Friday Column: How I Did This Year

Last January I outlined a number of books that I wanted to read in 2007. Now it's time to see how closely I kept to my reading resolutions. Those who have been keeping score at home (I would hope no one has been actually doing this) will know that things are a bit suboptimal.

To start, let's list the books. The ones with little stars are the ones I read.

Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec *
Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin *
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis *
At the Mind's Limits by Jean Amery
The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
The Tunnel by William H. Gass
2 volumes of Proust *
something of Poe
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy by Sigrid Undset

And the books I wanted to reread:

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Recognitions by William Gaddis

As you can see, I didn't do terribly well. I read 60-some books this year, but only 5 of the 13 I planned on getting to.

That's not good, but in my favor I will say that I did a pretty good job of picking—of the above books that I did manage to get to, I really liked each of them. If only I'd gotten to more.

Look for some more reading resolutions in January. I'm promising myself that I'll do a better job keeping to them in 2008.

So what else was I reading in 2007? For one thing, foreign titles continued to make up an increasingly important part of my reading. In 2006, I read 23 (out of 69) books from non-American authors; in 2007 it was 26 (out of 61)—this number includes 2 novels in the original Spanish but does not include 6 works by Englishmen and women.

Reading more international works is something that started on its own—I just followed my interests, that this is where they've taken me. That said, it has become a trend and now I take note of it. What this means is that I know what regions I like (Latin America, Russia) and I know where I would like to read more from (France, Germany, Eastern Europe). It seems the more I read, the more finely I can dissect what I read.

Aside from reading more from around the world, there are two other things I've consciously been doing with my reading. Both of these started toward the end of the 2007, and I've been pleased with both of them.

The first is that, not entirely satisfied with what I find in magazines and journals, I've gotten interested in reading book-length works of criticism from people who generally don't (or didn't) write for wide circulation. This year I've tackled Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye and The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth, as well as an 800-page collection of essay-length selections from major works of criticism. (This last was useful as a survey and in order to help me figure out which works I'd be interested in reading a as whole). Right now I'm slowly making my way through two works from Bakhtin, and, as you might have guessed, I'm accumulating a small critical library.

From a literary reading perspective, going more deeply into criticism has been one of the best things I can do. Delving into these works has truly revealed to me what a small box most magazine- and newspaper-only critics confine themselves to. These works have absolutely made me a better read by widening my conception of what there is to be aware of while reading a text and giving me insight into new ways to think about a book as I read it. As a whole they've raised my standards for how closely and how carefully a book can be read, and being able to see these things more clearly has helped me better evaluate critical writings.

In other words, imagine that you are driving up a windy mountain road amidst a fairly thick fog. Suddenly you crest a hill and find yourself above the fog and in possession of a wide, if still somewhat obscured view, of the countryside you have just been driving in.

Aside from reading more and better serious criticism, the other thing I've gotten interested in this year are older books; roughly pre-1900 and beyond. I did this because I decided that I had gotten too caught up in reading contemporary authors without having a real appreciation of what's come before. In other words, I thought that reading old books would provide more context.

This has proven to be true, but what I have also found is that most older works are simply better than what's getting published today. This isn't so much a criticism of contemporary publishing as a simple acceptance of the fact that 100+ years does a lot of burn away the chaff. As William Gass has argued, the most important test is the test of time.

This gets into an interesting question that I'm not going to try and dissect here. From a structural and aesthetic point of view, I'm appreciating the older books more than the contemporary, but in terms of what punches me in the gut, it's the contemporary stuff. Certainly I've found that classics are timeless—that the best aspects of these books hit the target regardless of how old they become—but though contemporary works are more flawed they tend to feel more immediate by virtue of being part of the world that I live in.

And now I turn my mind to figuring out what I must (and will) read in 2008.

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Comments

[Luke]

So, somehow unbelievably, one of the country's largest specialty retailers managed to enter the holiday season with virtually no copies of The Savage Detectives (at least there are none available at the store where I work). With great foresight I elected to feature Distant Star as my employee pick back in November, and since then 3 copies have been purchased and one, presumably, stolen (very Bolanoesque.) Additionally, I made the stores first sale of Last Evenings on Earth. And of further note, I am sure that a couple of vila-matas novels have been lifted as well. Something to keep in mind: 'Sales' don't exactly equate reading rates. I'm not too sure how extensively stolen books effect publishers, but if someone really wants to read these books and can't afford them, short of the library, I don't think a little pilfering of the big chains really bothers me.

[Nicolai]

Stay away from Sigrid Undset and her dimestore romance novels, Norway has a lot more to offer. Try your hand at something by Jon Fosse for instance.

[Rohan Maitzen]

Your comments about reading older books are very interesting to me. One of the things I've been mulling over about book blogging is how far it needs to be a kind of literary journalism treating quite current material, if it's going to be relevant and interesting to more than a couple of readers, or whether it can be used for criticism of a less journalistic kind. I suppose there's no reason both kinds of things can't go on, but it is sometimes hard to think what kinds of thoughts about older works are 'blog-worthy,' if that's a term with any stability....But then, if people are looking to literary blogs for thoughtful conversation about books, that need not be bound to what is current like reviewing or journalism.