capitals: BOOKS I MUST READ, READ I MUST and don’t ask me why I did that strange linguistic leap frog and double turn. Forgive me: I was fourteen.

I began to type, slowly and carefully because I’d run out of Tippex and I really didn’t want to start again. The list of books I must read, read I must, was getting longer and long and I’d only been doing the list making for a few weeks.

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Beside me on the table was a copy of a long-forgotten magazine called Books and Bookmen that I’d persuaded my parents to subscribe to for me, which they did because they knew I liked reading books or, to be more precise, they knew I liked reading about books and I liked making lists of the books I wanted to read.

I can still recall the first two books on the list: one was a novel called Molloy by the great playwright Samuel Beckett, and one was a novel called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by an almost forgotten writer called Angus Wilson who is well worth rediscovering.

I remember reading those two, borrowing one from the library and buying the other with a book token I’d got for the birthday but even as I was reading those books I was reading my Books and Bookmen and extending my typed list which meant that even at that tender age I was experiencing the phenomenon, as far as books were concerned, that we’ve come to know in the internet age as FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out.

Fear Of Missing Out means just that: if I read that book, then I won’t have time to read that book, or if I read that book then I won’t have time to watch that film or visit that museum or go to that concert. Somehow the abundance (even in these tight and turbulent times) of cultural offers makes us anxious when it should make us happy.

I don’t have my READ I MUST list any more, or at least in a formal and typewritten sense and Books and Bookmen is long gone, but if I flick through the notebook I scribble in all the time I can see book titles that I want to read, notices of films I want to see and when they’re screened, jottings about string quartet concerts on the radio that I want to listen to.

If I go far enough in the notebook I can see that I’ve not read/seen/listened to most of them. I’ve missed out, despite my FOMO.

So maybe, just maybe, the making of the list has been enough for me. It’s like when I used to (and this shows how old I am) tape films from the TV and by the act of taping them it somehow seemed that I’d watched them. After a while I’d just delete them unwatched.

Anyway, time to go. I’ve got some books not to read and some concerts not to hear. Can’t be missing out!