Notes From a Year of Reading 2023
The final book blog post of 2023. I am aware that I did not even write one for the last book I read, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, nor am I likely to write one for the Hemingway short stories I'm reading now.
I set out to discover what the Western literary canon is like. And the answer is, it's a mixed bag.
There are some authors I just do not enjoy. Virginia Woolf is one. I hated Mrs Dalloway in school and I still hate her style today in A Room of One's Own. Muriel Spark was annoying, too. Then there are the books that are classics only if you're in your teens or early 20s - Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby - I tried reading them and gave up.
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But those were the duds. The good stuff:
1. Jane Austen: My favourite of hers is Emma, followed by Pride and Prejudice. But I'm glad I read all 6 novels. Really, I think all the Jane Austen books should be read together as a document of her particular epoch (time and class). Her books are fun and frothy, yet you can (if you so desire) read deeper into them.
2. Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a good short story, but it's nothing compared to Robert Louis Stevenson's sublime travelogues. I think my favourite was The Amateur Emigrant. But they are all delightful.
3. Paul Theroux: On the travelogue theme, I discovered Paul Theroux this year via The Great Railway Bazaar and Riding the Iron Rooster. It was like meeting my alternate self - crochety guy on the train, grumbling about everything. I plan to read The Old Patagonian Express, Dark Star Safari, and Kingdom by the Sea next year.
4. George Orwell: I didn't like 1984, but that didn't mean I wasn't affected by it. The book stayed with me for a long time. So did Orwell's two fantastic class wars memoirs - Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.
5. Evelyn Waugh: Scoop is one of my favourite books ever. Decline & Fall also good. Both novels are very different from the later and more famous Brideshead Revisited, which when I was young but I don't remember. I found an omnibus edition of all the Evelyn Waugh novels and plan to work my way through them.
6. George Gissing: I'm not sure if New Grub Street is representative of George Gissing. I've only read that one book. But wow, what a book. Life-changing, and I don't mean that in a hyperbolic way. It helped me process the death of my writing "career" - helped me understand that content is a mere commodity.
7. D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover was actually a very good romance. I was not expecting much, but the clash of the classes was just too good. So many things to love about this book. The language of Oliver Mellors! The nicknames for private parts! The subsuming of the intellect to the primal urges of nature! Will read Sons and Lovers next year to see if he's a one-hit wonder.
8. John Steinbeck: I didn't think I was a Steinbeck sort of person. But after reading The Red Pony on the plane to Chiang Mai, I think I'm in love. Something about the setting just gets me. Next year I will read Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men
9. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are amazing. Especially Left Hand, with its elements of doomed gay romance - my particular weakness; see Robin Hobb's Farseer series. Next up is either Earthsea or Always Coming Home.
10. Franz Kafka: Only read The Metamorphosis, but still! What a story! It's not at all what I expected. It's funny and warm-hearted and human and sort of lovely.
11. Bram Stoker: It would have been nice to end this at number 10, but I had to include Dracula because it was such a fun romp.
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IN ADDITION to those I've listed above, the other books still on my to-read list include:
- Herman Melville - Moby Dick
- Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina and War & Peace
- Cervantes - Don Quixote
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude
- Samuel Beckett - Murphy
- Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange and The Malayan Trilogy
- E. M. Forster - A Passage to India
- Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- Gaston Leroux - Phantom of the Opera
- W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes & Ale and Of Human Bondage
- Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Guy de Maupassant - Bel Ami
- Rudyard Kipling - Kim
- Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook
- Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
- Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
- Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton
- M. R. James - Ghost Stories
- de Laclos - Dangerous Liaisons
- Erich Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
- Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
- Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
- Anthony Trollope - The Way We Live Now
- Charles Bukowski - Post Office
- William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
- Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
- Samuel Richardson - Clarissa
- Jules Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
- Anne Bronte - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- Mark Twain - A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator
- Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater
- James Boswell - Life of Samuel Johnson
- Samuel Johnson - Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys
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