Friday Column: Reading Resolutions

I'm not too big on New Years resolutions, but the start of a new year seems as good a time as any to take stock of your reading and think about what direction you'd like it to take. To that end, I'll suggest some reading resolutions you might make for 2007.

Probably the easiest way to do this is to make a list of what books you want to get to. I think this is a useful exercise, if you can stick with it, as I've seen too many good books recede farther and father away from my eyes, eventually becoming lost to obscure regions of the various apartments I've lived in. Books seem to have an uncanny ability to find their way into my possession, often putting inches of paper between the book I'm reading and the one I meant to read next.

Here's a few, some of which I own and some of which I'm sure I'll acquire soon enough, that I'd like to crack open in the next 52 weeks.

Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec--Too many smart people have praised this book too highly for me to pass it up for another year. Not to mention, I seem to enjoy the work of authors who write under constraints. See, for instance, Italo Calvino and Gilbert Sorrentino.
Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin--Golem Song<, which I read at the tail-end of 2006, was more than enough to whet my appetite for more of this quirky author that seems to always be writing with a surplus of energy and erudition.
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis--Although many books are billed as the story of a modern-day Don Quixote, I think the work of this Columbian-turned-Mexican (one of the few non-reprint books published by NYRB) is the real deal.

At the Mind's Limits by Jean Amery

I got intrigued by the work of this German Jew who renamed himself as a Frenchman while reading W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, and the criticism thereof. The Boston Review's review/essay on Natural History provides an intriguing glimpse of Amery's beliefs; beliefs that, if I can't wholly get behind, I am at least quite intrigued by:

One good way criminal and victim can join together is in death--of the perpetrator. Of the execution of one “especially adroit” SS torturer, Améry writes, “I would like to believe that at the instant of his execution he wanted exactly as much as I to turn back time, to undo what had been done. When they led him to the place of execution, the antiman had once again become a fellow man.” What Améry offered the Germans--and a thornier, less desired gift cannot be imagined--was the possibility of their re-engaging, and remaking, the past on a mass scale and of thereby transcending their existence as “antimen”:

"Germany . . . would . . . learn to comprehend its past acquiescence in the Third Reich as the total negation not only of the world that it plagued with war and death but also of its own better origins; it would no longer repress or hush up the twelve years that for us others really were a thousand, but claim them as its realized negation of the world and its self, as its own negative possession. On the field of history there would occur . . . two groups of people, the overpowered and those who overpowered them, . . . joined in the desire that time be turned back and, with it, that history become moral."

This would require not just individual imprisonments and individual executions (though Améry approved of both), but national transformation on an unprecedented scale: the creation, that is, of “a national community that would reject everything, but absolutely everything, that it accomplished in the days of its own deepest degradation.” This is--or more precisely, would have been--the exact mirror image of the “perfectly functioning mechanism of repression” that Sebald describes.

The travelling back into time and subsequent joining together of hunter and hunted that Améry advocated had nothing in common with reconciliation; it was, rather, a shared recoiling from history. Améry knew that this kind of mutuality would never be attempted; that it was only the victims whom the ruined past trapped; that the burdens of shame and self-loathing haunted the tortured and not the torturer; that nations often destroy others but never negate themselves. He knew that neither time nor power was on his side; he proudly acknowledged that his was “a morality for the losers.”

The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide--I meant to read this one last year, but was unable to find a copy and settled for The Immoralist
The Tunnel by William H. Gass--Gass is such a dense writer that this one would be intimidating even if it were half it's size. If I can't hack it then maybe I'll settle for In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.

Add to these the books I mean to reread.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon--My reading of Against the Day has convinced me of just how far I've come as a reader since I first tackled Pynchon's masterpiece. It's about time I gave this one a second reading.
The Recognitions by William Gaddis--Likewise, I've come a long way since I first read this book, which stands as Gaddis's most daunting and which I was able to respect more than enjoy the first time through.

And then, there are the classics.

Proust--To expect to read it all seems to taunt fate. At least the first couple books, then.
Poe--Like Proust, it seems about time I took this author on.
The Epic of Gilgamesh--I'm curious about this epic that is perhaps the first narrative ever written down. Gass recommends it.
The Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy by Sigrid Undset--After reading The Axe, I decided I liked Unset's books that hearken back to medieval Norway. Although Penguin recently, admirably released a new translation of this mammoth trilogy, I'm hoping to read my 50+-year-old Knopf edition.

Of course, if your head hurts just contemplating all the books you want to read, there's other goals you could set for yourself for a year in reading. Here are a few.

Half and Half. Most people's reading tends to be gender-biased one way or another. So try a year of alternating between male and female authors. Once you're done, you'll probably have some interesting ideas about the differences between how each gender writes.

