What do I want to read? This is the question @perdvivly asks us to consider in a recent book meme thing. This is not something I'm very orderly about most of the time, I don't really have a list (untrue but we'll get to that) I just possess a lot of unread books always and when I finish one I just kinda look around and see what seems good. I guess I'll be doing the post version of that here. I might not end up with 10 categories and they might not all be proper categories, dunno let's see what happens! Stuff I want to read in 2025:
Three English women I've mostly read and need to finish off who have not a ton else in common
So obviously we have Iris Murdoch, whose novels I've been deliberately rationing at 1-2 per year for the past 15 years; currently at 21 out of 26 read. I'm not gonna finish them all this year but I am thinking of picking up the pace a little bit, it would be embarrassing to die or something without getting to the end, the above numbers don't even include the philosophy and other bits that I intend to get to too, and I mean I'm obviously just going to keep rereading one or two per year for the rest of my life anyway so the sense of "oh no there'll be no more left" is maybe a little silly? Like it's cute that I've made her last this long but come on. Anyway I love her I love her I love her I love her.
There's less Jane Austen to get through, I read Northanger Abbey in January thus finishing the novels so it's just the incomplete Sanditon and then the juvenilia so I can say I've read all of her. Looking forward to seeing her get silly with it in some of this stuff. Oh and maybe there's some letters but I don't think very many?
And Virginia Woolf, again already finished all the novels as of this year but then there's--well there's a lot, I'll obviously finish the short stories soon but there's a lot of essays and stuff and I'll have to play by ear how deep I want to go there, I read vol 1 (of 6) of her diaries a while back and it was like half-fascinating half-boring, which I guess is the best we can hope for from unedited diaries... I possess the second vol but we'll see, we'll see. Do I care about her book on Roger Fry? Who knows. I wanna read Hermione Lee's biography of her too, I read the one by Quentin Bell (her nephew) which was pretty entertaining but I want to read a proper one too.
It's weird I'm pretty obsessed with her but like, you have to really get on her wavelength to actually enjoy her fiction ime, and getting on her wavelength is a mental trick I'm... kind of mid at? Like when I do fall under her spell it's like nothing else, you can really get swept up in her evident sincere conviction that every single thing that happens to everyone is intrinsically fascinating, but when the spell fails to work, I can't lie to you, it can be pretty boring? But I keep coming back to her because I crave the magic and probably always will.
(A year ago on this very tumblr I linked one of her (actually pretty unWoolfian!) stories and two people actually read it and liked it and that felt really good. If anyone's reading this please check it out and tell me what you think and I will give you. A little kiss.)
17th century British history
Fuck I gotta make these shorter than that. Alright well I've never really been a history reader tbh but I've randomly become a bit fascinated with the period around the civil wars and I'm seeing how far I can ride this, aside from like wikipedia and podcasts I've read Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World (which is kinda bleh, pretty loose narrative that often is just jumping around various anecdotes and quite shallow-feeling analysis), started Blair Worden's The English Civil Wars (much much better so far! It's short but feels way more grownup and less documentaryish). Have also bought but not started The Noble Revolt by John Adamson, intimidatingly long but highly regarded, and then for a primary source I have my eye on Edward Hyde's History of the Rebellion, written by Charles I's chief advisor and supposed to be fun... yeah we'll see how all this goes.
All this fucking poetry I have
I had to ban myself from buying poetry a long time ago because I kept falling in love with volumes in the bookshop and then when I get them home I just can't get it up for them somehow. I know I can like poetry because I can tell you poems I love but they're always isolated encounters, somehow sitting down with a book of poetry and spending real time with it is, not a thing I can really do? Or not a thing I can do on purpose very often. But like I don't believe that's my heart, this feels like it should be a solvable problem. So this section represents, I suppose, an intention to have another stab at solving it. Oh I guess I should mention some actual books right? Well this here anthology of Metaphysical Poetry is surely a promising start because the metaphysicals are clever and I value cheap cleverness extremely highly. Don Paterson's collection Rain is one I did actually succeed in getting deep into back in the day so perhaps I'll try his 40 Sonnets which I have here, a lot of it looks annoyingly avant-garde though (wrong type of clever). Two of my favourite bands have written songs about John Berryman which is probably as good a reason as any to pick up The Dream Songs. TS Eliot because I still know the first couple pages of Prufrock off by heart although I couldn't really get a handle on The Waste Land.
Muriel Spark too! Fun fact one of my earliest original posts on this account was just me posting a Muriel Spark poem I really loved and it didn't get any notes, go read it and give it some notes. I will give you a little kiss.
Phenomenology?
