This year, as I do most years, I set a goal of books read, and made it a few titles over.
But seriously, who cares? "Books read" lists are akin to notches on a palm tree during your desert island isolation. It marks the time; it's an accomplishment, but a rather arbitrary one.
For starters, "titles read" encompasses longer works, like Nicholas Nickleby, and children's books, like The Value of Believing in Yourself. It does not distinguish between books I did a deep-dive into for the first time (Barry Lyndon; Lauren Brownstone's Enabling Enablement) and those I sailed through for perhaps the thousandth time in my life (The Hobbit; Stephen King's The Dead Zone).
I'm reminded of magician Harry Lorraine's anecdote about the performer who bragged he knew a thousand tricks. "That's marvelous," the skilled professional responded; "I only know five." The implication being, of course, that he actually knows the tricks he performs. Sure, I may have read Zadie Smith's The Fraud, but there's a momentous amount of subtext and nuance that completely escaped me. Did I really read it?
"Can we ever truly reread a book, since we, the reader, are not the same when we come back to it?" Joyce Carol Oates mused in one of her diaries (quoted from memory). No, I don't think we can.
So the number read doesn't really matter; the reading does. And in 2023, I found myself strangely preoccupied with a few topics, and I found myself developing a few habits.
Upon the morning of January 3, for example, I happened to find an online copy of W. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife, and devoured it in one sitting. I've been a pretty big Maugham fan ever since I discovered Of Human Bondage in my twenties, and wound up rereading it once every ten years or so, but honestly, it's not even his best work. Maugham has a wonderful ear for dialogue and domestic conflict, and pairing this play immediately afterwards with L.A. Theaterworks' dramatic performance was an experience. So I wound up repeating the experience monthly: one play, one audio production.
In February, it was Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar. In March, Michael Frayn's Make and Break. (I discovered him when I found out he was married to Claire Tomalin. I found that out when I read her account of Ellen Ternan, which was fantastic.)
April found me devouring Viet Gone by Qui Nguyen; May, however, was a side route with Gore Vidal's The Best Man, a play I've seen live but never actually read.
Then in June, July and August, with the exception of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, I was mostly wallowing in the works of Noel Coward, and by September, with Design for Living under my belt, I lost the play-plus-production habit. All of these titles were free, by the way, either available in the common domain or, in the case of dramatic productions, free for download at the local library.
It's a good way to read this stuff. I recommend it.
The winter did not only lead me towards an immersive audiophile avenue of drama, alas. It was dark and cold; it was mostly just me and the dogs, slugging through the school days. And by sheer chance, I came across Clare Pooley's The Sober Diaries, her online account of giving up drinking and reacclimating herself to an alcohol-free life. Engaging, though not particularly prosy, I was hooked once I found that her deep dive into the subject had unearthed all kinds of revelations about her own life, life in general (why does our culture celebrate the imbibing of poison so readily, anyway?) and the nature of addiction vs. habit. That, in turn, revealed wonderful titles like Kerry Cohen's Lush and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. It also led me to Ron Livingston's Amazon seriesLoudermilk and Judd Apatow's Netflix series Love, all stories involving some kind of addiction and the people in the addict's orbit trying to navigate the waters and figure things out. "We ain't living; we're just trying to survive," as Ben Rogers sings. Utterly fascinating.
In July, for my birthday gift to myself, when I wasn't packing or arranging to move across country, I read and took to heart No Plot? No Problem! by NaNoRiMo founder Chris Baty, and Stephanie Vanderslice's The Geek's Guide to the Writing Life. Those titles, plus the rather chaotic schedule I was keeping at the time, led me to start another novel and get farther than I ever did in my life. It's a comedic horror story about a pandemic that turns the population into zombies; the only way to avoid infection, paradoxically, is to socially congregate. The first draft is a mess, but by God it was fun to write. I inch ever closer to checking "write a crappy novel" off my bucket list. Maybe next year.
Of course, I wallowed in Victorian literature, like I always do; this year I rediscovered W.M. Thackeray, and I'm angling towards Anthony Trollope for next year. Clare Carlisle's The Marriage Question was an intriguing deep dive into George Eliot's marriage with G.H. Lewes, and a much more critical approach than anything I'd read about her relationship before.
But I did stretch my legs and take in some other titles besides. Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling was harrowing; Kimberly Harrington's But You Seemed So Happy is a title a husband trying to do better can only appreciate.
I didn't read as many new titles this year as I'd have liked, but R.F. Kuan's Yellowface, Emma Cline's The Guest, Nathan Hill's Wellness and Annie Abrams' Short Changed were stalwart, challenging, thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding books. Stop reading this. Go read them instead.
Wait, before you go...
How will you read the new year? I always say I'm going to read more outside my comfort zone; I rarely do this as much as I plan. I always say I'm going to abandon Reading for Pleasure so as to Read For Work. I'm going to find the titles that will give me the intellectual equipment necessary to fight the fights that need fighting. The horrors of Gaza. The continual heating of our planet. The war on education. Yes, it's nice that I got to reread Silas Marner but what about boning up on late term capitalism? How about knowing the ins and outs of the electoral process well enough so that, if necessary, I can step up where needed to push for sanity and rationality?
How about reading for others, for the world, instead of just for one's self?
I'll try.
Read on, all. See you next year.
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| They beckon me still... |
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