My Year in Reading

I wasn't entirely sure what image to use at the top of his blog post to represent a year of reading and blogging. Then I found this beautiful flip book calendar, featuring a tree transformed by the seasons.

Most other book bloggers or book-related websites do some kind of feature on their best reads of the year in December or January, which is the traditional period to neatly tuck away what’s been achieved in order to move on to the year ahead. I love reading this type of list myself, but I find their number is growing exponentially and it’s easy to lose yourself in a deluge of interesting titles. I toyed with the idea of doing it myself over the holidays, but instead I decided to release a list of my years reading now, in the Spring, because it’s during the Spring, last year, that I began Book’s End with a post about book titles. That’s right, Book’s End is one year old.

And what a year it’s been! To be fair, I spent most of it reading for school—although there were pleasant discoveries in that domain as well. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of my time pouring over the short stories of three Irish writers for my undergraduate thesis: Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain. I’m lucky to have chosen writers of such undeniable talent because I can honestly say that not once did I NOT feel like picking up one of their collections to read or reread a certain story. These writers are three masters of the short story form, and their works reveal many truths about human nature. I also very much enjoyed Bowen’s The House in Paris, which I studied in a class on the Uncanny last year. It’s a wonderful between-the-wars novel about displacement and inheritance. 

Thanks cdrummbks on Flickr for the image.

Other school-related discoveries include Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (a stunning, extremely well-wrought reinterpretation of a historical figure), Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (a Canadian masterpiece I had never heard of before), Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (you’ll hear more about these last two modernist novels very soon), Jean-Paul Sartre Les Mots (I thought this book would be dreadful but it turned out to be a bibliomemoir, a genre I’m very fond of), and Toni Morrison’s pitch-perfect Jazz, about Harlem in the 1920s. 

My reading this year was also enriched by my membership to Mr. B’s Year of Reading Delights, which means I got a new handpicked book in the mail every month until February. Because of my otherwise busy reading schedule, I didn’t get a chance to read all of them yet, but among those I did take the time to open, I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, a hilarious, rambunctious Australian novel about a 19th century Tanzanian prisoner on a mission to paint and catalogue specimens of fish from the surrounding waters. This strange novel, which develops level after level of forgery, is also an exhilarating exploration of language.  I look forward to checking out the rest of the novels my bibliotherapist at Mr. B’s sent me, such as Robin Jenkins’ The Cone Gatherers and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers.

In the last twelve months also went from living in Bristol, England (where I’d gone to study abroad for two semesters) to moving back home to Montreal, Canada. I made the dreaded voyage at the end of June, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch provided the transition between my life there and my life here. As I’ve said elsewhere, I planned to finish the novel in Bristol but ended up using it over there as a kind of manual to explore the British countryside, and finished it in Quebec as a way of easing myself into my old, normal life… It was my first time reading Eliot, and as these things go I read it mostly for the interweaving of plot and the descriptions of quaint English country life. It demands rereading in the future. 

As for other books I picked up myself (or that were recommended by G.) during the year, the ones I enjoyed the most tended to be a little bit ludicrous (escapism, anybody?). There was Jocelyne Saucier’s award winning Il pleuvait des oiseaux (It rained birds, as yet untranslated), which I got as a gift at Christmas, about old people falling in love in the woods of Northern Ontario. There was Bulgakov’s thrilling The Master and Margarita, which I read in the train over a trip in Italy that contained way too many hours of transportation. There was Umberto Eco’s brilliant The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac who remembers only everything he’s ever read. These are very different novels, but they are united by their originality and distinctive voices. Here are books that come blazing into your life with their own aesthetics, their own logic. You must accept them on their own terms: that’s what makes for a remarkable reading experience. 

One regret I have about my reading year is that I didn’t get a chance to check out any new publications. Reading books that have been out for a while is a safer choice, but it’s also fun to be able to take part in what everyone’s talking about, like Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning The Sense of and Ending, or Murakami’s 1Q84 or (more recently), Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. There are some books I’m really excited about that will be coming out in the next months, such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (the sequel to Wolf Hall) and a new novel by Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth; hopefully I’ll be more inclined to pick up some reading material from the “hot off the press” pile at my local bookstore. 

