@handfuloftime tagged me to post my 2021 reading plans. Thank you!
Three remarks before we start. One: I’ll likely post a full but very tentative list on the book blog at some point, so this is just a selection. Two: I’m not gonna mention any thesis-related reading because I don’t really want to think about that right now and also because most of those picks are going to be rereads and/or papers anyway (some of which I hate with a passion). And three: I’m a mood reader and very bad at sticking to anything even vaguely resembling a ‘reading list/TBR’. I can predict themes, but I can’t promise sticking to specifics. It’s like the pirate code: guidelines rather than actual rules.
That said:
I see myself picking up more books - primarily fiction - around the themes of seafaring, polar exploration, and travel: I still haven’t read Dan Simmons’ The Terror, Sten Nadolyn’s Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, and Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned, and I recently acquired Herman Melville’s Typee, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, and Ian MacGuire’s The North Water. In a similar vein, I also want to pick up more of the classics of the genre, especially (finally) Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Captain of the Polestar, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, Jules Verne’s The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a reread and only partly related, but it has been a while). (My heart also tells me to reread Moby Dick but we’ll see about that).
There will definitely be more nature writing, but it’s a genre that I don’t currently own much of, so I can’t predict what exactly I’ll be picking up. I’ll likely start with Thoreau’s Walden and Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.
authors: Virginia Woolf and Herman Melville, definitely. Likely also more Joseph Conrad because... I still don’t know what to think of him and I’m curious.
in terms of poetry I’m predicting more Seamus Heaney, and probably parts of that Yeats-collection I’ve owned for years. Other than that, I’ll have to see what strikes my fancy (and what I can actually lay my hands on because English-language poetry is super-hard to find/browse in Germany and I’m super out of touch with the German poetry scene)
the two vaguely research-related non-fiction books that I really, really want to pick up in 2021 are James Delbourgo’s Collecting the World. The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane and Stephen Asma’s Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Neither are relevant for my thesis (especially not to finishing it), but I hope they’ll give me ideas for another research project and a creative writing thing I’ve been thinking about for a while but have not had the energy or brain space to make any progress with this year
errr.... more German literature? I’ve been meaning to make a dent in my unread German classics collection and I’m reasonably sure I’ll pick up a Romantic or two, but the real goal should probably be to finally try and finish some of the later 19th century fiction I never actually read during my degree (you know... Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm, Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer).
a random assortment of fairly recent releases, likely literary fiction and/or queer and/or written by women
and, if the mood holds, probably a couple of Rosemary Sutcliff (re)reads, and/or Beowulf and/or other Athuriana
(Victor Hugo is also still on this list but *psssst*)
As usual, I’m way too optimistic I think.
[Edit: I just realized that I was way too excited / distracted by all these options and forgot to tag anyone so consider yourself tagged if you see this?]
