Rounding up 2008

So this year is drawing to a close and I can't help but feel this has been the fastest year I've ever experienced. Definitely far fewer than the usual twelve months. When I look back, though, quite a deal seems to have happened. And, as I usually measure time and capture events by the books I read, maybe it has been a whole year as it is certainly a very long time since I was reading Lady Chatterley's Lover.
So, in reading blog terms, what has this year consisted of? Well, let's first deal with the shameful: challenges. Yes I signed up for many in new year enthusiasm and the mistaken idea that my reading impulses could be directed. So how many did I complete this year? Not one. How many did I even make a start on? Oh dear, not too many. I apologise to all the kind people who set them up that I was so bad at taking part but it was just not to be; I have learnt my lesson, though, and fully accept that, now I have become comfortable with my blog-self, I am not a challenge person and will not be signing up for any in 2009.
I am also not a post-every-day blog-person. I began to feel that I should write about every book I read and post at least two or three times a week in 2008 which naturally led to long gaps in both of these, as I do not like feeling as though I have to do anything. So in 2009 I will post when I feel like it and write about books when I feel moved to do so. I will be listing books as I read them in my sidebar, though, for one reason only - that I forget them very quickly if I don't.
2008 was the year that I discovered that not all writers from the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond were unimaginative sex-crazed degenerates unable to string a decent sentence together. There are some wonderful books being written, especially in the fantasy genre, or, as it seems to be termed when it wants to be taken seriously, magical realism. Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Clive Barker and Ray Bradbury have restored my faith in the publishing industry this year, and the recent decline in the sales of mis-lit is starting to restore my faith in the human race altogether. I hope to discover more wonderful books and writers next year, and enter more magical worlds.
This was the year I finally set aside my prejudices and fell under Georgette Heyer's thrall. All I can say is I'm glad in equal measures that she was so prolific and that my parents have almost her entire works. Four books by one author in a year may not seem much to most of you but for me it is quite a ridiculous amount. I feel I may be reading even more by her next year.
It was also the year I rediscovered my love of poetry and I will never be able to thank Stephen Fry enough for that. My poetry collection has increased substantially and I have enjoyed reading it more than I can remember doing since I was a teenager and only read poetry or Kerouac, or sometimes poetry by Kerouac. I discovered wonderful poets this year, such as e e cummings, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin, that I had always ignored in the past going straight to the Romantics or the Beats. I hope for much more of this in 2009, as there are poets from other centuries and cultures whom I have yet to discover.
My main New Year's resolution last year was to get my TBR pile down and I have failed miserably. I didn't really think I would succeed and with books received at Christmas, as well as some book vouchers, there's little hope it will be brought down in the near future but it just means that I have plenty of choice for the year ahead.
I have counted up the books I read this year and it is quite paltry, little more than one a week on average, although if I added in the books I have got part way through - some abandoned and some just not yet finished - it would be substantially increased. I have been a bit of an intellectual butterfly this year, flitting from flower to flower but not always staying as long as I should. The amount of non-fiction I read decreased from usual years, although books like Colin Wilson's The Occult were quite chunky, and there has been an awful lot of very enjoyable escapism in my reading, and rather less intellectual challenge than is usual. Although, as I cast my eye down the list and see Anna Karenina, Proust's The Prisoner, Huysmans' A Rebours and others there, maybe I am being a little harsh on myself, but I enjoyed them all so much they didn't feel at all challenging to read.
And as for my writing, well, a quite pathetic amount has been created or edited; domestic issues, largely involving holding hammers and plasterboard for my other half, have distracted me too often. However, I have enjoyed working on the little I have written.
So what will I crown as my book of 2008? Last year it was a close-run thing between Sweeny Todd and Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, with Jayber just winning out. This year I find it hard to decide again: I think it is a photo finish between Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I really don't think I can pick a winner between them, and there are plenty of others that are up there with them, jostling for position. Which must mean that overall 2008 has been a very good reading year.
Here's looking forward to 2009 - Happy New Year everyone!

Impressions of Anna Karenina

It is a few months now since I read Anna Karenina, and I have been putting off writing about it. It was a book that I am very glad I read but when I had just finished it, there was too much of it in my head to be able to articulate it on e-paper. So I decided to let it sit for a while and then see what impressions I retained of it after a while. Books tend to slip from my mind like water through a sieve, and for a book to stay with me for more than a few weeks it has to be special.

And so - Anna Karenina is special. Despite the length of time I can still recall many incidents in this huge book and so much of the feel of it, when I am sure that six months after reading War and Peace I had little left but a confused notion of French troops shivering in Russian snow. For me, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's masterpiece. Its focus is domestic: it concentrates on relationships, how they can develop differently and the emotions that people go through, and for this reason it is universal. The emotions are human and recognisable, and although the focus is on a small number of characters, it feels broad, as though it has taken in all people.

One chapter stood out above all others for me, one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read. It described one of the character's emotions as he waits for his wife to give birth; he is dazed, afraid, and feels pushed and pulled about by the other people dealing with the birth. He fears that terrible things are happening but people are hiding it from him, and cannot make sense of any of it until the wonderful moment when his child is born.

Politics are still present in the book, as one character attempts to find an answer to the problem of serfdom in nineteenth century Russia and with the benefit of hindsight, as often happens with literature from this period, it is easy to see how this country ended in revolution a few decades later. However, these points seem unimportant compared to the examination of people, people struggling to make sense of life, dealing with love and hurt, developing emotionally and sometimes finding life positive, sometimes suffocating.