School’s almost out, now, and there’s a daunting, exciting (and growing) pile of books on my bedside shelf (I realize I just said I was also looking forward to buying new books that will come out this year—it’s the paradox of my existence). Hopefully I’ll be able to spend the upcoming months with my nose between their pages. 

Reviewing Reviews

In this age of proliferation for both literary prizes and book reviews, it was only a matter of time before a prize would be awarded to the best book reviews of the year. This prize now exists: created by the website Omnivore.com, which recycles culture reviews from newspaper and magazine websites, The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is meant to celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The idea is that, with the decline of newspaper readership in favor of tweets, blogs, and reader reviews on sites like Amazon, the very important job of the true book critic must be honored in some way. The need to praise real, thought-out book reviewing is especially important since newspapers have begun to imitate the web-model themselves in recent years by publishing short, hip book reviews that are more like blurbs or ads than actual content. The truth is, newspapers and magazine should continue offering with pride what anyone with access to the internet can’t do: professional, objective reviews that evaluate books thoroughly, put them into context, and draw comparisons with others works. Because they have the resources, newspapers can provide this kind of in-depth analysis for every review they publish. Then, it’s the reviewers job to keep the standards high and offer something more than a plot summary and a bit of recycled pros and cons. Maybe this prize will help book critics achieve the recognition they deserve

I am becoming increasingly aware of the difference between run of the mill reviews and in-depth, meaty analyses. Often, really good reviews won’t even tell you if the book is bad or good. True reviews are not only there to tell if you should buy the book or not; they’re supposed to draw in material from the outside to help understand how specific books are to be appraised, and then pick at the smallest details to assess their intrinsic qualities. A good example are the amazing pieces over at the New York Review of Books. These are lengthy, in-depth reviews of books that are really essays about the books and the authors who wrote them. Recent excellent examples are the review of Joan Didion’s latest memoir Blue Nights and the phenomenal essay Julian Barnes wrote on Joyce Carol Oates’ own memoir A Widow’s Story.

It’s unfair, however, to say that you can’t get good content on social media. Sometimes, they do provide close contact with really brilliant literary thinkers. I’m thinking of people like Charles May, who, for quite some time now (by internet standards), has been producing consistently  insightful work on his blog, Reading the Short Story. May is an academic who has specialized on the form of the short story; his blog is a collection of his thoughts about books, reviews of contemporary and older short stories, and responses to comments and questions about the form. It’s a very interesting project, and a trustworthy source about authors and books who are worth reading; nowhere else on the internet will you find a lengthy review of a single short story by Alice Munro. 

Among the nominees for the Hatchet Job of the Year (see the shortlist here) are the wonderful classicist Mary Beard, for a Guardian review of Rome, by Robert Hughes, in which she spotted dozens of unacceptable and frustrating mistakes in the chapters about the city’s ancient history (high school level stuff, like confusing CE and BCE, apparently). Mary Beard has declared on her blog that she is not expecting to win the prize. For her, the review she wrote on Hughe’s book was simply part of her job. Reviewers, she writes, should act as “gate-keepers”, lest a book’s success depend entirely on “the size of its publicity budget and the enthusiasm of its publishers’ tweets”. In fact, Mary Beard is a little bit alarmed, because she fears that her review of the book may have been lauded above all others because these other reviewers may have either omitted to mention the erroneous material, or else failed to see it entirely—two “ghastly” prospects. Words of wisdom from a truly admirable woman (as a side note, I saw Mary Beard host the “ancient booker” event at the Cheltenham literary festival last year—she was great). If she wins, she will have gotten herself a year’s supply of potted shrimp. 

Reading with Intent

Reading with purpose? Don't just pick up any old book; you've got to choose it carefully.

While it is true that I always know what book I’m going to read next (as if having some kind of hole between books could open up a chasm of non-reading out of which I could never emerge), my choice of books has generally been whimsical. Except for school books, I read what I like, what I think will interest me, what I expect will be good for me, and what trusted friends or reviews recommend. However, I always admire readers who read book with intent, according to some kind of plan, which they set up for themselves and follow carefully, sometimes in the hope that some kind of literary (or other) illumination will ensue. These long-term literary cures seem to be all the rave these days, and countless blogs detail the lives of readers as they lumber through lists of must-read books or calculate the average number of pages per hour (reminding me of A. J. “The Know-It-All” Jacobs, who spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica) in order to… well what exactly? Why would you read according to a plan? In order to learn something about yourself by implementing restrictions on what books you read? In an effort to gain sovereignty over your reading habits by setting your own limits? So that you are forced to read stuff you know you should but never get around to? Let’s take a look at a few people who read or have read by design, and see what they’ve gotten out of the experience.