World Tour. Try to read from as many countries as possible. If you take this on, you'll be relying heavily on Archipelago Press and Dalkey Archive Press. Both publish a large number of high quality works-in-translation each year, and Dalkey has an amazing backlist. You can also check the Complete Review for info on what books to read, but watch out for their reviews of untranslated Ukrainian fiction.

Lost Classics. Get out your shovel and make this year the one you uncover all those books buried beneath the sands of time. NYRB Classics can help you get started on reading the formerly out of print, but to really get into this, head over to your local used bookstore and search for all the dingy, battered books by authors you've never heard of. To see if they're worth your time, apply William H. Gass's page 99 test.

Specialize. There's lots of periods and schools you could resolve to become a specialist on this year. (I particularly like this approach because it lets you build up context so that you can begin to make connections between books and develop a holistic understanding of a certain subset of fiction.) Try reading as many pre-modern epics as you can handle. Or you could go with the authors of the Russian Golden Age. You could pick Nobel prize winners out of a hat, although that may require some research on your part since so many of them are no longer remembered. Read the American post-modernists, modernists from between the wars, African Americans from Frederic Douglass to Colson Whitehead and Edward P. Jones.

Recommendations. Resolutions like these are all about getting out of whatever reading rut you've fallen into--maybe the best way to do this is to get outside of your own head entirely. Find some trusted fellow readers and let their recommendations guide you. You can easily do this by looking through the archives of litbloggers you like, or get together with some of your friends, hit up the local library used-book sale, and let them press 20 or so books into your cart.

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Comments

[Sandra P]

Lit-lover (wish I had time to be a lit-blogger!). Great post, I have become a book sale junkie. Hitting up every sale in my neighborhood and now even get sale alerts sent to my email from booksalescout.com. You can find some real gems. Keep up the good work!

[Sandra P]

Lit-lover (wish I had time to be a lit-blogger!). Great post, I have become a book sale junkie. Hitting up every sale in my neighborhood and now even get sale alerts sent to my email from http://www.booksalescout.com. You can find some real gems. Keep up the good work!

[dignam]

I just finished re-reading Gravity's Rainbow for the third time.

The first two times I read it, I didn't have nearly the education in the world that I have now; nor was the time itself amenable to getting it. And GR was a gibberish of picarisms for me.

Today it sounds clear as a bell. It's an undeniable masterpiece and as important, in its way for America, as Ulysses is for Ireland: it's a high-megapixel-count photograph of American post-war psychology. Among other things. You can read just about any paragraph in the damn thing and come up with an entirely differently-angled understanding of some aspect of our contemporary existence.

[RWB]

Though it looks big and complex and imposing, Life: A User's Manual is actually quite a fun read. I hope you do read it this year and find it as delightful as I did.

[Robert Nagle]

Wow, excellent list. I haven't heard of the Estrin and Amery.

My resolution for the last two years has been to read as much public domain fiction as possible. (I have an ebook reading device, so I can read it in bed). You might enjoy a series of articles I'm writing about the undiscovered classics of the 1920s (specifically, works between 1923-1931 which were supposed to go into the public domain, but didn't). I'm doing one article for each year between 1923 and 1931 and talking about notable books and movies. I've found some cool titles.

[Max]

Brilliant. So glad to hear you're going to read Maqroll, and I can't wait to hear what you think. It's a book that resides near the top of my list of all time fvorites. I've never read anything like it.

[Antoine Wilson]

Maqroll, Counterfeiters, and Proust are all on my list this year. But I've pledged to get through the 13 books I was already reading before starting anything new--that was my resolution this year.

Meanwhile, another pile grows with future picks, more Murakami, Lawrence Durrell (never gone there before), William Boyd x 2, and so on.

All take a back seat to writing, of course.

Antoine

[J.P. Smith]

Do try to read all of Proust, even if it takes you a few years. You will be both entertained and perhaps even shocked when you get to the final volume. He is one of the most frank writers on sex (there's an astonishing brothel scene set during a German air attack in the First War), and he is also one of the great comic writers.

Remember that the first volume, which is about as far as most readers get, was written and rewritten and polished and rewritten; it's slow-going, but consider it as a kind of foundation work for what's to come.

Originally planned as a three-volume work, the First War got in the way (and shut down French publishers), and during the war years he was able to expand the work. He died, of course, still adding more to the novel. But the press of death--he was never completely healthy--compelled him to write more quickly and fluidly, and the volumes that follow Swann read accordingly.

I read him originally in English when I was living in England, then taught myself French to read him in the original. Unlike some of the translations of Proust's novel, his language was sinewy and confident, the language of someone who was the master of his material and style.

The best way to understand what his writing conditions were like is to read Céleste Albaret's Monsieur Proust, published by the NYRB. Céleste was his housekeeper and amanuensis, and she knew first hand not only how he conducted his life, but also his methods of composition. Beyond that, my friend William Carter's Yale U. Press biography of Proust is the place to go.