2014 Reading Report

I think I read more books this year than any since my retirement. By my latest count I'm on my thirty-third book, but I'm not sure I'll finish it by the end of the year. In fact, I'm not sure I'll finish it at all. I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), often considered one of his best novels, but for some reason it just hasn't appealed to me. The pace is slow, the characters are not very attractive, and the style is elaborate and affected. Added to that, the plot is overly complicated, or seems so to me. I generally don't abandon books once I start them, but this may prove an exception. If that's the case, then I will still end the year well.

This has also been a very diverse year. I've tended to follow my interests from one thing to another. After beginning the year with some of my Men's Book Club selections or books inspired by those selections, Charles Frazier's Night Woods and Richard Russo's Empire Falls, I reached back to Huxley's Brave New World. Then I read Hugo Williams' All the Time in the World, about his trip around the world in the 1960s when he was in his early twenties. Then I continued with various titles I'd been considering: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (another one inspired by a previous Men's Book Club selection), followed by Kinsley Amis's The Old Devils and then John Le Carré's A Delicate Truth.

Something I'd read in TLS or the NYRB got me interested in E.E. Cummings' The Enormous Room, his witty account of rather horrific experiences while being detained and imprisoned by the French during World War I as a possible collaborator. Then in preparation for our book club discussion of Night Woods, I read Frazier's earlier and more successful novel Cold Mountain, which for some reason I'd put off for years despite hearing what a good book it was. Both of these books I read using my Kindle app on my new iPad Air, which has now become something I use regularly. In fact, my next book was also a Kindle edition: Georgina Howell's Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.

For a while I devoted myself to reading my Loeb edition of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, which had been a retirement gift from my friends in the Latin reading group at NEH. Although I enjoyed my time spent with this one, I eventually put it aside to return to the next book club selection, Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, a book I think all Americans would benefit from reading, since it gives us so much insight into our Puritan past and some of the problematic origins of our nation's religious manias.

After finishing Wordy Shipmates, I launched into a series of books I'd been wanting to read and one that I came upon serendipitously while searching online for traces of an old high school friend. First I read two classics by Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Collins is one of those writers I'd been aware of most of my reading life, but for some reason I'd never actually read him. What a treat it was to discover these two little masterpieces of mystery and imaginative storytelling. Next I jumped back into Aldous Huxley and read two novels that have been on our shelves for years, both American first editions I'd picked up when I thought I was going to be a book collector: Eyeless in Gaza and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. I will return to Huxley later, but when I'd finished with these two, I came across Tamara's Child, a gem of a story by B.K. Mayo, the old friend I'd lost track of but was glad to discover doing well as a now published author.

Back to book club selections with Ian McEwan's Atonement, then a return to wrap up my sentimental journey through the works of Aldoux Huxley by re-reading Ape and Essence, Island, and Doors of Perception. Another interruption with a book club choice: George Saunders' collection of stories Tenth of December, and then back to Huxley to read Time Must Have a Stop, which I got to out of chronological order because I hadn't had a copy of it earlier.

Once I'd finished with Huxley, I began casting about for something else to fill the gap in my enthusiasm, but not before reading Jan Reid's Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards, another book club choice. About this time one of J's ARC's arrived, Another Side of Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes, so I jumped into that, then I picked up Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which I'd started but never finished when it first came out, before reading Jack Weatherford's fascinating history Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, again for the Men's Book Club.

Before completing the book club's selections for 2014, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, I picked up a copy of Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton. Ackroyd is another author I'd been interested in for while, so I thought I might return to him, but Ready Player One sent me off to read Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and some of his short stories as well. Bester is one of those pioneers of modern science fiction that I'd read as a kid, but not since, and I really enjoyed his stuff. I guess I've more or less brought the year to a conclusion by returning to Ackroyd and English Music and then Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. But having now bogged down in Hawksmoor, I will have to look for something to get me going in the new year. There is no book club selection upcoming because we haven't yet made our list for 2015, so I'm on my own for another month or so. I'll just have to improvise, or continue reading back issues of TLS, which is also instructive and might lead to another discovery such as Cummings' The Enormous Room.