I am sitting here nice and warm and listening to the radio. Brahams Violin Concerto wafting out of the speakers, it is warm and cosy and I am beginning to feel a teeny bit festive. Only a teeny bit mind you. And at this time of year my thoughts turn to My Reading Year. I love looking at all the supplements of the papers and magazines about this time where the glitterati lie in their teeth and start looking back at the books they have read and start poncing on about 'gritty' 'realistic' 'stunning' 'gripping' 'searing inditement' and all those critic phrases that send me screaming from the room.
And, natch, they will have finally got round to reading Proust, or Joyce or Tolstoy or Gogol or some weird author in translation who nobody has heard of and tell us all about it.
I ignore the lot of them.
I wallow in mediocrity. No Booker list book crosses my threshold (I hasten to add I have read quite a few in the past), no Costa Prize, no Lidl Literary Award (OK I made that one up but you get the drift) - any longlists published in the heavies immediately are renamed Books that I Have no Intention of Reading.
Oh Elaine I hear you cry don't you think you are overdoing it a bit? and yes, I daresay I am, I always do. I am being flippant I know but it is merely to stress that nowadays I read for pure pleasure. When I first started this blog I felt that I needed to read all the Booker longlist and write a learned discourse thereon, and I tried. But it was beyond me. Plus the fact that I found an awful lot of these highly hailed books slightly, how can I put it, boring.
Some of them were not of course. They were wonderful. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. I went through a phase of reading many of her books but then found they exhausted me. They are books that require work, taking notes, thinking deep thoughts and trying to work out what the author meant, the symbolism etc etc. You get the drift. Marvellous though they were they finished me off. And once read I have not had the slightest desire to pick them up again. A S Byatt is another. Oh my goodness this women is clever. And doesn't she know it. And what is more she wants us all to know it as well. I read Possession. I enjoyed it very much but at the end, once again, I felt soooo tired. It was a book that took you over, chewed you up and spat you out and you were left feeling like a piece of string. And don't start me on The Children's Book. I thought it Would. Never. End.
Enough.
So I now read all sorts. Murder, history, romance, children's books, funny books, Dickens, Anne and Charlotte Bronte (never Emily. Don't get me started on Wuthering Heights), Austen, Alcott - in short lots and lots of books written yonks ago. I have never been a fan of modern literature. This is not something that has come upon me in old age. I was ever thus. I was reading like this from my teens onwards.
And there is one thing I have learned throughout the years of this blog. Do not feel you HAVE to read a book. If a publisher has sent you a book unsolicited, do not think Oh dear those nice peeps have sent me this I should read it. I used to. Oh Yes. No more because quite frankly some of the stuff that dropped through my letter box was awful.
I still get sent expensive hardbacks by an author who I will never read because (a) I think his writing is stilted and boring and (b) he wrote reviews on Amazon saying how wonderful they were himself, only using a faked name. When discovered he said 'Well, doesn't everybody do it?" No you prat they don't. In the end I contacted the publisher and said please do not send me any more as they are going straight to the charity shop. There is a shop in Colchester that has his entire oeuvre by now I am sure.
At the beginning of this year I went on a cruise. I was at sea for two months and then I had a month in Australia. While I was at sea I read 49 books. Yes 49. On my Kindle. I love my Kindle. Can you imagine how I would have coped without it? The so called lilbrary on board was pitiful. If I had depended upon it for reading matter I would have been in dire straits. Now these books were all fun reading. Loads of light Regency romances. I discovered one writer who was nice and frothy and a bit of a giggle full of dashing heroes and heroines. They were all available for 99p. So I read about fifteen and then tired of them.
I read nearly all by Val McDermid who I had only recently discovered. Why I had never read them before I know not. Well now I had and boy are they good. She has several series featuring different partners and characters and they are terrific. Superbly plotted, great writing and so exciting. The wifi at sea could be a bit dodgy and some days almost impossible to download anything. One night there was a sudden surge in power, perhaps we had sailed in the area of a satellite or something and I took advantage and for fifteen glorious minutes downloaded about twenty books until phut it all came to a grinding halt.
I read Austen while sitting on the promenade deck. I read Persuasion for the umpteenth time. I read Sandition, two different versions finished by two writers, ditto her unfinished the Watsons. I just had a wonderful time sitting there with the sun shining, tucked up on a lounger with a drink to hand (usually tea I hasten to add) and just read and read and read. I would take a break every now and then and gaze out at the sea and all was quiet and serene and it was just perfect.
I am rambling. So this year has been a really pleasurable reading year. I have re-read old and loved authors and enjoyed new Golden Age crime writers and embarked on tracking them down and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so. I will go into more detail on some of these in another post and also list my top ten that have really made an impression.
Bet you can hardly wait.
The last movement of fthe Brahms is now playing. One of my favourites.
Au reservoir.