Okay this one is like, I'd be pretty surprised if it happens in a big way this year. Sad as fuck to say but I'm not sure the version of me that has a full time job is capable of accessing the requisite levels of not-being-tired to read long dense philosophy tomes, but I mean it's not like I've really tried lately. When I was a teen I started-didn't-finish all three of Being and Nothingness, Being and Time and The Phenomenology of Perception, and while they did technically defeat me this stuff was what convinced me philosophy was important, it's still really the only philosophy I've ever read whose value really seems beyond question. I've never really touched Husserl but at some point last year I impulse bought Ideas so clearly some part of me wants to do it. I don't know man! Maybe.
I want good nature writing to exist
This one is mostly not about specific books and is more of a cry for help, I ranted in the tags of this post about how frequently nature writing seems to go out of its way to like, be about anything other than nature? And I know it can't all be like that but I've been burnt a lot of times... I guess I've had more luck with the ones that are more pop sci branded than "nature writing" branded so maybe that's the way to go. But yeah if anyone has any recs for who is the anti-Helen MacDonald please do let me know.
Should I start reading the cool kid books?
In a way, I work in a bookshop, and I hope to keep doing that actually, so it might be professionally prudent to know something about like RF Kuang or Sally Rooney or whoever the fuck. However, I don't really care. So it's a dilemma!
I want to re-read Claire-Louise Bennett,
which might actually be doable this year because it's only two books and they're not very long or slow, but fuck she's good. The only really recent author I truly love I think? If I were asked to write a quippy quote to go on the back of her books I'd say she was equal parts Woolf and Tristram Shandy and then they wouldn't use my quote. I quoted Pond at some length in this post, I actually think Checkout 19 is probably better but there's not much between them. If you go with Pond don't be put off by the prose-poem shorts, I can take/leave 'em they're not really representative of the rest.
Weird depressed Europeans who go on about stuff too much
Some years ago I walked into the bookshop that would eventually become my workplace in a mood to find something totally new-to-me and fall in love with it, I came across Laszlo Krasznahorkai and something about War and War really grabbed me and for some reason (apparently about a guy whose suicide plans are interrupted by his randomly discovering an unknown ancient epic and his felt duty to make sure it's preserved? Sounds cool right) I bought everything they had by him (four books). And for some reason I started reading The Melancholy of Resistance instead of that one, a very unhinged and sprawling philosophical novel with no paragraph breaks that was hard-going but compelling, then I lost the book halfway through. Months later I found it again but by then I had gotten too sad about it and it's not the kind of book you can really dip back into after a long absence so like, that was kind of the end of my Krasznahorkai thing. Well I'd like to try again. And I want to start with War and War this time since that was clearly what fate intended in the first place.
The other guy in this category is Knausgaard, who I feel like I don't gotta talk about as much cos everyone has already heard about how great he's supposed to be, I read the first volume of his struggle and yeah it's pretty great. Wanna get to the second vol soon.
I want to start writing in my diary again
I'm a firm believer that every list should contain at least one item that doesn't belong on the list, so: I've proven that keeping a regular daily diary is something I can keep up for at least like a three-month continuous period, I proved it last year. If I can keep it up for three months then I can keep it up forever, right? Three months is a long time, it's like a small forever. And there's a lot of reasons why "a few words per day of record-keeping/minor self-expression that no one gets to look at" is a really useful thing for me to have, but after that initial run got derailed I never managed to get it back for more than brief episodes. Well, I hope it wasn't a fluke and I hope I can find my way back into it this year.
Oh I don't know, maybe my actual fucking list of books I want to read that I actually supposedly have? Hmm what about that? What about that maybe
So I do have a goodreads (Viv I want to be your goodreads friend but last time I looked through my read shelves like a ton of the ratings made no sense to me and I'm just kind of embarrassed by it, I've been planning to start a fresh account for a while, when I get around to that I shall add you; it looks like you went through a similar thing so I trust you understand!), and I do add stuff to the Want to Read list on there occasionally. I never look at this list, so it serves no purpose at all. I'm looking at it now and I don't even know what half this stuff is. Like wtf is South Wind by Norman Douglas, with only 314 ratings? I'm sure I've never seen this book in my entire life. Who is Witold Gombrowicz? I recognize Elias Canetti as the name of a guy who might have slept with Iris Murdoch I think but that doesn't seem like a good reason to want to read him. Yeah this is a completely useless list and I will continue to never look at it. Oh sometimes at work I take photos of books that momentarily catch my interest, and those photos are like, another one of this.
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Okay that's ten! Hey Viv this was actually a lot of fun thank you for tagging me, I'm not really proofreading it because it's too late so uh, sorry about how it is. Everyone else, obviously I'd enjoy seeing you talk about books if we're mutuals, I hate tagging people but I'll do some anyway: @lloke @medlinka @autogeneity @jerkeline @robustcornhusk @wellmetmat @abodywithorgans, if I didn't mention you you should take it as a calculated insult obviously