I won't give you a precis of the story, partly because it would probably sound like a second rate soap opera if the events were detailed with all the adultery and hysterics; in a lesser writer's hands it could easily have turned into melodrama. I'll just say, if you haven't read this please do.

Season's Greetings

Christmas has arrived for me as I took some extra leave to finish work on Friday and by now (Monday) can't even remember what I do for a living. I remember once when I was quite little, nine or ten, my mum told me that she liked the run-up to Christmas better than Christmas itself. Well, of course, at that age that was just proof that my mother was crazy. There's no presents during the run-up, you see. And having five days off before Christmas just meant that the torture happened at home, not school, as I wandered around with a painful ball of excitement in my stomach wondering when, oh when, it was going to be Christmas morning!
Now, I realise how right my mother was. The run-up is by far the best bit, the pottering around the kitchen making brownies - my contribution to the Christmas table as my mother still does most of it - cleaning the house (yes I even find Christmas cleaning enjoyable, just not the rest of the year), listening to Christmas songs, watching the Christmas Nigella, wrapping presents, usually in front of a suitably Christmassy film. I always find it quite magical that you can buy something pretty ordinary for someone, wrap it up in Christmas paper and it turns into a delightful object of mystery, even though I know exactly what's in it!
I love Christmas films and try and watch at least one of Holiday Inn or White Christmas every year, but my Christmas wrapping film this year will be National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I know it off by heart, having watched it a hundred times, but I love the fact that Clark wants the perfect Christmas that he remembers from his childhood, just as I do every year. Last year I did an internet quiz to find out which Christmas character I was and, yep, I was Clark Griswold, which made me happy.
And two weeks off gives me lots of reading time. I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book yesterday in front of the fire. It was wonderful, and puts Coraline in the shade, not something I would have thought possible. It is the story of a young boy brought up in a graveyard by ghosts and other creatures, while a mysterious and powerful group try and track him down to assassinate him. After reading this book, it felt like Coraline was Gaiman dipping his toes into children's literature and in this one he really lets himself go. If it's not a classic within ten years, I'll eat my hat. I can't wait to see what his next children's book is like.
Of course, it is the time of year that I need my Christmas Dickens and I had been pondering which to read - finally to read The Old Curiosity Shop, or perhaps to revisit one; last year was Master Humphrey's Clock, a collection of stories loosely linked together by Master Humphrey, which was just right. My indecision was sorted by the lovely people at Hesperus Press who sent me copies of A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, and Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. These contain stories and the occasional poem by Dickens and others, and were published as Christmas editions of Household Words.

Here they are, don't they just look like Christmas? I am really looking forward to reading them over the next couple of days; between Dickens and Clark Griswold this is going to be a perfect run-up to Christmas.

What ho, what ho, what ho!

It's been a while but I'm back. So where have I been and what have I been doing? Well, reading, of course, and then Fallout 3 took hold and I lost 100+ hours of my free time to this game on the Xbox; I even stopped playing Warcraft, so that is serious. It was a get-no-sleep-shaky-hands-obsession, which nicely coincided with a media moral panic about gaming addiction. But the difference, as several gamers tried to point out, is that it doesn't wreck your life. I am out the otherside of the obsession and am still married, have no long term medical effects, as I would with drugs or alcohol and, unlike a gambling addiction, the loan sharks won't be knocking down the front door. And, you know, I really enjoyed my time in the post-apocolyptic Fallout world.

Gaming suited my frame of mind which for some reason has been extremely frivolous lately. The main symptom was another addiction which I let run its course, Jeeves and Wooster. I mentioned previously that I was reading a book or two - it ended up being six books in close succession, while simultaneously watching the tv series with Fry and Laurie in the title roles. It was wonderful, Wodehouse was a genius. After the sixth book, though, I stopped and thought about this question - which would you rather be, Bertie or Jeeves?

Because, as is always the case in the best comedy, Bertie is not just a buffoon. You may smile as he says he is considered one of the shining intellectual lights of the Drones Club and that before Jeeves was on the scene he was the one his pals came to with their problems, but as you move through the stories and meet his pals, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps for instance, you realise that Bertie is speaking no more than the truth.

Bertie is an extremely likeable character. He has no pretensions to be anything other than he is, he knows he is lucky and wants to enjoy his life without aspiring to things like a grand intellect. He likes lunch at the Drones Club, his snifter at 6pm, out for dinner and a thriller to read before bed. He knows his limitations and tries, when circumstances allow it (which is not often), to stay within them. You can't read these stories without becoming very fond of him.

And for a while I fell into the Wooster way of doing things (without the Drones, of course). Amongst the six volumes of Bertie and Jeeves I threw in a couple of good old fashioned thrillers, Edgar Wallace's Feathered Serpent and Bulldog Drummond by Sapper. Stories where men are men and women need to be rescued by the chisel-jawed hero from the evil clutches of the villain. Both great fun, but at the end of this junkett I started to wonder, am I cut out to follow Bertie's intellectual life? Or would I rather be Jeeves?

Because, really, Jeeves isn't so different from Bertie; he's created his little life which he protects fiercely, often at the cost of his master's engagements with unsuitably domineering women. The main difference (other than the employer/employee thing, of course) is that while Bertie likes to stay on a comfortable intellectual level, Jeeves likes to expand his mind, reading Spinoza for instance. I decided that Bertie's mind is alright for a visit but it is Jeeves' that I want to live in.

And so I left the frivolity behind and picked up volume five of Proust, to carry on my long term project of reading a volume every year or so. But that's another blogpost...