The first type of intentional reading I encountered was Susan Hill’s memoir Howard’s End is on the Landing, in which the author recounts her year of reading “from home” (you can read the introduction here). Hill explains that she has a country home full of books, many of which she hasn’t read, while she has always wanted to reread many others. The solution: Hill locked herself up in her dusty old home for a year and read, refusing to buy new books and minimizing her use of the internet during that time, as a way to get to know her library again, “to repossess [her] books, to explore what [she] had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map [her] house of many volumes”. The idea is interesting, but the memoir she wrote as a result — although I was a very excited about it at first — turned out to be rather uninteresting. Indeed, Hill’s perusing of her bookshelves is a way to recall her past, and to revel in some poorly dissimulated name dropping. The book could by a bibliophile’s dream, a charming account of the pleasures of reading and rereading; it turns out to be the wild fancy of a frustrated old English lady with something to prove. I’m being harsh, but then, I’ve had something against Susan Hill every since her unnecessary rant from last year about being asked to display a short story she wrote anonymously beside stories by other writers, some of them — God forbid! — amateurs.

At least the cover is nice.

On a more human (and certainly less self-indulgent) note, last week saw the long-awaited publication of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch. As a way to recover from her sister’s death, Sankovitch, after three hectic years, decided to stop and sit and read — one book a day for a year. She is living proof that bibliotherapy works, that there is something fundamentally human and helpful in literature. For Sankovitch, turning to reading allowed her to slow down, to pace her life and find a new center, and, in her own words, “not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it.” The phenomenon of intentional reading is also greatly aided by the internet, whose new platforms urges people to constantly update, to always keep everyone out there posted. Nina Sankovitch therefore decided to blog about her year of reading, writing a review for all 365 of them on her website Read All Day. She’s also very active on Twitter and now writes book reviews for The Huffington Post. I haven’t read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair yet, but it sounds very promising, and since I’m incapable of not getting books about books I will no doubt be reading it soon.

Sankovitch's highly praised grief memoir cum reading diary.

The final reader I wanted to talk about is a recent discovery of mine; I found out about her blog by seeing a picture of her library on a “my bookshelves” picture group on Flickr. This picture immediately caught my attention (and the attention of many other bookshelf-savvy commenters) as, with its rows and rows of glistening, faded penguin covers (orange, blue, green, and the unifying beige stripes), this woman’s bookcase is simply stunning. Her blog is called A Penguin a week, her goal is to collect all 3,000 penguin titles published before 1970 (they’re numbered from 1-3,000, which facilitates the collecting part) and to read and review one of the books each week (she now owns about 1,500 of them). The rationale behind the project is that the only interest nowadays in these old penguin titles is purely aesthetic, for the book design and the history of publishing paperbacks, and while many of these titles are certainly good books, they remain unread because many of them aren’t in print anymore. The blog seeks to give these books a new life and rediscover a number of long-lost, really good books — saving them from the abyss of time. It’s a highly intriguing, laudable project.

Ample proof that books do, indeed, furnish a room (or two).

At the heart of all these purposeful readings is an urge to discover, or rediscover, something that was lost — either in the reader or in what is being read. Perhaps the intentional reader feels that his or her relationship with books has become too whimsical and fleeting. You read a book, and then you put the book down and read another one. For all the time and energy you spent reading and thinking about the first book, once you’ve turned the last page, you move on quickly to something else. What remains? In truth, very little. Perhaps giving a purpose to one’s readings is a way to fit all the books one reads within something more vast, and more lasting. It’s a way to implement order upon the act of reading, a way to keep track and leave traces. As for the blogs and memoirs that emerge from these (apparently life changing) reading experiences, they are definitely a way to break the boundary of solitude which usually rules upon the act of reading; it’s a way of reaching out to the community of readers. That, maybe, is the wider purpose of these journeys: to communicate and instigate more widely an interest in books.