Outa-Spaceman The Obsure, The Art Of Party Conversation And How To Pick Up Girls.

In my youth I would go to parties.
I was never actually officially invited to any of them, I either gate-crashed or hung on to anyone I vaguely knew and drifted in on the tide.
At the time I was anxious to elevate my social standing from the gutter I was born in to the more esoteric world of the chattering classes.
I also wanted to drink for free and meet girls.
I would stand in suburban kitchens enveloped in a fug of exotic smoking mixtures trying to engage in meaningful discourse and meet girls.
Then the conversation I would dread started.
It began with a question.
'Have you read...?'
To save bit of typing here is a list of the possibilities that could be added to the end of that question:

Catcher In The Rye.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Next
Naked Lunch.
Das Capital.
Catch 22.
Zen And The Art Of Motor Cycle Maintenance.
On The Road.
The Female Eunuch.
Under The Volcano.
Anything By Kafka.
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.

At that time my reading, such as it was, consisted of Tip and Mitten, lots of Ladybird books, huge chunks of the King James Bible, the obvious end of George Orwell's work (Animal Farm, 1984), bits of the Iliad I used to read to my Granny and books with titles like 'How To Pick Up Girls'.
At a push I could hold a reasonable conversation on Shakespeare's Macbeth which I'd studied at school and had seen Roman Polanski's film version.

Because I've always been hopeless at lying I would shamefacedly admit to not having read any of the 'possibles' and would then be subjected to patronising didactic monologues from girls I'd tried to pick up.
In the early hours of the morning I would stagger back alone to my squalid bed-sit, dig out my library ticket and wait for the library to open.

I read 'em all.
I also read Voltaire, Proust, Byron, Milton, Blake, De Sade, Ted Hughes, Dickens, Chaucer, The Bronte Sisters and Thomas Hardy.

It was sometime before I managed to get into a suitable party.

The question was asked (Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance on this occasion).
'Yes, I have read that'. I then spoke about some of the revelations I'd had whilst reading the book, I became voluble and expansive, posing questions on some of the aspects of the book I'd found perplexing....
I looked around the silent kitchen, I looked into the eyes of those around me and realised that no one in that room had read that or, any other of the books they had spoken about.

I went into the room where the music was playing.
Someone asked, 'd'you dance?'
'Yeah, I dance'. 'After we've had a dance would you like to come back to my squalid bed-sit?'
'Yeah, cool'.
'BTW, what's y'name?'
'Lilith'.
'Cool'.