A Reading Year

As the year changes, many are inclined to look backwards on the previous year and to assess whether or not it has been a ‘good year’. However, for me this last year was the one during which I reached one of life’s recognised milestones – achieving the age of sixty-five, and a deeper reflection seems to be called for.

I have always been a reader and for most of my life I have been an unconscious reader in the sense that the act of reading was far more important than what precisely, I chose to read. Of course, I had been instilled with an aversion to read ‘rubbish’ – my father, as an English teacher, had a very clear idea of what was and wasn’t ‘rubbish’, I however, am slightly less rigid in this view. I have long felt that one must at least sample the rubbish, in order to decide whether it is indeed, worthy of such contempt. I have also been fairly disciplined in my reading, to the extent that once having started reading a book, I do feel an obligation to see it through to the end. I give up on very few books, the graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ is a recent one that proved too much, some I put down temporarily, having been distracted by the prospect of some more instant gratification, only to pick that same book up later and finish it. This year, I finished Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ some forty years or so after having first picked it up.

Over recent years I have settled into the habit of having two books on the go at the same time, usually a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction. In addition I will have one or two books at hand in order to dip into as my mood dictates; poetry or drama, for example, and even a book written in a foreign language. So out of 46 books read completely within the last calendar year, here are seven that I would recommend:

Autobiography: A Journey by Tony Blair
Biography: Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter
Literary Novel: With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Modern Novel: What a Carve Up! By Jonathan Coe
Essay Collection: A Plea for Eros by Siri Hustvedt
Poetry: Frequencies by R S Thomas
History: The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Dehli 1857 by William Dalrymple

I recommend Blair’s autobiography because of both its innovative style and the insight it gives into a very large ego. The biography of Anthony Blunt is well researched and beautifully written. Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword is a rip-roaring historical adventure and deserves a new and more modern translation and a place among the wonderful range of Penguin Classics. What a Carve Up! is a superb satire and extremely funny. Siri Hustvedt is one of the very few American essayists that I consider worth reading. Nobody else writing in English evokes Wales and the Welsh better than R S Thomas. William Dalrymple, as ever, gives us a wonderfully balanced account of a very brutal period of British history.

2010 was a wonderful reading year for me and although I fell short of my target of reading 50 books in the year, I read very little rubbish. Happy New Year and enjoyable reading to all who happen on this blog.