Reading in 2011

I can see that in retirement this blog is turning into a reading journal, which is fine. Reading has always been my main vocation. Now two of my favorite pastimes are reading and playing my guitars. However, of late, guitar playing seems to have plateaued. I probably need the stimulation of playing with friends to get me moving in a more ambitious direction. In relative isolation I think I've only learned two new pieces on my classical guitar this year, although I have several in various stages of "perfection," which for me means simply being able to play them all the way through without stumbling too much over the notes. I practice regularly, but not with sufficient dedication to see significant improvement. Perhaps in the new year I will do better.

But as for my reading program, there I have been able to gain some traction recently on books from the early 20th century. It has long been established that the first world war changed everything, especially for the European countries most engaged in the fighting. It took most of the rest of the century to come to terms with some of those changes. In England the generation that came of age just after the war was much affected by the trauma of the war. Martin Green, in Children of the Sun, suggests that the result for the educated classes was a flight from maturity into aestheticism and decadence. At the moment, that is where my reading is focused. I'm still working my way through Green's study, but also reading Huxley, and looking forward to Waugh, Orwell, and others, having just completed Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.

But in addition to this continuing fascination with 20th-century writing, I've also found time to read some more recent work: Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. And a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Curt Stager's Deep Future at the Alexandria library and enjoyed learning more about the long view of global warming. A little earlier in the year I got myself distracted by another library book, Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's Letters, a book I had been curious about after reading several reviews. Bellow got me interested in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, and earlier I had read Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness, books in my own collection I had been meaning to read but needed some impetus to push me in their direction.

The book that refocused my attention on the early 20th century was Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I had intended to read that one last year when I read McMurtry's memoirs, but for some reason got distracted by other things. McMurtry mentioned Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise and Graves's Good-Bye to All That, both books I'd long meant to read but hadn't yet got around to. In fact, I'd also been reminded of Cyril Connolly earlier in the year when I was reading William Boyd's Nat Tate and Any Human Heart. Boyd's Logan Mountstuart, had he actually existed, would surely have known Connolly and others in his circle, including Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming, who does make an appearance in Any Human Heart.

Two books I read this year have a rather peculiar relationship to my 20th-century project. One, Harold Nicolson's Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, was a sort of continuation of an earlier fascination with English gentlemen. A friend had lent me the book a couple of years ago, when I was reading Anthony Powell and Noel Annan's The Don's and David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.  I suppose those were the first signs of my lastest fixation on this period. Realizing I should return the book to its owner, I quickly finished reading it. Then later in the year I returned to Nicolson when I  decided to do some background reading on Harold and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, two prominent members of my group of authors; and so I read their son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage.

But while much of my reading has lately been focused on this single obsession with a rather small group of English authors of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, I began my year, following an earlier concentration on biographies and memoirs, with Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions, and Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life. After finishing the latter, I went back and re-read Salinger's Nine Stories, having realized their significant relationship to his war experiences as well as their importance for his apprenticeship as an author.

The only other book I recall reading this year, which would make nineteen if I counted correctly, doesn't seem to fit in any specific category. Just before I retired I picked up a reference somewhere to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and realizing that this was one of those major gaps in my life reading list, I decided to sit down and read it then and there. It turned out I really enjoyed the book, the plot was entertaining, if ridiculous, and the characters were engaging. I gained new respect for Goethe and determined that I should read more, only to discover that The Sorrows of Young Werther were not much to my liking.

And so Johann Wolfgang Goethe will have to remain on the shelf a little longer, while I continue to explore the writing of early 20th-century Britain. Next up is Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, a book I started earlier this week, to be followed by a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, both of which I last read when I was an undergraduate. I fear I was too young and inexperienced then to appreciate such brittle humor and satire, so I'm looking forward to reading them again in the context of Huxley, Connolly, Powell, and all the rest of that little group that left such a big imprint on British literary culture. I may even return to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, realizing now that the character of Fleming's hero very likely owes much to a group of rogues and dandies he knew in public school. Perhaps that is why I always thought Roger Moore, with his combination of wit, charm, and rakish humor, captured more of Bond than any of the other actors who attempted the role. But these are thoughts for another year and perhaps a different sort of reading obsession.